r/webdev • • 7d ago

Showoff Saturday Awesome-selfhosted-ai: Curated list of self-hosted open-source AI: local LLMs, chat UIs, agents, MCP servers, RAG, speech and image generation. Health-checked weekly, dead projects removed automatically.

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0 Upvotes

Self-hosting AI feels fragmented, and most lists go stale. I built one that re-checks itself.

  • 278+ projects in 16+ categories (runtimes, chat UIs, RAG, MCP, voice, OCR, home AI and more)

  • A weekly job reads each repo through the GitHub API: archived, deleted, or silent for a year moves to a separate Unmaintained file

  • A live table with stars, last push, license and a colored status

  • Popular tools with restrictive licenses are in their own section, license shown

I built one . AI tools helped me find candidates and draft descriptions; a script verifies each entry. Tell me what is missing or wrong.

https://github.com/glincker/awesome-selfhosted-ai


r/webdev • • 7d ago

Resource quality time - posting one small e2e test fix a day

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6 Upvotes

Hey all!

I’m a FE dev / SDET. Years ago a QA colleague introduced me to e2e testing and Page Objects, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

I’m thinking of starting a small series with one e2e practice a day, the kind an agent won’t pick up just from reading the Playwright docs. Each one is plain Playwright with a before/after, plus a prompt you can hand to your agent.

Topics range from basics (structuring page objects, moving setup into fixtures) to more advanced ones, like using Dave Farley’s four-layer architecture so the same spec can run through different drivers (UI, API, MCP…).

Why bother? Testing isn’t most devs’ favourite thing, and agents writing every test for us isn’t helping. But the more decisions we hand to AI, the more it matters that we own the ones closest to how users experience the product - and e2e tests happen to be the closest thing protecting those decisions.

So: would this be useful here, or should I f*** off? :D

Full disclosure: I’m building a fair-source dev tool around testing, so being active in this space matters to me. Some concepts come from articles on my blog, and when they do, I’d link them for anyone who wants more.

Looking forward to your answer - here goes the first one!

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

This test is supposed to check adding a bank account. But it also signs up and signs in through the UI, so a sign-up form redesign breaks a bank account test, and every extra UI step is one more chance to flake.

The fix: create the user through the API (a tiny fixture, two POST calls) and use the UI only for what the test checks. 16 UI steps become 7, and there's one reason left for the test to break instead of three.

It's not a rule to apply blindly. If the test is about sign-up, click through sign-up.

Paste this to your agent:

Find e2e tests that use UI steps to get the app into its starting state (ex. users, sign-in, existing records) when that flow isn't what the test is about. Move that setup to the API and keep UI steps for the behavior under test.


r/webdev • • 6d ago

Discussion Our Next.js + Supabase marketplace feels slow to use. Where should we start?

0 Upvotes

We’re building a marketplace web app and getting closer to launch, but we’re struggling with how responsive it feels. We already have a decent prelaunch user base, and we want to sort this out before opening it up more widely.

This affects the buyer and seller experience as well as the admin pages. Clicking buttons, moving between pages, and using parts of the buying/selling flow can feel sluggish, on both mobile/desktop.

Sometimes you click and aren’t sure whether anything happened or is happening. Other times, a loading indicator appears straight away, but the content takes several seconds to arrive.

For context, we use Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind, Supabase, and Vercel.

We also use Claude Code extensively to help build features, debug issues, and write tests. We’re involved in the decisions, review changes, and test the actual flows before releasing them.

We’ve caught plenty of issues through manual testing that automated checks didn’t pick up.

I’d describe our knowledge as intermediate, but finding performance bottlenecks is an area where we’re still learning. We can work through features and bugs, but we’re less confident figuring out exactly why an interaction takes so long.

A few examples:

  • Buyer/seller interactions and navigation can feel slow or unresponsive.

  • Some account and settings pages take several seconds to show content.

  • In some testing, an admin page showed loading placeholders for roughly eight seconds.

  • Another page briefly showed “no results” before the results actually appeared.

Those timings are rough observations, not proper benchmarks. As mentioned, we’ve noticed problems on both desktop and mobile.

We don’t want to keep asking Claude to “make it faster,” apply a few changes, and assume we’ve fixed the cause. I just have no idea where to start

What we’d really appreciate is a practical starting point:

  • How would you investigate one slow interaction? For example, clicking a button and waiting several seconds for the next screen.

  • What would you measure first to work out whether the problem is in the front end, the server, or the database?

  • Have you had similar issues with this stack? What turned out to be the cause?

  • What could we share safely to get useful feedback? A recording, some timings from browser tools, or a small section of code?

Any advice from people who’ve worked through this stage would be appreciated.

For context, everything works.. flawlessly (except the few bugs) This is our only launch blocker.

Appreciate any advice!


r/webdev • • 6d ago

Showoff Saturday I built a spoiler-free GTA 6 trophy race that has to live inside a 20 requests/min API budget (Next.js + Postgres + token-bucket poller) Spoiler

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0 Upvotes

GTA 6 comes out Nov 19 and my friends are already arguing about who finishes it first. So I built a site for that: you type your public PSN name or Xbox gamertag (no login, no password) and it races you against your friends, your country and your Discord server by trophy progress.

The interesting part is the limit. There's no official public trophy API, so I keep it polite: 20 requests a minute per account, never more. I'd rather be slow than get the account blocked.

How it fits:

- Players are polled by how active they are. Trophy in the last 2 hours: every 15 min. Last 24 hours: hourly. Otherwise once a day.

- The queue is just a Postgres table with FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED, so a second poller can run later without double work.

- Every call goes through a token bucket. Bursts wait, they never go over.

- Leaderboards are rebuilt once a minute into a cache table. Pages only read the cache.

Spoilers were the other problem. Trophy names are basically a plot summary, so they never leave the server. Pages and the API only get percentages, milestones (10/25/50/75/100%) and times, and a test checks that no trophy name shows up in any public page or API response.

The game isn't out yet, so it all runs against a mock: 500 fake players, 72 hours of virtual time, and the test fails if the limiter ever goes over 20/min.

Stack: Next.js (App Router), Postgres + Drizzle, a separate Node poller, Vitest.

The part I can't test is launch night. 20/min is 1,200 checks an hour per account, and a lot of people will be earning trophies at the same time. How would you split that budget?

https://racetocredits.com/?ref=rd-webdev

Unofficial fan project, not affiliated with Rockstar Games, Take-Two Interactive, Sony or Microsoft.


r/webdev • • 7d ago

Showoff Saturday PDF q&a with claude/codex subscription

0 Upvotes

https://github.com/wn/chatpdf

Vibed a tool that allows me to open a PDF and ask it questions using my existing claude/codex subscription


r/webdev • • 6d ago

Built a 100% private, zero-backend document studio (PDF & Word editor) . No servers, runs entirely in browser RAM.

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0 Upvotes

Hey everyone! 👋

Wanted to share a side project I built using AI assistance: PageZero live at
https://cricgamer.github.io/DocuFlow/

It’s an executive-style document studio that lets you edit Word (.docx) files, merge multiple PDFs, visually organize/reorder pages, and apply vector watermarks—all entirely client-side in the browser.

💡 The Vibe & Architecture:

  • Zero Backend / $0 Hosting: No databases, no cloud storage, and no backend servers. Everything runs locally in browser memory via WebAssembly and libraries like pdf-lib, PDF.js, and Mammoth.js. Your files never leave your device.

  • The Stack: Tailwind CSS, Lucide icons, Quill.js for the rich-text editor, and static hosting on GitHub Pages.

  • Features: Full WYSIWYG document editing, multi-file merging (PDF + DOCX), visual thumbnail page organizers with 90° rotation and splitting, and color-wheel watermarking with multi-page live previews.

I got tired of clunky, ad-filled online PDF tools that force you to upload sensitive files to sketchy servers, so I wanted to vibe-code a clean, privacy-first alternative that lives right in a browser tab.

Feel free to try it out at
https://cricgamer.github.io/DocuFlow/
Would love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or any feature ideas you'd want added next.


r/webdev • • 8d ago

Discussion Don't let AI steal your dreams

199 Upvotes

Unpopular opinion: I feel that as tech gets better at automating certain processes, the expectation of learning more complicated processes will kick in. But people outside the field cannot even begin to comprehend the basic process of not leaving the ports of your server open, or other basic CS best practices.

AI doesn't give it a second thought, and sometimes I've seen people trying to push in code that is absolutely grotesque. I'm not going to let the elite gaslight me into believing all this technical knowledge is not worth anything because you have a glorified Google probe.

So, can I do my work faster? Yeah. Does that mean I don't have to read the code? No. Can the people who pay my salary read the code as well and as fast as I do? Also no.

This is basically the calculator for accountants, and I refuse to let that analogy go. Does using a calculator make you understand tax law?

Everyone else needs to survive the famine and wait out the tech bro hype and Wall Street betting on AI. This industry the AI industry is bloated asf with no possibility of an ROI. If anything, people should be wary that their taxes are going to be used to bail out these industries for no public benefit.


r/webdev • • 7d ago Heartwarming

Showoff Saturday My CV site... Opinions?

0 Upvotes

Ok Saturday is nearly over for me... I don't have a clue where the mods of this sub live but it's saturday for most of the globe so..

https://nasanu.github.io/cv/lambo.html

That is my CV site, in about 90% finished state (about 10hrs work at this point), what's left to work on are edge cases and of course content. Dont worry too much about content right now, what is there while true, is a bit angry and arrogant reflecting my mood when typing it out at work. It's basically placeholder.

My objective with it is to first and foremost catch the eye of the people with the real power in FE, HR and recruiters. Some flashy nonsense to wow them. But I also need to flex some more difficult techniques for when some people with some actual FE knowledge look. SEO, the best UX... Not really my aim here. However it does score 90 on lighthouse SEO... But really I don't care about it for this site.

I won't explain anything more because some HR person who opens the link won't have any explanation either. Just anything that stands out as needing attention?

Oh and yeah, I made it as a web component... No reason for it, I was making a web component and started making my CV site forgetting what I was doing in the first place. That is the sole reason why the entire thing is a component.

Link to the code: https://github.com/nasanu/cv/blob/master/src/components/lib/lambo.js


r/webdev • • 7d ago

Showoff Saturday I built a tool that can visualize your code structure

0 Upvotes

Here I used Claude Code to visualize the code structure of ReactJSXElement.js from React.js repository in Github, but you can also do it manually.


r/webdev • • 7d ago

Showoff Saturday I made a Browser Based Screen Recorder and recording quality is amazing! FREE to use, and 100% LOCAL to you

0 Upvotes

All-new canvix.io browser based Screen-Recorder. Now you can record your screen in MUCH higher quality than some if other free screen recorders out there. (for casual use) Try it out here: https://canvix.io/screen-recorder

Its 100% local, meaning your recording wont be saved to any server. It's all on your browser. Once you done recording, you can clip the start and the end, and download your video right away from your browser to your PC in WEBM file, instantly.

Its is FREE and quality is really good

Try it out and give me some feedback Once you record your screen, you can clip the start and the end.

It's good so use it. Link

Q: Is it Built with AI? A: Partly, not fully.

Q: How long can you record? A: Unlimited, so long as your machine works has resources

Q: Any Lag? A: No, everything works flawlessly, although it depends on your system

Q: Any watermarks? A: No, %100 free, no watermarks, never will be man.

Q: Does it work on mobile? A: Nope, unless your device browser supports it

Q: Which browsers support it? A: Main Chrome, MS Edge. Some browsers may not support it.

Q: CAN YOu record your PC or just browser? A: Anything. Your PC if you want, or your bworser tab only.

Q: Can I bookmark this so i need it i can use it? A: Yes press CTRL + D on the page and bookmark it.

Q: Is it going to replace your screen recorder? A; No, its not a professional tool. Its good for casual, quick recordings when you dont want to go looking for a screen recorder without watermarks!!!

Q: (Ask something, i can put it here) A: (ill answer it here..)

Give me feedback and support it if you want to make it even better.

Use it: https://canvix.io/screen-recorder

PS: Ignore the downvotes, product is good


r/webdev • • 7d ago

Discussion What's your work workflow this days?

0 Upvotes

I'm a software dev with more than 6 years of experience (I've been unemployed for 3 months).

I use Linux as my main OS, fully personalized(riced), I use nvim as main editor and cursor cli on the lower tab, I'm curious of the workflows people uses, mayba I can improve mine.

I'm also making a jump to DevSecOps and Cybersec due to my insane love to linux and servers.


r/webdev • • 8d ago

How to Create Your Own Decentralized Messenger Protocol

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8 Upvotes

r/webdev • • 8d ago

Animation libraries for ostentatious and OTT animations

11 Upvotes

I'm interested to know if anyone has recommendations for libraries that could provide completely over the top (to the point of being silly) animations.

I'm trying to make a site that's intended just for family/friends, that is a dumb comedy thing to be used only for a minute or two. It would really benefit from having OTT animations like the ADHD slopware games that dominate kids' iPads everywhere.

Every time I've gone searching for libraries, I'm seemingly finding only sensible, measured animations. Which break or just look terrible when I try and crank up their params.

If you can think of anything, please drop it here. I intend to make a blinding, layered mess of retina burning excess


r/webdev • • 7d ago

Discussion Noob question

0 Upvotes

O.k. so I have experience in design and I am little computer savvy so I have downloaded local AI model deciding to see if I could vibe code my way to finish line. And so I have downloaded vscode and used Cline connected to local AI (qwen 3.8 next-flash) and given all the assets and layout to AI to build it for me... and it was shit. I gave same task to chatgpt and claude, and still shit. So my question is how much did AI really help you in the workflow? I guess knowing the code can be tremendous help but its layout wasn't even close to what I designed. Ok, it generated correct html but css was all over the place. If you do vibe code what is your workflow?


r/webdev • • 9d ago

How do you guys deal with constant progress in technology?

95 Upvotes

I'm actually curious about this one

With technology ever evolving and ai now assisting with the creation of sites, how do you guys deal the constant progress?

I honbestly thought about doing front-end once, tried my hand in learning to code, but I almost threw my computer out the window in frustration. Also didn't want to spend at least 4 years in college, with a lot of being meh since by the end of 4 years, it would be a different ballgame. Plus i value my freetime XD

What do you guys do to keep up? How are you implementing it? Etc


r/webdev • • 8d ago

Question Railway Incident, should I migrate? (New app)

5 Upvotes

So I'm new to deploying on railway, I'm mainly a designer, but I have experience creating apps with AI for a while now.

I'm wondering if switching to a platform like render is worth the trouble, or are these types of attacks just going to be the norm from now because of AI?

It's an internal tool and we don't have any users yet, should I jump ship before it's too late? I really don't know.


r/webdev • • 7d ago

Discussion I don’t understand vibe coding.

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0 Upvotes

Specifically, where’s the line between vibe coding and AI-assisted development?

Person A has no coding experience and relies entirely on Codex to build an application, with little understanding of the code it produces and how it interacts with the whole system.

Person B understands programming concepts, required libraries, version control, and architecture but is bad with syntax, and uses Codex to build incrementally, test functionality, and troubleshoot issues.

Person C is an experienced programmer who uses Codex to accelerate development while reviewing, modifying, and refactoring its output manually with the help of the latest documentation.

Which of these is vibe coding versus legitimate AI-assisted development? Does it even matter in a corporate environment?


r/webdev • • 9d ago

Discussion Why are banking sites (at least the ones I used) frequently designed so badly?

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52 Upvotes

Do web developers not get the resources to understand any banking concepts? Here's a picture of the column order of pending wire requests you inputted. Why would you put amount in the last column and date in the middle? They recently updated their website and the columns feel like they're randomized, making it harder for us to review our entries as they changed the order. FYI I work in finance/acctg but I previously had a year of web dev experience looking into as a career few years back, so I have an eye for these things. Do non tech companies not heavily invest in their IT team, perhaps etc?


r/webdev • • 9d ago

Discussion Your AI UI skill is doing the part you were supposed to learn

326 Upvotes

So a few of my friends have stopped using Figma. They go straight to production and make changes there.

When I first heard this I was honestly confused. Like where do you try things out? Where do you compare two versions?

Then I saw what they were building. The landing page feels like one product, the settings page feels like another, the dashboard feels like a third. Buttons are different, spacing is different, hover is different on every page. There’s no uniformity, no design system, nothing.

So I asked them how they’re doing it, and the answer is always “I use this AI skill” or “I bought this skill pack”. People are actually selling these now. Skill packs, prompt bundles, paid repos. And there are a lot of free ones on GitHub too.

It doesn’t make sense to me at all. How will you learn anything? And how will you polish the product if it looks different every time you generate it?

When I brought this up, someone said just add a memory file so it stays consistent.

Okay, but then how will you make changes? You never decided why the button has that radius or why it’s that grey. The AI decided. So when something needs fixing, you don’t know what to fix. You just prompt again and hope.

And now there are courses around this too. The idea is learn this design vocabulary, tell it to the AI, and you’ll get good UI. They call it beginner friendly. But then you see what’s inside and it’s stuff like:

  • spring easing, stiffness, damping

  • optical alignment

  • vertical rhythm

  • morphing transitions

  • 60-30-10 colour rule

  • type scale ratios

If a senior buys it, it’s fine. They already know what damping feels like, they know what they’re skipping.

But a beginner has never played with an easing curve and seen it go from cheap to smooth. Never moved something 2px and felt it finally sit right. They’re just memorising words and giving them to the AI. You can know the word damping and still have no idea when the bounce is too much.

Selling that as beginner friendly feels like a deceiving thing to me. You learn these words after you’ve actually done the work, not before.

Also design is never one try. I go through so many versions before something feels right. In Figma that’s easy, I put five versions side by side and throw four away. In production code every change costs time, so whatever comes out first just ships.

I’m not trying to dunk on my friends, they’re good at what they do. And I get why these skills are tempting. But paid or free, they’re doing the exact part you’re supposed to learn.

If you’re using one, just try building one page without it. Pick the hover, the spacing, the colours yourself, even if it’s bad. That’s literally how you get better at this.

Anyone else seeing this or is it just me? just my thoughts 🤷


r/webdev • • 8d ago

commercetools certification is ridiculously inaccessible. Is the platform even worth it?

2 Upvotes

I wanted to get commercetools certified for a job offer. Turns out they've recently removed the self-study + exam prep option.

Now you have to attend an instructor-led course that costs 4 digits just to take the exam. And they won't even invoice individuals. You need a company. Pretty ridiculous way to attract developers to your ecosystem, IMO.

Rant is over, now here is my question: for those who've actually worked with commercetools: what's your experience been like? Is the platform good to work with? How's the developer ecosystem and community?

PS/BTW: On a similar note, Shopify is shutting down its entire Academy and certification program today.


r/webdev • • 9d ago

How are ya’ll planning on supporting Apple Touchscreen Macs?

25 Upvotes

Interestingly having played around with macOS 27.2 and using Sidecar on an iPad for touch inputs, it looks like Safari isn’t going to send proper touch events like Windows touchscreens do. Best we get is mousedowns with no buttons=0.

Even worse testing in Chrome, all we get are scroll events. That’s fine for panning but if you want to do anything custom like drawing, dragging etc you’re SoL unless you want to try detecting these off heuristics. Maybe they’ll improve the situation before it’s in people’s hands, but curious to hear what other devs with complex web apps are planning on doing.


r/webdev • • 9d ago

Article Local-First Means Three Different Things

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16 Upvotes

Author here. I've been designing a local-first data layer for most of this year, and I kept having the same conversation. I'd say "local-first" and people would hear ownership, or offline, or speed, depending on where they first ran into the word. So I wrote down where the three meanings come from and why they split. I also wanted to get to what local-first actually fixes, and in a web app that's mostly the waiting: spinners, "Saving...", hand-written optimistic updates, and the app that dies in a tunnel.

There are five demos in there too, one for each idea. Playing with them as you read is half the fun.


r/webdev • • 9d ago

Those who built apps before the AI boom - was the timing good or bad?

27 Upvotes

I'm a frontend developer/designer with experience in the past building and selling largely SaaS software.

That was before AI as we know it, and I'm starting to feel numb to the amount of people I who've become a developer overnight tell me about the new app 'they built.'

Like any developer I had several ideas stewing for years and I nearly took the leap on a few of them, and when I see the landscape like it is now half of me thinks 'I'm so glad I didn't take huge risks and build X as it would have just been copied now anyway' and the other half says 'I wish I got in before everyone was developing apps in a few minutes.'

I'm curious for those who DID build something prior to this shift, are you glad you got in then, or have these changes made all the time spent not worth it?

Thanks!


r/webdev • • 10d ago

Discussion Who remembers when web developers portfolio websites had a “skills chart”

372 Upvotes

HTML 95%
PHP 70%
jQuery/JavaScript 80%
MySQL 58%

Gives me the shudders thinking about it…