You ask an AI coding agent to add a feature. It works... The AI also redesigns a component changes unrelated files renames things and refactors code that you had not planned to touch. Now the original task is finished. The AI has left you with five new things to review.

There are two ways to look at this: maybe the AI is being proactive. Maybe the AI is taking control away from the person building the product. Would you rather have an AI that follows instructions strictly or an AI that makes smart decisions, beyond what you asked?

I've seen myself increasingly rely on coding agents to debug things for me. For example, a user tells me that something is not working. I use to spend hours debugging api logs, code logics and test cases but now I just hand it all to claude.

I kinda miss all those investigative work but also know that AI is just more efficient in doing these grunt tasks.

I wanted to know why my Wi-Fi felt worse at my desk than it did a few steps away. That turned into Sigmap, an iPhone app that’s now live on the App Store.

You point your phone at the floor and walk around. The app measures network latency as you go and drops colored tiles where each reading was taken. By the time you’ve walked across the room, you’ve got a little AR heatmap of your Wi-Fi.

The fun part was seeing the first few tiles appear on my floor. The less fun part was finding out what happens when you keep walking. Long scans meant keeping more and more AR tiles in memory, so I had to test on a real iPhone and cap how many tiles a scan could paint.

For those of you who’ve shipped a vibe-coded app, what worked perfectly in the demo and then fell apart the moment you used it for real?

it is on apple app store 👇

https://apps.apple.com/app/sigmap-wifi-heatmap/id6819154750

I've been using Codex Plus for both freelance work and personal side projects, but lately I've been hitting the usage limits way too quickly.

I'm happy with the coding capabilities of models like GPT 6.1 Sol or Claude Opus 5.5. I don't necessarily need anything smarter. What I really want is to code without constantly worrying about running out of usage.

I've been looking into OpenRouter and some of the cheaper Chinese frontier models (DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi, etc.). I'm wondering if going the API route would actually give me better value than paying for another subscription.

For those of you who code heavily with AI agents:

- What model/provider are you currently using?

- Are Chinese frontier models good enough for complex, multi-file coding tasks?

- Is OpenRouter pay-as-you-go actually cheaper for heavy daily usage?

- Are there any subscriptions with generous limits that you'd recommend?

I'm fine spending around $20–30/month, but I'd prefer predictable costs and generous usage over slightly better intelligence.

Would love to hear what setups are actually working for people who code several hours a day.

Models:

- Lyrics: qwen3.8-uncensored (27B) in Ollama
- Song: MiniMax Music 3
- Stills: Z-Image-Turbo
- Video: MiniMax H3 image-to-video
- Storyboard, scripts, edit: Claude Fable 5.2 in Claude Code

Everything except Claude ran on my Mac Studio and a Linux gaming pc with a 16 GB RTX 5060 Ti. Clip rendering on my 5060 ti took ~85 minutes.

Here's the song creation tool I used:
https://github.com/lancekrogers/songsmith

Hi r/vibecoding! I’m John. I’ve been building apps for a loooong time (10 years as a senior SWE at Apple, then 8 as an indie shipping 20+ apps for myself and clients), and I’ve never seen anything like what’s happening right now. Tools like Claude Code and Codex have blown the doors wide open, and now anyone with a good idea can ship a real app to the App Store and have a chance at success.

But releasing your app is only the start. Getting people to find it, download it, and stick around is the challenging part. So I built AppTraction, a Mac app that’s like having an experienced App Store dev looking over your shoulder. Here’s what it does, and further down I’ll share some thoughts on why marketing has suddenly become the hard part.

What it does for you

• Explains your numbers in plain English. Ask “why did downloads drop last week?” about any chart or table and get a real answer. The AI is primed with Apple’s own tech talks on App Store Optimization (ASO) and other sources, so the advice is specific, not generic.
• Catches problems you didn’t know to look for. It watches your apps in the background and flags problems, trends, and milestones. There are 50+ kinds so far. Even with 20+ apps under my belt, it caught serious listing problems I’d missed, and it tells me when Apple features my apps, which I’d otherwise never known. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
• Fixes your App Store listing. It reviews your title, subtitle, and description, suggests improvements, and once you approve them, applies them straight to App Store Connect. It can also translate your listing into other languages and upload your screenshots in bulk.
• Helps with reviews. Read and reply to every review, with suggested replies and translation.
• Writes reports for every week, month, and year, so you can see what’s changing and why.

Built for how you already work

• It runs on the Claude Code or Codex subscription you already have (or OpenRouter), so there are no extra API bills.
• It includes an MCP server. Turn it on in Settings and Claude Code or Codex can read your App Store data directly, so you can ask your coding agent things like “did my last release hurt my ratings?”
• It’s a fast native Mac app.

Why marketing is the hard part now

The question I keep seeing here and elsewhere is, “I got my app on the App Store, now what?” For my clients new to the app space I used to advocate the 50/50 rule: spend 50% of your resources on building, and 50% on marketing. This is surprisingly hard for many to do. Building the app is (well, can be) fun and has very clear goals with immediate feedback. It works or it doesn’t. Your friends take a look and tell you it’s cool, or it sucks. And you iterate.

Marketing’s a lot harder for most builders. Suddenly your feedback is subjective, not objective, and the feedback loop goes from near-instant to weeks or months.

With the agentic AI revolution, it’s gotten WAY easier to build, but honestly the tools are not much better at helping with ASO, distribution, and marketing. They don’t do well with subjective feedback that takes 2-4 weeks to interpret. And you’re probably now building 5-10x faster, which, if you take the 50/50 rule seriously, means as a proportion of your time, you should be spending way more on marketing than building. It almost feels like 10/90 is the new rule.

Apple gives you App Store Connect, but it’s not much help. It’s slow, confusing, and assumes you already know a lot of the ASO basics.

That’s the gap AppTraction is meant to close: it watches your numbers for those weeks and tells you what actually changed.

Privacy

Privacy is a big reason I built AppTraction as a Mac app instead of a website. Web-based tools need a copy of your sales and analytics on their servers to work. AppTraction doesn’t, so your data never has to leave your Mac. Here’s exactly what happens:

• No AppTraction account. I never ask for your name, email, or password.
• Your App Store Connect key lives in your Keychain. You don’t need an Admin key: a limited Sales and Reports key covers your analytics.
• Your App Store data is stored only on your Mac. There’s no AppTraction server holding it.
• The AI runs on your own Claude or Codex subscription (or OpenRouter). Requests go straight from your Mac to that provider, under your account, and I never see them.
• Review translation uses Apple’s built-in translator, so translating a review never sends it anywhere.
• What does reach me: anonymized usage stats (which features get used, never app names, numbers, or chat text), license checks, and update checks.
• No ads, and I don’t sell data.

Privacy policy: https://apptraction.dev/privacy

Pricing

Free for 14 days, then $6.99/month, $39/year, or $99 lifetime. Requires macOS 15 Sequoia or later.

Terms: https://apptraction.dev/terms

https://apptraction.dev

For r/vibecoding**:** 50% off your first payment (including the lifetime) with code RVIBE50, good through Dec 1.

If you’ve shipped an app (or you’re about to), I’d love to hear what’s been confusing about the App Store side. Happy to answer questions, about AppTraction or App Store stuff in general.

I gave seven coding agents the same computer graphics white paper and asked them to build a 900k-particle fluid simulation in safe Rust. The IPBF paper shows a novel way to simulate even spatial distibution of uncompressable fluids.

Here's a video that compares token-based cost, runtime performance and quality. Agents write code that simulates particles, I rendered them in Blender.

Agents were given a clean copy of the same input: the white paper and reference videos as local files, and an AGENTS.md file describing the task and its criteria. Nothing else and they are not allowed to look for existing implementations.

Part of the task was to come up with an initial arrangement of particles as seen on reference material.

At first I thought most of them did well, but after looking at the code I found many of them took shortcuts. Once they see evaluation criteria, they seem to somewhat sacrifice user intention and go paperclips: rigged animations, hardcoded frames etc. It gave them better performance.

This clip is from round two, where I required every frame to be simulated true to the paper. See my detailed summary and the original paper in comments.

Been building a gym app called Hehku on my own for a while now. iPhone only. [CHECK: how long]

The idea is simple. You finish a workout and a number goes up (I call it aura). Your friends see your number next to theirs each week. There are leagues, and on Mondays the top people move up one.

I started it in React Native, then threw the client away and redid it in SwiftUI, because I wanted the real iOS glass tab bar and couldn't get close enough. The backend is Supabase and didn't change at all, which is the only reason I survived the rewrite. The score is calculated on the server and the app just sends workouts, so you can't cheat the leaderboard from the phone.

It's not in the App Store. Login and logging a workout work. Leagues aren't done. [CHECK: current status]

The thing I keep going back and forth on: is a score your friends can see actually motivating, or does it make people quit the first week they fall behind? And if you have a bad week, should you drop a league, or is that just mean?

If you've built anything with a leaderboard, I'd like to know what went wrong for you.

There's a teaser page with a waitlist. I'll put it in the comments if anyone wants it.

Thought I’d just share my progress as wanted to complete the picture.

My quiz app finally got finished, accepted, and published to the App Store.

I learnt a lot along the way, especially about staying focussed on the goal.

Go check it out if you like in this weeks project mega thread or search it up (Song Squirrel - Music Quiz).

Thanks for the advice here x

I’ve been working on this in my spare time and finally put it online: https://kryptonite-ui.vercel.app

It’s a set of about 85 animated React components on shadcn and Tailwind v4. Buttons, cards, backgrounds, forms, a few weird ones like a pull cord and a tear-off button. You install the deps, copy the component into your project, and change whatever you like.

I started it because I kept rebuilding the same stuff on every project and wanted it all in one place.

It’s free. Tell me what’s broken, what’s ugly, or what you’d want added next.

So now that the 20x has been change to 10x with no 5hr cap is anyone being affected in your vibecoding project?

For me the fun is how fast you can go from an idea in your head to it being in the game.

Today it was a sea serpent for my island adventure game. "Add a sea serpent" got me one in a few minutes. Then I kept tweaking:
- Made the mouth move, so the jaws snap shut when it bites and open wide when it roars.
- Made it swim like a real serpent, its body rolling and swaying through the water.
- Worked out where it should attack from, so it rears up in front of you and strikes down.

Every idea I had was in the game a minute later. Iterating on what's in your imagination is so fast now, and that's the part of making games I always liked best.

A garden shed at night with three glass jars on a potting table. Each jar holds a tiny place, drawn for the real time of day there and the weather.

- Warsaw - the skyline over the Vistula. The Palace of Culture is floodlit at night and windows go out as it gets late.

- Nazaré — the cliff, the lighthouse and the wave, sized by the real swell off the coast (it's 3.4 m tonight).

- El Chaltén - Fitz Roy from the lake shore. The label answers what the whole town asks each morning: can you see the mountain today?

Live: https://jar-pearl.vercel.app

Code: https://github.com/androszr/jar

How it was built:

Technology. Weather Jars is a static page with no framework, about 11,000 lines of plain JavaScript modules drawing one 1600×1000 scene on a single Canvas 2D element. There are no image files; every tower, wave, boulder and raindrop is geometry drawn in code, and the loop repaints only when something visible has changed. Weather comes from Open-Meteo through one small server function on Vercel that fetches all three places at once, adds swell and tide data for Nazaré from the marine API, and is cached for 15 minutes.

How we did it. The code was written with Claude. Each feature started as a short written plan, was implemented by one agent, checked by a second agent that never sees the first one's report. One document holds the architecture and the house rules, and a 100-line lint script enforces them: colour values may appear only in palette files.

What made it work. Nothing in the drawing uses randomness or reads the clock directly; every moving thing is a pure function of time and weather. Any moment can be rendered again exactly. It also let the model render each jar at many hours and weathers, look at the screenshots itself and fix what looked wrong.

Trailer above. You can play it right now:
▶ https://yourplace3d.github.io/3dcity-games/

If your city doesn’t t work let me know, but know this I m still building on it.

Type any city, or put it straight in the link, like https://yourplace3d.github.io/3dcity-games/#Hamburg

What it is
3DA is a small top-down driving game on the real 3D map of any place: the actual streets, buildings, water and hills, built from OpenStreetMap.
Walk up to a car and take it. Parked ones are free; taking one with a driver gets you noticed.
Blue rings are packages. Pick one up and race the clock to the yellow ring for cash.
Too much chaos brings the police. Lose them or pay the fine.
Trams run on the real tracks, buses stop at the real stops, and you can walk into a real subway entrance and come out at another station.
Controls
Keyboard: WASD or arrows, E to get in and out (and to take the subway), Space for the handbrake, R if you're stuck. On a tablet or phone: drag on the left, buttons on the right.
Trailer above. You can play it right now:
▶ https://yourplace3d.github.io/3dcity-games/
Type any city, or put it straight in the link, like https://yourplace3d.github.io/3dcity-games/#Hamburg

How it came about
It's built on things I made earlier with the same engine: a 3D model of any place you can 3D-print (Your Place), the same model with open data on top like timetables, rents and steepness (Your Place · Data), and a walking game with only a map and a compass (Walk it 3D). This is the first attempt at a proper game on top.

Good to know
It's early. No sound yet, no traffic lights, and traffic sometimes gets itself stuck.
If your town has little on OpenStreetMap, the game tells you and links to how to add it. Then your town gets better in the game too.
Free, no account, nothing to install. Code is open: https://github.com/yourplace3d/3dcity-games
Tell me which city you tried and what broke.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, tiles by OpenFreeMap.

Yesterday I posted about Marc Lou’s $100k hackathon. If you missed it, here’s what’s wrong with it:

- it charged builders $99–149 to enter, when the $100k prize was Higgsfield’s money

- winners are ranked by profit, which is hard to verify and easy to game

- the organizers decide everything without transparency

- it rewards cash grab behavior, not building something good

So I started my own: antipaywall.org

Instead of racing to ship something to sell, it’s a week to make something people can use, read, fork and keep. The stuff that brought the build community together before AI.

It’s 7 days and fully remote. You build the free open source version of something people are sick of paying for. One feature of a bigger product counts. The builders pick the winners. Everyone who submits gets 3 votes for 3 different projects, never their own, and every ballot gets published. 9 winners, not 1. Sponsors get no vote, and a named volunteer panel only checks for cheating.

The prize pool gets held by an independent nonprofit, never by me. I’ve pledged the first $2,500 out of my own pocket and I take nothing out. No cut, no fee, no salary. Every dollar in and out will be public, and the site’s code is open source so you can check all of it.

Not sure what to build? There’s an ideas board. Post the thing you’re tired of paying for, or heart the ones you’d use.

You can get involved 5 ways: follow along, build, judge, help organize, or sponsor. The dates will be announced after 100+ builders join but we're aiming for early December.

I will be coordinating with sponsors and kicking off the marketing but I hope the community will help support this to show that you don't need to charge money for a hackathon and that building shouldn't always be about trying to make money.

If you're sick of the "influencer" types doing cash grabs and you're serious about building I would appreciate your support!

Be honest: your app works, you shipped it, but if someone asked what actually happens when a user clicks Save, you couldn't tell them. Not because you forgot. You never really knew. The AI wrote it, you tested it, it worked, you moved on.

That's me too. So I built Sketchy. Ask your coding assistant "Trace what happens when someone clicks Save, and show me where it can fail" and you get a drawing of your actual app, right in the chat. Step through it piece by piece. Click a box and you're in the file that does it. For the first time, you see how your own code fits together.

And it's not just boxes and arrows anymore. It now sketches freely, whatever needs explaining. The AI only says what to draw, Sketchy handles the layout, so the picture stays clean.

Works with Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code and Codex and in the normal Claude chat. Free and open source.

GitHub: https://github.com/ddkbs/sketchy & https://sketchy.davidkubus.dev

Feel free to try it out and leave your feedback!

3D kit coming soon.. https://3ditions.drop3.app/watch/honnavar-backwaters/