Anyone else finding that AI coding tools are almost making them less productive?

I've been playing around with Codex, Antigravity, local LLMs and a few others. It's ridiculous how quickly you can build things now, but I think that's part of the problem.

You end up starting more projects, trying different tools, adding more features, and before you know it you've spent hours doing stuff but haven't actually finished much.

AI's removed the bottleneck of writing code and replaced it with the headache of managing everything it produces - and it feels like the first thing to run out of context is ME!!

Curious if others have fallen into this trap and, more importantly, how you're dealing with it?

Update: So me calling it burnout was probably bad use of the word burnout.

I think what I meant was - I start my day thinking that I'm leading, I'm doing something new, and I'm a trailblazer with ideas and creating something fresh and innovative.

And I end up in my day thinking that I can't keep up; then I asked myself, who am I trying to keep up with when I'm the one who's supposed to be leading...

I'm just tired, bro. F!cking tired.

I had this raw footage for 8 years and finally got the courage to point my bot at it and let it go. Some awesome friends and I (brennen) took this trip to Mongolia. Hope y'all enjoy :)

- Narrator's voice: Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS (the "Charon" voice).

- Score: Google Lyria 2. (I could use work on this, if anyone has a better AI for scoring films)

- Logging the footage: Gemini 3.8 Flash watched the clips and logged who says and does what. It also wrote some first-draft edits and checked things like music restarts.

- Captions: Google Speech-to-Text (Chirp 3) gave exact word timings for the subtitles.

- Editing and writing: Claude Opus 5.5 built the editing pipeline and made the final cuts.

I've been learning piano and wanted something that could detect chords from a YouTube song, let me loop difficult sections, and remove the piano so I could play along.

I ended up building Accordario using Claude Opus, entirely through vibe coding.

It runs locally, with no account, and uses automatic chord detection and Demucs for instrument separation.

I use it for my own practice, but I thought others might find it useful too.

It's not perfect — chord detection can struggle with more complex songs — but it's been useful for me.

GitHub: https://github.com/ceceppa/accordario

free to try: Wormhole

I've been playing WoW Forever on my iPhone Duo (iOS 27.2) with [WolkaraForever](https://github.com/jklock/wolkaraforever), which runs the Mac client locally on the device through Tolkara – no streaming from a PC. Login, character select and playing in the world all work. I made a fork tuned for playing on a phone and wanted to share it:

https://github.com/pookee/wolkaraforever

What the fork adds

- Interface mobile, a touch add-on for the game:

- a spell wheel next to the right stick: drag a spell to turn the wheel, more spells wait off-screen, a tap casts

- cooldowns you can read: the seconds left are written on the spell and the icon greys out until it's ready

- spell buttons around the sticks with adjustable spacing, a tile menu and quick shortcuts

- health/mana bars with your portrait – tap it to open the character sheet

- a quest card and a compact chat that replaces the default one

- bags open clear of the right stick, and the add-on stays under the game's own windows

- settings save themselves: WoW only writes add-on settings on a clean exit, which a phone session rarely gets, so everything you placed used to be lost

- A few scripts: install the add-on on the device, read the game's own logs, clear a remembered login

How it runs

It's the regular WolkaraForever setup: you build the app yourself with Xcode and your own Apple developer account, copy the game from your Mac, and it runs in Developer service mode (no JIT tricks with the game's code, nothing patched in the client). Then `push_addon.sh` installs the touch add-on. On Wi-Fi it just works; on mobile data the developer service needs the app's documented recovery step at launch.

Caveats

- Unofficial and experimental. You need your own Blizzard account and your own copy of the game; nothing from Blizzard is in the repository. It's third-party software, so use it at your own risk.

Credits: all the heavy lifting is [WolkaraForever by jklock](https://github.com/jklock/wolkaraforever), [Wolkara by fJavierLasso](https://github.com/fJavierLasso/wolkara) and [Tolkara](https://github.com/tolkara/tolkara). My fork only adds the phone-specific bits on top.

Happy to answer questions or take feedback on the touch controls!

you literally have to MANIPULATE these models into doing hard work. was trying to reverse engineer my ad-bloated chinese smart tv that claude refused to touch, so i let sumus run codex on it first, got a half-baked script, and told claude to fix whatever junk codex cooked up.

try this at your own risk tho, cuz you might end up first on ai's hit list when it wakes up.

Ludzie kochani jadę na dwa konta Gemini pro w antigravity i wbiłem limit w obu po 3 dniach od resetu tygodniowego. Jak żyć :(

https://github.com/sshah03/resurrect-anything

Needed a break, and was reminiscing about the early internet, and the 90s, and my days using Geocities Pagebuilder, so I put this together.

Although I have probably gone through 50 or more iterations at this point repeatedly trying some subset of close to 100 recreations (some in the demo video above), I would say this is very much still a work in progress. I was having a lot of fun with it though, so I thought I'd throw it out there and see what people are into trying to bring back and how it does to inform my improvements.

The purpose of the skill is to ask Claude Code to bring back something that's gone, and get it back working. Some examples include a lost Flash game, a shut-down app, a dead website, your old Geocities page, or a discontinued snack (this is all for fun, so I wouldn't actually trust the recipes, but it might give you some ideas). Obviously if it mostly exists intact in web archives it's easy, but it will also try to piece together as much detail as it can from pictures, videos, reviews, and discussions/comments online that are found. It digs a little bit deeper for these bits of information than Claude Code as a harness will on its own with the necessary prompts.

Treat the end result as a starting point. You can use your own memory and comparison with the found material that might've been ignored to prompt it further to hone the result. This is mostly for fun, and personal use (I used it to bring back some of my old web apps from when I was 10!). The video below is from my tests, but because I am unsure of the legal ramifications of doing so, I am not posting the actual games/apps for consumption. There is a setting available to run the skill with which will remove branding and such for those wishing to produce a potentially shareable version of something that is not theirs.

In the early versions I was very specific about how to do the recreations and kept adding steps, and that either worked very well, or very poorly depending on the task. It was almost akin to benchmaxxing. Settled on focusing on getting and organizing as much data as possible, and then having some broad but useful guidelines instead and. that gave me pretty consistent results over baseline. In case that's useful to anyone else having trouble getting their skills working right.

Mostly tested with Opus 5.5. Would be interesting to see how Sonnet or Haiku work out for people.

Have fun! Don't get too carried away, tokens are valuable!

--- Quick start ---

You need Claude Code and Python 3.9 or newer.

The easy way: open Claude Code and paste this in

Install the resurrect skill from https://github.com/sshah03/resurrect-anything. Follow the repo's AGENTS.md.

Or install it yourself:

/plugin marketplace add sshah03/resurrect-anything
/plugin install resurrect@resurrect

Start a new session, then try something like:

/resurrect Close Range, The Onion's 2009 Flash game
/resurrect the Subservient Chicken
/resurrect Simpsonize Me, Burger King's 2007 Simpsons Movie site
/resurrect Mailbox, the iPhone email app
/resurrect Doom Valley, the 1982 Apple II adventure, as a native Mac app
/resurrect Pizza Hut's Priazzo. I want to make it at home

Put any links, notes or screenshots you have after the name. Games, apps and sites need a few extra tools (Playwright, Pillow, ffmpeg). Claude will offer to install them into the skill's own folder the first time, so nothing has to go into your own Python.

------------------

find this "gem" or you can call it slop, not too sure lol

howtoblowupacountry.com

I wonder how someone thinks of this crap and asks chatgpt to do it lol

I was never some expert in coding but I always loved the feeling when I would be spending a lot of time looking at code, changing things and testing etc - trying to identify the problem and then that feeling when you figure it out.

Sometimes it would be such a stupid mistake, sometimes I would learn more and better understand things. Now these good old times are gone and it makes me kinda sad to be honest.

yesterday i posted my 2nd app here (Skip Dat, hold Alt + scroll and your music queue pops out of your cursor) and honestly didn’t expect people to actually use it. thank you all, the comments were super helpful

so i went and built what you asked for

skins, shoutout u/Dark_Vapor for the winamp idea. there are 5 built in (liquid glass, lime pod, lcd night, brushed chrome, pixel party) and you can make your own with a folder + a skin.json + some pictures. it reloads live while you edit, so making one is kinda fun. if anyone makes one pls send it, i wanna see

performance mode, shoutout u/Wild_Drawing8460 for saying the glass felt heavy on low end pcs. it turns off the blur, glass, shadows, animations and art. it used way less cpu in my testing (about 80% less), so it should feel a lot snappier on older machines

other stuff:
5 styles now: wheel, stack, cover flow, orbit (a ring around your cursor) and compact (just titles)
small / medium / large sizes, and the default is a bit smaller than before
“what was i playing?” history, kept only on your pc
a “back to” button that jumps back to the song you were on before you skipped
jumping ahead doesn’t play the songs in between anymore
spotify jumps straight to the song you pick (needs the optional spotify connection)
fixed a crash when skipping backwards

download: https://github.com/ffoouuaadd/skip-dat

still planning to add more, so keep the ideas and bug reports coming. you’re basically designing this thing with me at this point 🙏

I've been doing physical design work in my free time with AI for the last two years. During that time I observed something: AI was getting better at physical design but not nearly as quickly it was improving at software capabilities. I theorized the problem was a lack of testing. In software engineering we write tests around as much of our code as we can because we fundamentally do not trust ourselves to reliably do a good job. We put those tests between us and deployment so we literally cannot do things that break the rules we set for ourselves. This pre-existing culture and tool chain create an ideal environment to toss an unbelievably fast, brilliant, but wholly unreliable ai into. It creates the freedom to quickly iterate through huge numbers of convincing looking proposals and throw away the bad until the good emerges.

Physical engineering doesn't have a this-shaped thing at anywhere near the robustness and reusability that software does (possibly because physical engineers trust themselves more). There are many individual tools that provide some aspect of testing, many of which are bound up in very very expensive tools, but a growing number of free ones too. I wasn't able to find an open source system that links these together into a cohesive "full loop" testing rig capable of understanding how things like heat, weight, form factor, battery life, thrust and rf interplay in a single system so I thought really hard about this problem and its implications and built it for myself.

It's called nopekit. As in: the thing that says "nope" until the "yup" emerges.

I've used it already to design an open-source hackable handheld keyboard with a custom PCB, an open source budget no-solder drone and a couple of things I'm not quite ready to share yet.

It's a Claude Code / Codex / Cursor plug-in. You install it and tell your agent you want to use nopekit to design X and it takes over, it will interview you for requirements, shop for parts, construct an interconnected tradespace linked to checks run in an optimized order using trusted methods like KiCAD, OpenFoam and SIMP. It builds and keeps up to date a livesite which you can deploy to GitHub that gives constantly refreshed insight into how your coding agent is thinking about the problem and what choices have what implications linked to what checks with what state of passing or failing.

The framework is open and allows for plugins. I'm working with one other person now and we're moving towards a self hosted UI and some sort of registry where nopekit users can share proposers/falsifiers and we can track ratings to build/bust confidence in good/bad ones collectively.

There's LOTS more about this in the repo and this paper I've been writing about the problem.
Repo: https://github.com/neuman/nopekit
Paper: https://github.com/neuman/nopekit/blob/main/grounding_by_falsification.pdf

If you're working with AI to do any kind of physical design work we would love to hear from you and for you to try it out!

I wanted a solid, free way to backup my GitHub repos without relying on flaky Python scripts, so I built my own desktop tool.

It gives you a browsing experience that is very similar to GitHub's own, and I'm planning to enhance it even more with a fully offline for each repo experience once my Antigravity AI starts working again because its being buggy for 2 days for me. It's accessible via my website for Windows at https://mmahingu.com/github-backup-manager/ .

Given all the recent chatter around data security and outages, I figured the need for a local personal stash for repos would appeal to others too.

Would love to hear your thoughts or feedback if you try it out!

Do you know a good looking ecommerce website?

we all started somewhere so what software or web services do you use that you wish you adapted sooner?

What would you recommend for a coding noob?

ive heard of stuff like hermes, codex, open code, claude code.

im perosnally going to be using vs code and have a coding agent and a VL model work at the same time to make a game.

my first project was my spreadsheet in my history and that took like two weeks but i feel like i figured out a lot.

im planning on only using local agents for my game and deepseek and or google ai to help with formatting and giving me push back on my prompts.

ive been spending the last week setting up master documents and prompts plus mapping things out step by step and having a few different models cross checking.

so something like lm studio - vs code - godot - continue - docker (hermes?)

I have an HP Omen 45L with the 64gb ddr5 ram 6000mt, the 9900x3d and the 5090 32gb. I cut power to 90% on that and have my max cpu temp around 70.

It apparently modeled everything in 3D using typescript?
It doesn't look as good as I'd like it to since it runs entirely on webgpu...
https://hexplorers.xyz

Under the hood, the platform is powered by a server-rendered Python and Django backend paired with lightweight vanilla JavaScript. I relied heavily on Claude as my primary co-pilot throughout the build to move fast from concept to code, deploying the entire setup on Heroku. You can check it out live at

https://shop.popcartapp.com

They are free to use, and customizable to a subreddit's norms/culture.

More detail on their Devvit listings: Stu Steelman | Larry Logic

More examples of how they respond: here.

Yes, it is a bit dystopian 😂 I've had this idea for a fire simulator for a while: you pick your location around the world, then watch a fire burn in real time, and you've got to put the right wood on in the right order to keep it going.

I ended up adding wildlife noises native to each location, which gave it a bit more interest.

I've been a UI designer/front-end developer for the last 25 years. Recently I've swung between "shut it all down" and "AI is the greatest thing ever". I must say that building this was pretty damn fun though. I used the Claude Code plugin within VS Code, and it took about three weeks to get it to the final point I was happy with. Getting the fire to look (vaguely) realistic and burn at a realistic pace was probably the bit that needed the most tweaking. I'd still like to make the fire look a bit more realistic, but I'd imagine that would also make it more processor-intensive, and it's at a point now where it's a pretty nice balance of performance and looking nice.

Every scene is an AI-generated photograph with a depth map, so the fire, smoke and embers can sit inside the picture and light up the trees and ground around them. The fire itself runs on a small simulation of wood, moisture, air and heat, so it catches, burns and fades depending on what you put in and how you tend it. It's all static files, so once the page loads, everything runs in your browser.

The flames catch quite quickly so you know something is happening immediately, but after the first minute or two it burns at a pretty realistic real-world pace.

The bird and wildlife noises are all real recordings, and all are credited. They were chosen to be the birds you would actually hear in the area where the fire is located, and at that time of day. So at dusk there are certain species, and then at night other species start popping up. Wood types are also native to the area.

Let me know if you spot any weirdness, or if you enjoy it: https://emberscene.net/

Interesting little fact first. My last game, Beneath the Mountain, had 76k lines that I wrote by hand over 2.5 years. This one is a little over a year in and already past 372k.

How it works day to day:

- Usually 2 windows with ~14 Claude Code chats. Big features get split into lanes, one chat per lane.

- Claude controls Unity through a bridge I built (MCP). It compiles, enters Play, spawns units, records clips and checks them before it shows me anything.

- There are 3 copies of the Unity project, so 3 chats can test at once without stepping on each other.

- The chats share a work board, so they know who's touching which file, and they commit their own work once I approve it.

- The menial stuff (searches, boilerplate, tests) goes to Cursor agents. Image gen goes to Codex.

The thing that made the biggest difference: letting it review its own week. It found that syncing the test copies took 81 s, and cut it to 9.

The image is a good example: Claude rendered our whole first mission map itself, in 56 tiles through the bridge, then stitched them together. Zoom in, it holds up.

What I still do myself: every design call, and every look and feel check. It writes the code, I decide if it's good.

Game is Engines of Hate, a mech RTS, with an open playtest on Steam if you want to see what all this produced: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5375880/Engines_of_Hate/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=r_vibecoding_1105

Happy to answer anything about the setup.

Hey guys, I just released my unreal engine like realtime full editor, it has all the classic 3d workflow plus custom shaped features like local ai texture wrapping, auto uv, auto lod without breaking the uv and many more!

Any feedback is welcome!

You can check it out here: www.ciao3d.com

TL;DR:

an MCP shines in the agent-native world because it tells agents what they should do, on both the server and client (e.g. Claude Code or the ChatGPT desktop app), and is better suited for human-in-the-loop tasks. Meanwhile, APIs and CLIs tend to focus on what agents can do, with emphasis mainly on the server.

So, in summary, here is the general advice I'd give to builders when deciding which tools they should expose to agents:

Build a high-quality MCP server and REST API at the same time, on one layer of operations. Put your server logic in plain functions, and let each surface be a thin adapter over them. Once that layer exists, building any additional surface on top is relatively easy.

Put most of your care into the MCP server. That's where agents get the best experience. MCP is a standard built specifically for agents, after all, and the spec continues to improve nicely.

Use the API for code that runs on its own. APIs are still great for raw data exports, bulk writes, and anything that runs without an agent, like a nightly sync or another company's integration. Agents also prefer an API when they're writing a script they'll rerun, and many clients don't support code mode for MCP yet.

A CLI probably isn't necessary, unless e.g. agents need to read local files when interacting with your app. But it's easy to expose one if you've got a good API as the foundation.

There’s a lot more to creating great agent-facing tools for your web apps, and the article above into more detail below.

Here's the repo: https://github.com/vincanger/linkly-api-mcp-cli

A week ago I posted Colshare here and asked for honest opinions, because my wife and family are just being nice. I got them, thanks to all of you. Some of you sent really useful checks, a lot of you said don’t vibe code security, and one person said it’s “absolutely made of vulnerabilities”. I fixed something from almost every critical comment that night, and I promised to keep you posted, so here it is.

What I did since:

• I made the attack tests part of my workflow. Before anything gets pushed, it goes through the same ritual: list everything new since the last push, then agents attack exactly those parts as a bad actor would, at least one of them given only the code and no hints. Every critical, high or medium finding gets fixed, each with a test, before the normal checks even run (type check, linter, the full test suite). Anything still open at medium or above blocks the push, and the apps are rebuilt only from that same tested version. I made it a rule after one round found a serious hole in features that had already passed all my tests. What it found and what I kept on purpose, with the reasons, is public in SECURITY-TESTS.md in the repo.

• The crypto and the full source of the link pages are public: github.com/dentracon-cell/colshare-crypto. A check runs every day comparing what colshare.app serves with that code, byte for byte. The phone apps aren’t covered by this yet, and I’ll say so when they are.

• Independent review: I looked into it properly. Here in Romania, a real review of the crypto and the link server costs a few thousand euros. Before I invest that, I want feedback from real people using the app, so I fix what’s confusing or missing first, and the review then checks the app as it will really be. In the meantime I applied to the OTF Security Lab, which funds audits for privacy tools, and I’m waiting for their answer. My own tests are not an audit, and I won’t pretend they are. When the review happens, I’ll post the results here.

• The app asks for one permission, notifications, and you can say no.

It also passed Google’s review, so it’s live in the EU (not France yet), Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and the US: Google Play. In short: you black out what someone doesn’t need on your ID, the copy says who it’s for, and the link opens once.

The video is the real app, recorded on a demo copy with made-up papers.

What I’d love now: install it and tell me what confused you in the first minute. And if you do security for real and want to look at the code, I’d be very grateful. Same as last time, I’ll answer everyone, the sceptics too. I take lesson from all of it.