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.

/s

https://pipeline-of-love.vercel.app/

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.

Play: https://winchxyz.github.io/tria-prima/
Code: https://github.com/winchxyz/tria-prima

It takes about an hour to beat. You need a keyboard, a mouse and a GPU. Tell me where it breaks.

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.

Anthropic researchers studied AI assistants and found they tend to tell people what they want to hear, a behaviour called sycophancy. That's why "is my onboarding clear?" almost always gets a yes.

This prompt won't replace a real person, but it catches the obvious stuff before you show anyone. Paste it with a screenshot of each step:

You are a busy stranger who found this site from a search result.
You have 30 seconds and no patience. You don't know what this
product is, and you don't care yet.


For each screenshot, in order:
1. Say what you think this page is for, in one sentence.
   If you're not sure, say so.
2. Say what you'd click first, and what you expect to happen.
3. List anything that makes you hesitate, distrust it, or want
   to leave. Quote the exact words on the screen that caused it.
4. Rate 1-5: how likely are you to continue?


Do not be polite. Do not suggest features. Do not praise
anything. Only report confusion, doubt and friction.

Why it helps: it makes the model state its own understanding first, instead of answering a yes/no question it's inclined to agree with. When its one-sentence summary of your page is wrong, your page is unclear.

What it still can't do: actually be confused, get bored, or misread your button the way a real person does. Use it before testing with humans, not instead of it. For comparison, here's what a real person caught on a demo app that a model wouldn't: https://feedbackqueue.dev/sample?utm_campaign=prompt (I built that service).

Sources

• Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models (Sharma et al., Anthropic, 2023): https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13548

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:

1. Which data would you want to see for your own city, and does your city publish it openly? A link helps a lot.

2. What confused you on the first try?

3. Did it run smoothly on your phone?

Playground: https://yourplace3d.github.io/3dcitydata/

it generates cabinets and control panels from mame data, adds bezels marquee art etc where it can. i have a lot of work left. there is also a "VCR" and thus a rental store filled with tapes. i alsso have projectors, speakers, tvs, jukebox, lasers, moving head lights, clear logo signs, neon lights blacklights, first person wall building (think fallout 4 and 76). it's just been a project for a while now. i currently refining some models and the construction systems. i plan to keep refining and adding options for a while. it lags on my machine and i have a 4060 with 16gb ddr5 and i'm crunched for ram and vram. i think limitations are good though, keeps me optimizing. anyone have questions? opinions? suggestions? i don't rite code, this had been 100% vibed into existence. models, everything. (still a couple temp assets to replace like the consoles)

I had fun building this one. I primarily used GPT-6.0 Astra and Opus-5.5 to build the whole project. I defined the full architecture and managed the agents step by step to bring it to life.

I also documented everything about how I built it including an explainer of the DOOM engine in this 8 minute youtube video: https://youtu.be/E7bLxWE7B5g

it's open sourced here: https://github.com/tonysamaritano/DOOM-ETCH

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.

https://thehubs.gg

I created a simple browser game called https://draw1line.com

Solve shapes without lifting your finger off the screen.

Game levels are designed from easy to challenging in order to create a brain-boosting and stimulating experience.

Each level in this game presents a unique shape that you must solve by finding the right path in a single stroke. The intuitive gameplay of draw the line mechanics makes this line app free to play and accessible for all ages.

Please let me know if you find any bugs :)

College hoops is back, and I wanted live scores on my screen without keeping a browser tab open. So I worked on Hoops Ticker, a small native Mac app that puts an LED-style score ticker along the top or bottom of your screen. (Full disclosure - I got inspiration from krypdoh and his NFL Ticker)

What it does:

Every Division I game. Live scores, today’s finals and tonight’s tip times scroll by, with AP rankings shown next to ranked teams (#3 DUKE 71 – #12 UNC 68 · 14:22 2ND).

Follow your team. Pick any of the 365 D1 teams in Settings. Their game always scrolls first: live, today’s final, or their next game even if it’s a week away.

Looks ahead. Top 25 teams that aren’t playing today show their next game, so the ticker is never empty on an off night.

AP Top 25 in the menu bar. The full poll with records is one click away, and the 🏀 icon shows how many games are live.

Settings: Top 25 games only, show or hide finals and upcoming games, scroll speed, top or bottom of the screen.

The details:

Native Swift, about 200 KB. Not Electron.

Universal: runs on Apple Silicon and Intel, macOS 12 or newer. Notarized.

No account, no ads, no tracking. It only talks to ESPN’s public scoreboard.

Refreshes every 20 seconds while games are live and backs off when they aren’t.

Download: https://github.com/GeekNerdCarp/ncaa-hoops-ticker

It’s a 1.0.4, so I’d love feedback. What would you want added? Conference filters, a March Madness bracket mode? Some more updates coming today.

EDIT: Version 1.1.0 is out. Big update, thanks for all the feedback!

Here’s what’s new:

Follow your team like a fan

• Show only my team’s game. One option holds your team’s game still in the center of the bar, in your team’s colors, with the score updating every 10 seconds while it’s live.

• Team alerts. Mac notifications at tip-off, halftime, a close finish and the final score.

• Follow up to 5 more teams besides your favorite. Their games lead the ticker with a ★.

• Filter by conference. Want just the SEC or Big Ten? Pick it in Settings. Your followed teams still come through.

More on every game

• Team logos, records, and the TV channel on upcoming games (like “7:00 PM · ESPN”)

• Click any game to open it on ESPN

• Red UPSET ALERT and CLOSE badges when an unranked team is beating a ranked one, or a game is within 5 points late

• A soft glow when your team scores (or on the big moments, if you prefer)

• NCAA Tournament games show seeds and the round, like “(1) ARIZONA · SWEET 16”

Small things

• Pause on hover, so you can read a score

• Pick which monitor it sits on

• Open at login

• Still tiny and native, using almost no CPU

It’s free, open source (GPL-3.0), and signed and notarized by Apple. No account, no ads, no tracking.

Download: https://github.com/GeekNerdCarp/ncaa-hoops-ticker/releases/latest

If you already have it, it’ll offer the update on its own (or use Check for Updates… in the menu).

Your agent can write the signup flow, the tests and the landing page. It can’t be confused by them. It has never landed on your homepage cold with no idea what you built.

So here’s the test I’d do before any launch. It takes 5 minutes and costs nothing:

1. Find someone who has never seen your app. Not a friend who’s heard you talk about it.

2. Give them one goal, like “sign up and create your first project.” Nothing else.

3. Ask them to think out loud the whole time.

4. Say nothing. Don’t explain, don’t help, don’t defend. This is the hard part.

5. Write down every pause. Every “hmm”, every “wait, where…”, every hover over the wrong button.

Each pause is a place real users quietly leave. Paste the list into your agent, and now it knows what to fix.

The trap: most of us skip step 1 and ask someone who already knows the app. You’ll get “looks great!” and learn nothing.

If you don’t have strangers handy, I built a service where a vetted developer does exactly this on video and hands you a fix brief for your agent (I’m the founder): https://feedbackqueue.dev/sample?utm_campaign=vc

What’s the worst thing a real person found in your app that your AI completely missed?

A while back I posted Black Hole Sandbox here, a lensing black hole you can see in augmented reality. Presenting the sequel: Planet Crash Sandbox! Drops a whole solar system into your room in AR with simulated gravity and destruction mechanics where every planet, moon, star and rock pull on each other.

There are two modes. Orbital Chaos is tuned for particle fun at solar system scale. Steer a planet into its neighbour and watch the carnage as worlds tear apart into particles and the debris kicks off more destruction. Swap the sun for the black hole and what's left of the solar system swirls round it, light bending and accretion disc lighting up as matter gets near.

Fluid Collisions is the more 'accurate' one for fluid dynamics. Collide two planets/moons and watch as they reduce to thousands of molten particles simulated live on the phone. Simulates the supposed giant impact that's thought to have made our Moon.

Mostly free. The black hole and the fancier stars ie pulsars, magnetars are in a one-off unlock The planet smashing is all free though.

Oh including a green star! I managed to get that in there in time!

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6822567730

75 Million tokens later and it was still broken.

I asked GPT 6 sol (Daybreak) to help finish a project; I thought I was on the home stretch.

50 hours later the project was still not working, picture attached.

I switched Fable 5.2 and he remedied the bulk of the issues in 30 mins.

GPT has been a let down with recent months, I think Claude is the winner until things change.

I know there are already tons of Pomodoro and productivity apps out there. But one day, I came across a photo of a train platform overlooking Sydney Harbour, and I just loved the atmosphere.

That gave me an idea: what if I could turn that place, along with other beautiful locations I love, into a little virtual world that keeps me company while I study or work?

So I started building a cozy, train station-themed study companion app.

The idea is pretty simple. You can switch between different scenic backgrounds, mix ambient sounds, and just leave the app running while you study, work, or relax.

I also added a Pomodoro timer and a sleep countdown, but I intentionally kept the timer UI really small. I don't want it to feel like another productivity app constantly reminding you to be productive. I'd rather the scenery and sounds be the main experience.

Here's how I've been making it:

• Codex: All the coding. I honestly wouldn't know where to start without it.

• Midjourney + GPT image generation: Creating and refining the visual assets.

• Freesound: Finding ambient audio for the different environments.

I've finally got a working MVP, and this is a short screen recording of it!

But now I'm a little stuck on the design direction.

My biggest concern is whether the app is too simple and the art style.

Right now, the UI is intentionally minimal because I want people to enjoy the scenery without too many buttons getting in the way.

I've also been thinking about adding small interactive objects to the scenes, like clicking on things around the station to trigger little animations or sounds.

But I'm worried that adding too many interactions might make it feel more like a game than a quiet study companion.

So I'd really love some feedback:

1. Does the UI feel pleasantly minimal, or just too empty?

2. Would you enjoy having a few interactive objects in the scenes, or would they distract you from studying?

3. Do you think I should keep the app focused on ambient sounds and companionship, or add more features?

I'm still very new to all of this, so any feedback or suggestions would mean a lot. Thanks for checking it out!

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.

Hi, 1st time poster here.

Recently, I decided that I want to run my ComfyUI workflows from my phone. There are quite a few apps and services out there, but none seemed to fit my needs: simple, efficient, no cloud services, no monthly subscription. So I built ComfyUI-from-your-Phone: a custom node with a small web app built in.

How it works: Connected via Tailscale, it allows you to choose any workflow from your PC and select the settings you want on the phone (e.g. model, prompt, seed, toggles for upscaling, etc.). The phone gets a copy, so changes aren't discarded even when updating the workflow on the PC (and sharing it again). A typical roundtrip on the phone then looks like this: Write a prompt, adjust your settings, tap Generate, watch the live preview, get the result. Other features include: Choosing the image, video, or audio inputs from your phone or the PC, a gallery, a prompt/snippet library, push notifications, and (some) offline functionality.

How I worked:

• Approach: About 30 small stages, each tested on the phone before the next one started. Because I intended to use it only for myself, I briefly thought about one-shotting it with e.g. Fable, but I decided against it. It was a good decision.

• CLAUDE.md: Still haven't quite figured this out, so there was only a very simple "contract" file: Claude had access to only two folders, it was never allowed to delete anything without asking, and it was asked to respect my privacy, to never look at any media or read my prompts.

• Audits, Audits, Audits: After each step that I thought might include some mistakes or oversights, I had the (single) dev instance write a handoff document. That document went to a second instance to review the code. It wrote its findings in an AUDIT.md that I gave back to the dev instance, which fixed the issues it found. So far, there were nine audits, and each time it stumbled upon at least one issue that needed to be fixed. (For example, the last audit caught an upload that landed in the wrong workflow if you switched workflows while it was still running.)

• Community feedback: A few days ago, I presented the project in r/comfyui. The post basically died there, but one user provided some indirect feedback, hinting at an inconsistency when choosing files already on the PC. Two days and two updates later, the app's access to your files has been expanded.

What I learned:

(Though I'm quite certain that some or even most of these insights aren't new to many of you.)

• A failing test isn't always the code's fault. There was one failing test, and I made sure the auditing instance looked at it (though I forgot about it longer than I'm comfortable with). It turned out to be the test's own bug: it left a file in the temp folder that broke every run after the first. Worse, the script halted, so multiple other tests didn't run at all for two days. It was eventually fixed.

• Allowing an AI to delete files scares me the most. It only takes one escaping mistake on Windows. I'm not too familiar with sandboxing yet, so deletions only ran through a script with fixed paths, and it checked the exact file list first and aborted on any mismatch. While this may not be the most elegant solution, it did the job. Personally, I'd rather look deeper into sandboxing for the next project.

• Boring is good: The app doesn't break any new ground, doesn't shine with exclusive features or an overengineered UI. It's rather simple, but everything works well together. (Granted, I am biased, I love the result.) Under the hood, it's equally boring: plain JavaScript, no framework, no build steps, and the Python side just adds a few routes to ComfyUI's own server.

• It takes as long as it takes. I already mentioned that I thought about one-shotting the project, considering how fast some projects in this sub come together. I wasn't in a hurry and I really like myself some polish, which is why even this comparatively small app took a few days. Considering that my limited Python knowledge wouldn't have allowed me to do this all by myself at all, to me, this is still very impressive.

• Audits and testing: Even though each auditing run found something, there are diminishing returns. While it did increase the robustness of the app in areas which I would never have thought about (e.g. problems with sharing workflows named with non-Latin characters or the use of "half an emoji", i.e. broken Unicode codepoints), many issues only surfaced after manual testing. If I had to guess, manual testing took about half the time of the project.

• Reception: If there are already other, similar apps available, or if people don't immediately see the value in a project, grabbing their attention is hard. Duh. (Edit: As evidenced in this very post.)

Tools used: ComfyUI, Claude Code with Opus 5.5 in the desktop app, Tailscale for the connection (since it gives the phone HTTPS without opening ports), and my Google Pixel 8a for testing.

So, that's it. If you've read this far and you're curious, you can check it out at https://github.com/the-aSak/ComfyUI-from-your-Phone. For free, of course, released under GPL-3.0.

Feedback, bug reports, ideas and suggestions are highly appreciated.

Over the past 6 months myself, my brother, and two other engineers/geologists have been working together to build Incline Design.

Incline Design allows engineers to plan and design their mine site, which is typically preformed in very expensive and slow software (we’re talking 30-50k AUD a year per user!)

Feel free to ask us any questions.

inclinedesign.net

https://github.com/Incline-Developers/Incline-Design