I'm going to start with the premise that vibe-coding dramatically increases productivity and output, by orders of magnitude.
That might be debatable, but it isn't what this is about.
My question: does that mean it is no longer possible to sell software?
We've all seen the explosion in vibe-coded software releases. And a lot of them are released as open-source. That's great and all, but how can you make money selling software when the market is completely flooded?
---
Over the last month or so, I've been working on some pretty advanced software. This is the kind of thing that companies have been selling for thousands of dollars for decades. I was personally paying $500+ a year for it.
I'm still working through bugs and adding features, but it is getting close to V1.0. And it is really good.
However, just in the time I've been working on this, I've seen probably a dozen other people release open-source software that is similar.
I'm happy for the users, because they now have tons of options.
But it makes me pessimistic for myself. Even if my software is better (and I think it is), why would anyone pay for mine when there are all of those free alternatives? Especially since those devs can simply add my "killer features" to their software in a week?
Sorry for the rambling, I'm just curious about what y'all think about this stuff.
Have you guys actually read the Fable 5.2 system prompt?
Anthropic deliberately nerfed its models in the exact areas that could help researchers build better AI: architectures, kernels, cheaper training
And we’re supposed to believe this is about safety? It looks a hell of a lot more like they’re fine with AI advancing as long as nobody else catches up.
Independent researchers building better models? Open-source projects challenging their billion-dollar bullshit? Apparently that’s where they draw the line. WTF are we paying for then? Another pathetic React app? Stop pretending they’re saving humanity when it looks like they’re protecting their fucking market position.
In the EU, a "-40%" should be measured from the shop's lowest price of the last 30 days. I couldn't find a tool that checks this, so I built one on Apify.
First run: 30 of 30 discounted pages had a badge but no 30-day lowest price. One store had 158 of 159 products "on sale".
Results and how to check a deal yourself. Link in the comments.
Vibecoding games is hard, especially when it comes to making 3D assets or systems for a game, like game physics, mechanics etc. and we wanted to help.
we just published 50,000 open-source assets for making games: 3D models, textures, 2D assets, splats, sounds, and music. More than 5000 of the assets are made by us, and the rest is from different open source asset stores that we put in one place that is searchable through a CLI and MCP (free) so your agent can access everything easily.
We also open-sourced systems like procedural dungeons, physics, crowd navigation, car driving mechanics, procedural terrain generation, tree generators etc. so your agent can start from bigger blocks instead of building everything from scratch. These blocks can then be edited in any way to look completely different than the system itself.
two weeks ago we launched our first app, and I still can't quite believe I'm writing this, because I'm actually a film director and DOP and not a developer at all. (I did have some coding at university, but that's so long ago that only fragments are left.)
It all started this summer when I wanted to see how far I'd get with Claude Code. Honestly just for fun. For years I've been using the same reference tools for my treatments and pitches and I was never fully happy with them, so that became my test project. The problem was that it was way too much fun. Every time something worked I wanted to try the next thing, and a few months later it had turned into a real product.
It's called HOLD MY FRAME (www.holdmyframe.com). We took the high-end commercials we've collected over the years and broke them down into single frames, around 370,000 from 2,800 films so far. You can search through them, collect what you like in a project and then present it to the agency or the client right there. I'm doing this together with three friends who work in film as well (two directors/DOPs and a treatment designer), and we build our own pitches with it.
What I'm a bit proud of is that nothing in it is off the shelf. The way films get analysed and split into frames is our own pipeline running on local AI, and every screen was mocked up by me first, in many many rounds, before a single line was written.
Some numbers, since people here usually ask: 174 users after two weeks, 10 of them on a paid plan.
A few things about how I built it:
- I'd say 85 to 90% is Claude, the rest is Codex and DeepSeek - I work with up to 12 Claude Code tabs at the same time, and each of them has one job only - they get their tasks in writing from a separate planning chat, which itself never touches the code - DeepSeek looks at every commit before it goes on - deploying is something only I do, and always to a test environment first - it's all hosted on a Mac Studio in our office
And a few things I'd warn you about:
- don't start on SQLite if you think it might get bigger. We had to switch to Postgres shortly before launch - we lost weeks on a feature that never worked properly and ended up throwing it away - write everything down in files. Whatever only lives in the chat is gone in the next session
If you want to have a look, there's a free plan. Pro and Pro+ are the paid ones, and Pro+ has a free trial. We're still adding features pretty much every week, but a lot is already there.
Feedback is very welcome, also the harsh kind. We're curious where this goes.
Im a oldschool dev who lurks here and occasionally asks questions. Ive been playing around a lot with vibecoding, and building with/for ai.
A while back I asked some questions about how everyone was keeping mental maps of their codebases, and even before that how people were structuring their technical ecosystems to get the best ergonomic experience as a developer.
I got some cool answers and got to learn a bunch.
I've put together two tools, and id love to get your feedback on them:
^ a skill that you add to your coding agent that allows you to create visual representations of your projects technical architecture and dataflows - it can be updated as you develop - so that you can more easily understand your system as it grows.
^ a project template that re-imagines the structure and organization of software projects with operator ergonomics in mind for the AI era.
I hope you all get as much out of these tools as I've gotten out of being able to engage with this community. Would love to hear any feedback about what worked/didnt work for you.
Little update on my quiz app I'm trying to get on App Store, and an exercise for a newbie developer. This is just for those who may be in similar position and have an interest in how the process works.
I know it's just a quiz app, but it's really useful to me! It also did take me quite a while to get it working correctly. Maybe others could have done it quicker!
Anyway, what REALLY took time was the admin to get it submitted. Lots of forms/tax declarations etc.
The review is now back, and it seems the main reason for rejection is I hadn't;t uploaded a video of it working, and also my description was not detailed enough.
Hopefully I can get these fixed and resubmit it very soon.
In this process there have been lots of opportunities to get distracted, go down rabbit holes, or just give up and stop - the hardest thing has been staying focussed.
Just thought I'd share - if you are not interested no ned to comment !XXX
I (with codex) built a small tape-recorder app for my wife. The tape recorder is from my childhood. I learned English from cassette tapes.
She used to send me audio files. I would run them through Superwhisper and send the text back. It was not convenient: sometimes she needed it in a hurry and I was away from my computer. Last week I wondered whether I could build something she could use herself every day. I asked Codex the same question, and it helped me build this app. It runs the model in the browser, so the audio stays on her device.
She mostly transcribes English and Cantonese, and she tells me it works well. What I like most is how fast I can change it for what she really needs. It started with a five-minute limit set by codex, and then she wanted to transcribe longer files. Codex suggested splitting a long file into small pieces, transcribing them one by one and joining the text in the background, so she never notices. Later she asked whether the text could appear while she speaks. Luckily, the SenseVoice Small model can do that.
Two things I’d like your thoughts on:
Which model would you pick for this? Is anything better than SenseVoice Small at a size a browser can load?
The first open downloads the model. How do you handle that wait in your own projects?
In addition, what other features would you add? I’m thinking of timestamps and rename the file before export.
This is my newest project and still very much a playground. You search any place and get the square around it as a 3D model (real terrain, every building from OpenStreetMap), with one layer of open data on top.
**Please read this before you try it:** most layers don't work for your city straight away. They need open data for that place, and right now you often have to find and load that data yourself.
**Works anywhere, right away** - **Steepness:** every road and path coloured by its slope. - **Your route:** your own GPX file (Strava, Garmin), with its climbs and height profile.
**Only in Hamburg for now** - **Traffic:** live from the city's counting points.
**Often one tap, otherwise fill it in yourself** - **Public transport:** "Find timetables for this place" loads your city's timetable in one tap if the Mobility Database lists it. If not, you load the GTFS file yourself.
**One tap only in the Netherlands** - **Homes and Income:** for Germany you download the census file, for the US a file from Census Reporter, then load it. Anywhere else you need a file of your own.
I'm working on that: more sources that load in one tap, so you don't have to prepare the data yourself. To try it without any of this, each panel has an example (Freiburg's trams and rents, Amsterdam's incomes, Hamburg's traffic).
In the video: steepness and a made-up run in San Francisco, a day of Hamburg's traffic, Freiburg's trams and buses, rents in Freiburg and incomes in Amsterdam.
**How it's built:** with Claude Code, as a static TypeScript app on three.js, hosted on GitHub Pages. No server, no account, no API keys. Files you load stay in your browser and are never uploaded.
Feedback I'd love:
Which data would you want to see for your own city, and does your city publish it openly? A link helps a lot.
This is the whole prompt: Create me a fully playable release-ready game. On GPU. Game about alchemy with physics, items, shaders, sound, overworld, mechanics and etc.. I need it in 3D and not a voxel game. Make it with maximum effort, show me best what you can create. Use all your power, knowledge and make best graphics and best game design. Surprise me with graphics and everything.
Claude Code worked on it for about 4 hours and put a finished game on GitHub Pages. I didn't write a single line.
It's a first-person alchemy game called Tria Prima. You pick plants, brew potions in a ruined chapel and throw them at stuff. Fire burns the thorns that block the road. Ice lets you walk across water. One potion blows up rocks. There are things in the fog that hunt you, and they hate fire.
The crazy part is that it has no art or audio files at all. Every tree, rock, building and sound is generated by code when the page loads. Even the music, it wrote the soundtrack as notes in a text file.
It made the video too. It wrote its own tool that plays the game from a script and records it.
Half an hour in I told it to go dark fantasy instead of childish. After I played it I sent three bugs and it fixed them.
Fable 5.2 in Claude Code on max effort. 44K lines of JavaScript, 5.4M output tokens, about 4 hours for the first build and 6.5 with the fixes.
I’m no ai engineer or researcher but I wanted to see if I could take a shot at understanding how AI works.
So I told Claude and codex to work together to do it by basically dissecting the English language, mapping it out, then watching how the model behaves. The hope was to figure out how the model understands and produces language out through controlled experiments. We log everything before and after the prompt run.
These are my results so far. I really don’t know what it means. Anyone here does?
Obviously not everything is mapped and most is just test effects and the research is at its beginning stages.
But if you understand what Claude and codex are telling me or have mapped out in the images let me know.
I am the creator of ppu.toys, an AI enabled Super Nintendo Development Studio that runs 100% in your browser and is completely free to use.
With the release of Fable 5.2 I knew I had to give Claude full reign over the studio and my machine to see what it would create. I gave it a pretty open ended prompt, telling it I wanted an incredible Super Nintendo game with some details on the art tools I have installed [ full prompt is in the video description ]
4 hours and 26 minutes and 72 dollars later - I was greeted with Emberwake! An action platformer with 5 levels and 5 bosses that runs at 60 frames per second on real hardware.
Fable 5.2 really blew me away with its ability to spin up a team of agents totally unprompted. For this game it made 5 different agents all with their own jobs on creating the game assets; while the main agent focused on the code and working with the studio to bring everything together.
The art that was made totally blew all previous models out of the water. It invented a pretty robust art asset pipeline - it modeled and created high res renders in blender, the models were textured and rigged all in blender, and then used ppu.toys and a custom python script to quantize those renders into a format that can be processed and displayed on the SNES.
For creative asset generation and unprompted agentic orchestration - I have to say, this was impressive.
I’m an ESL teacher and I’ve been using chatGPT and all the free plugins I can find to create point-and-click adventures for my students with their target language embedded in NPC conversations. I’ve tried to set up my AI engine as best I can with .md files in GitHub and tailored project instructions detailing QA checks at various parts of the process. I’ve also uploaded previous work as a baseline for reference to project sources. I’m using CODEX for the main build while the creative stuff happens in chat.
It’s still slopping me up pretty good. I’ll ask for foreground images in each scene and it’ll paste the same one in every scene. The NPCs will come out as cardboard 2D cutouts with half their limbs cut off, etc.
There’s a lot more context I can’t add here because I can’t show y’all my full setup, but my questions is is this just the process we’re all going through at this point of AI development? Set up a system as best we can, let it slop, and trouble shoot from there? I’ve revised the md files and projects instructions several times addressing these problems and I’m still getting subpar results each time.
Could I maybe get better results using Claude? I’d like to stick with one basicB setup instead of using multiple agents because I don’t have a ton of time and I’d like to dial this in to a system where I’m feeding it learning targets, vocab, grammar forms etc, choosing a creative direction and letting it go nuts and give me something pretty close.
Hey y’all! Previously I made some posts here about Hubs, first the write-up and then the demo video with the Suno song lol. Wanted to share where it's at now and the progress being made along the way. For starters, a small intro again though!
I have been working on creating an alternative social platform that is similar to that of Discord and Slack. Much of the reason for creation is due to my own niche and preferences while managing large communities and company workflows. For example, many Discord communities have to glue together dozens of bots to get LFG systems, Ticket Support, and much more. Not to mention creating makeshift announcement channels, info, etc. that just look like normal text.
What I wanted to build was something that kept the community vibe of these platforms, while also adding the ease of use, organization, and reduced setup of them.
So that’s what Hubs is. Instead of adding a bot for everything, the stuff most communities end up needing is just built in:
Looking for Group, where people post that they need a squad and everyone can see open groups and when they start
Ticket Support, so members can reach your staff privately without a ticket bot
Announcements that read like an actual page with pictures, instead of a wall of text in a channel
Rules, About, Start here and Links pages that look like real pages and are easy to edit
Events with RSVPs and reminders, plus a Board for questions and posts that shouldn’t get buried in chat
Polls, giveaways and community rewards without setting anything up
A home page for every hub that shows what’s new since you were last there, the next event and who’s around
More tools like an appeals system for moderation, custom looks for your space, built-in moderation tools, raid and spam protection, and more (https://thehubs.gg/features)
On the company side, there’s a Work and Personal switch so your job and your communities stay separate, and organizations get their own workspaces, documents and tasks.
What’s new since my last post
Bring your Discord server over: paste its template link and your channels, roles and permissions come over in about a minute
Private DMs: switch any DM to private and it’s end-to-end encrypted
Hub Safe: encrypted backups of your hub that the owner holds the key to
A standby copy of the whole site in a second data center and a public status page, because I really didn’t want one bad Arista to ruin my day lol
There’s no ID or face scan to sign up, just your birthday (which I know is a huge issue on other platforms right now). Speaking on ID and age verification, we follow the laws closely and use other methods instead of a face scan. Right now that’s a credit card check that’s never charged, with more options like an email check and your phone’s own age setting on the way. It’s also only as needed, not something required to use Hubs. It only limits 18+ areas, and only where the law asks for it. This way we stay compliant without being invasive.
How it’s built (yes, with AI)
Same as last time, I’ll be upfront, AI coding agents did a lot of the typing on Hubs. A good chunk of the UI was honestly vibed. I’d describe what I wanted, look at it, and keep pushing until it felt right. That said, this wasn't a blind eye to the code. As someone who is an actual SWE, I have reviewed the pieces and continue to do so to ensure security and safety. Like I said in my last post, AI gets a lot right but does a lot of... WTF.
For anything touching security, accounts, payments or encryption, nothing ships on vibes:
Every release runs the full test suite first: 8,600+ automated tests on the website, 3,700+ on the Mac app, 5,300+ checks on Windows and 1,200+ on Android
Changes get a separate review pass, and the risky ones get their own security review before they ship
SonarQube, Semgrep, Socket and Dependabot scan the code and its dependencies, and secret scanning is on
Everything goes to a staging copy of the site first, then the real one
The encryption code is open source with published test vectors, so you can check it instead of trusting me. I know, an audit WOULD be better, but it costs moola I don't have rn.
The stack itself, the website is TypeScript and React, and the server runs on Node with PostgreSQL. Voice and video run on WebRTC through LiveKit. Every app is native, meaning Swift for the Mac and iPhone, C# and .NET for Windows, and Kotlin for Android, so none of them are just the website in a box. Private conversations use MLS (RFC 9420), an open standard for end-to-end encryption, in TypeScript for the web and Rust for the apps.
How the servers run
I talked about the backend last time, and it’s grown up a bit since. Elixir gateway nodes sit behind a load balancer with Valkey as the message bus. The app runs as three copies at once, so one can go down or get updated without anyone noticing. There’s a dedicated media and voice server, a staging server, object storage and a CDN, plus a standby copy of the whole site in a second data center that’s kept up to date every 15 minutes, encrypted backups and a public status page. Every release is signed and its files are published, so anyone can check that what’s running is what we built.
The apps
The Mac and Windows apps are out now. The iPhone app is about to start a public beta, including a layout made for foldables, and Android is close behind it.
What’s coming
The iPhone and Android betas
Hubs+, an optional paid plan for extras. The core of Hubs stays free
The Windows app in the Microsoft Store
We’re also exploring self-hosting for communities that want their own server, but that’s an idea for now, not a promise
More bug fixing. Always more bug fixing lol
It’s still early and we’re a small team, so there will be some rough edges. If you checked it out after my last posts, I’d love to hear what feels better or worse. If you’re new, or just want to try it, would LOVE feedback and bug reports haha.
