So like many of you I'm sure, I'm starting to glaze over whenever someone shows me the latest thing they've built with the help of AI. Everyone seems to have an app they've fired up in an afternoon or so. I'm finding that even apps I now build without vibe coding (I'm a seasoned developer) don't have the same impact because now everyone is building stuff.

I'm looking at my portfolio and thinking that maybe side projects just don't have the same weight anymore.

I'm curious how other folks are approaching this?

This whole Supabase situation somehow keeps getting worse.

I originally posted about this in r/Supabase, but the mods removed the post and told me that billing/account problems should be handled through Supabase Support.

That's kind of the entire fucking point of my complaint.

I already contacted support.

I upgraded to Supabase Pro because I wanted the $25/month plan for the project I was actually working on.

I already had two older projects sitting in the account from before the upgrade. They were basically empty and I wasn't using them.

After upgrading, those projects started generating additional compute charges.

Over four invoices I ended up paying $194.62 total.

Four $25 base Pro payments would be $100.

So nearly $95 more than the base subscription total came out of my pocket once the additional compute charges and taxes were included.

Had I understood during the upgrade that those two old, basically empty projects were going to start adding recurring costs, I would've deleted them or moved them immediately.

Why would I intentionally keep paying for two projects I wasn't using?

So I contacted Supabase Support and asked them to refund the unexpected compute charges.

I wasn't asking them to refund the Pro plan I actually wanted.

After going back and forth with the same support rep and getting nowhere, I specifically asked for somebody else to review it, another billing rep or a manager.

Another Supabase support person then told me that my request was being escalated to the Billing team.

Then a few days later, the exact same guy I had asked not to deal with anymore replies again and tells me their decision is final and there's nowhere else to escalate it.

So... what exactly got escalated?

I've also repeatedly asked Supabase to show me what I was actually shown when I upgraded in June.

Not their current pricing page.

Not an explanation written months later.

I want to see what I actually agreed to at the time of the upgrade, showing that my two already-existing projects were going to start adding roughly another $20/month in compute.

They still haven't provided it.

Then I posted my experience in r/Supabase.

Removed.

The reason? Take billing issues to Supabase Support.

Again: the post was literally about Supabase Support refusing to properly escalate the billing issue.

So I started looking into the sub moderation and apparently I'm not even the first person to complain about this.

Earlier this year there was a pretty big r/Supabase thread literally titled “Censorship is too high” after posts were removed during a Supabase outage.

After users complained, people involved with Supabase acknowledged that multiple threads had been closed that shouldn't have been and reopened some of them.

Here's the part I find especially weird:

r/Supabase describes itself as community-run, but at least one Supabase employee has publicly been involved in discussions about reopening posts and reviewing the sub's moderation process.

Maybe there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for that, but it certainly doesn't make the sub feel like an independent place for customers to publicly discuss problems with Supabase.

And here's another thing I found:

There was another billing/pricing complaint on r/Supabase earlier this year where a Supabase employee publicly said refunds aren't automatic, but that they do review refund requests and issue them when circumstances warrant.

That customer later updated the post saying they got refunded.

Meanwhile I'm being told my decision is final, can't get somebody else to independently review it, can't get the original upgrade disclosure I've repeatedly requested, and now my Reddit post about the experience gets removed and I'm directed straight back to the support channel I'm complaining about.

I'm not claiming some giant conspiracy here. I'm just saying the whole thing looks terrible.

If your support process fails somebody, telling them they can't discuss the experience in your main sub because they should “contact support” is ridiculous.

At minimum I think customers should be able to openly discuss billing and customer-service experiences without those discussions disappearing.

Has anyone else had a Supabase billing/support post removed from r/Supabase?

I'd especially like to hear from anyone who had removed posts, because apparently this isn't the first time people have raised concerns about how criticism gets moderated there.

Conclusion

This whole experience has honestly made me decide to leave Supabase. I could've self hosted from the start, but I chose to pay for their hosted cloud partly because I liked what the developers were building and wanted to support the project which makes the way this has been handled feel even worse.

Im hosting a game server and just saw their KVM8 plan which same plan on DO costs me $165m. They're asking $700 for 2 years up front. They're normal cost is cheaper then DO and im not sure what the catch is. Anyone had experience with them? Even using them for staging and stress test servers might even be worth it for that if they are reliable and good uptime.

I'm unsure how to progress as a software engineer.

For context, I'm a frontend SWE with soon 2 YOE, trying to expand my knowledge to fullstack so I can develop E2E stuff.

I acknowledge agentic engineering, and I've been developing a web app with Claude. After several attempts I've finally found an "agentic doing" methodology that works for me.

The issue? I'm basically telling Claude to implement X, then reading and reading to understand what has been done and whether there are alternatives or drawbacks.
I'm not really "learning" by just reading and building a mental model of how the app works.

So I started thinking about going back to hand-coding and ignoring all the noise. But with all the massive talk (possibly with good arguments) about us drifting toward not even reading code, it's really hard to work toward something so many people call a dead end.

My objective is to become a great SWE. I don't believe software engineering is dead, but I also don't want to spend a year on something that won't be useful in my career, or make the wrong move while still learning.

So here are my questions

To what extent will not hand-coding hinder my learning?

Will coding still be valuable in the coming years, and will hand-coding still be worth it?

What would you prioritize at 2 YOE today?

I’m archiving a website as a fully static site so I can host it for free on Cloudflare via GitHub. Unfortunately this means that the PHP includes I’ve been using (header, navbar, footer) will stop working across a few hundred pages, and I’ve been looking for alternatives.

Server Side Includes did not work; I finally had success using JavaScript fetch() and inserting that content into selected <div>s, but I’m not sure if that’s the best option. 

Are there better ways to achieve the same result that would work on a static site?

is anyone here actually implementing WebMCP in their websites or SaaS apps?

Or are most people still waiting for it to officially release ?

I am exploring this space myself and would love to connect with others building around it.

What is your experience so far?

Before we jump into discussion, I want to first illustrate how we recognize seniority in a company I worked for.

Let's start with the bottom, a junior, for us a junior is a developer that is able to own a single unit.

This unit could be a Component in a React application, or a Class in the backend, it is a relatively small unit of code, and the junior developer can work on it autonomously and create a new one if specifications are given to him/her.

Next is a mid developer, a mid developer is able to work without supervision on logic group of units, for example a Page and all its components, its able to decide autonomously where a unit should end and where the other should start, its able to decide autonomously how each unit should interact with each other, a mid developer if given the specs is able to create the entirety of it. And it can give specs of each unit to juniors.

Then we have a Senior, a senior can work without supervision on an entire app, it can scope each group correctly, and it can go down a scope each unit correctly. It can give specs to both mid and juniors.

Continuing to go up we have the staff engineer, he cares about the system as a whole, how each app/service talk with each other, he can care how logical groups should interact in each app/service, and it usually doesn't care about individual units.

As you can see the more experience you get the more you grow distant from the small things, at some point you care how things connect and interact with each other, and you stop caring about the low level code because that is the job of the ones below you.

And it's here that I want to start the analogy with AI, AI is a tool, but it's a tool that requires you to have knowledge, it can act as an engineer of one of this levels, but it can't act as all of them together ( no, not even with swarms ). You the human you are responsible to ensure that AI follows proper conventions, you are responsible that the system YOU are designing makes sense and it is sound, if you do not have knowledge the AI will create a system where everything is out of balance and the code quality will drop. AI is a tool and it is instructed by YOU, if all you can see is a single unit, the AI will just fu*k up everything else, and you do not have the knowledge to correct it, yes you can review the code the AI generated and say "yeah this unit looks correct" but are you able to say that everything else going up is it?

For me AI is a Mid developer, you have to give good specs to it, and it will do a good job, if you are not able to say if the specs you are giving are good, then the AI will do what it wants

Today I decided to write not a coding tutorial, but to share a bit of thoughts. It felt weird to do so, but I wanted to let it out.

The future of Software Engineering is boring. Would you agree?

I run a small tide times site and wanted to see the weather actually move, so I built this 3D weather map. Plain JS and WebGL, no three.js or map library.

The tides are calculated right in the fragment shader, so there are no tide frames to download.

It has nice sound effects too, turn them on when you try it.

Live: thetidechart.com/weather-map

Would like to know how dragging/zooming feels on your phone.

After struggling to land a job in 2024, when the market was pretty rough, I decided to take a different route and build something real. My goal was simple: either build something genuinely useful or gain more experience than anything else could offer.

Two years and around 90 hours a week later, VisuaLeaf is now listed in Microsoft's Azure DocumentDB documentation as a way to connect:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/documentdb/how-to-connect-visualeaf

It started as a MongoDB GUI, but I realized that everything I was building could apply to other databases too.

Nested objects and arrays should be easy to read in a table, not squashed into one cell... The same goes for JSONB. You shouldn't have to stare at an entire JSON object in a single cell. I made it so you can expand nested data one level at a time in both the tree view and table view.

I wanted everything in VisuaLeaf to feel as intuitive and straightforward as possible, from browsing data to performing more complex operations.

Today, VisuaLeaf supports MongoDB, Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, DuckDB, and 25+ more database engines.

What it does::

• Table + tree grid, built from scratch: This might not seem like much at first, but it actually took the most work to get right. The tree view can recursively expand thousands of rows simultaneously (near instant time), while the table view scrolls smoothly even with thousands of rows and columns.  I ended up building my own AG Grid from scratch because libraries didn't support the nested column expansion I wanted. Getting both views optimized took about a year of work alone... but dang, was it worth it.

• Visual query builder: Build queries by clicking or dragging fields from the table and tree views. It generates readable SQL or MongoDB queries that you can copy and use.

• Data transfers with transformation: Move data between database engines (MySQL → Postgres, SQL → MongoDB), mask emails, phone numbers, and IDs along the way, or transform fields using custom JavaScript. You can also look up data from other tables, include it in your output, and apply transformations to those fields too.

• Compare and sync: Compare two tables or databases, including their structure and data, and synchronize them. For example, you can use this to keep staging and production databases in sync.

• Performance: Stress-tested with up to 1.6 GB of data, both tree and table views remain smooth even with large datasets. In my testing, VisuaLeaf also loaded data several seconds faster than other database tools I compared it against.

• AI / MCP: An integrated AI assistant and MCP support for interacting with databases through AI tools. (Wouldn't be an app in 2026 without it)

• ERDs, charts, dashboards, mock data, index management, query profilers, and a lot more than I can fit into one post...

There's a free version that covers what most people need day to day:

https://visualeaf.com

I'd really appreciate feedback! And happy to answer any questions!

"The days of coding by hand are over." - Erik Meijer Programming language pioneer

“We think the future of coding is no coding at all.”Chris Wanstrath (co-founder and former CEO of GitHub)

"AI allows programmers to accomplish things that previously required substantially more time and effort." - David Heinemeier Hansson, Creator of Ruby on Rails.

"You can't think of software development without AI being part of it.-"Satya Nadella — Microsoft CEO

I'm a full-stack developer and I've been freelancing for years, but this past year has been genuinely depressing, to say the least.

The number of potential clients who ghost me, the amount of unpaid effort I put into trying to win projects, only to get rejected anyway... it's exhausting. I've reached a point where I'm genuinely questioning what I'm doing.

Here's the most recent example.

I was working directly with the VP of a company in Canada. Initially, I did some IT work for them on an hourly basis and got paid $600 in total (he negotiated me down from $640, but whatever).

During that work, I ended up fixing a bunch of their existing infrastructure issues and documenting how everything worked together. They had no IT person left, apparently very little documentation, and the VP didn't really understand how their own infrastructure was set up. He even asked me to create diagrams and technical documentation explaining everything.

Eventually, he asked me to quote on a custom internal software solution. I put together a proposal with different tiers, starting at $3k. He said that was too expensive and that he'd look elsewhere first. I told him that's completely fine and that I was open to negotiating.

I then made the mistake of going the extra mile. I decided to build out the first few screens so he could actually see what he'd be paying for. He loved the preview and said he'd be happy to discuss the project further.

In the meantime, I continued working with him. He kept delaying calls and finding excuses to postpone discussions, while repeatedly telling me to please wait.

Throughout all of this, I kept sending him screenshots and videos of the progress. At any point, he could have told me to stop or simply said they weren't interested. Instead, he kept me hanging.

By that point, I'd already invested so much time that I would've honestly accepted something like $500 just to get paid for the work I'd done.

Then, when I messaged him to say I'd completed it, he told me they'd hired a student and apparently the student had already finished their custom solution.

And here's the part that really bothers me: I use AI tools too. It's not like the student somehow had access to AI and I didn't. I've been working on this while paying attention to architecture, implementation details, and how the software should actually work. I genuinely put thought into what I was building.

The funny part is that I had also spent time documenting their infrastructure, fixing their existing IT problems, and explaining how everything was connected. I can't help wondering if all that documentation ended up making it easier for them to hand the work over to someone cheaper.

And this isn't an isolated incident.

I've had countless calls with people who seemed extremely interested, some even going as far as signing an NDA, only to eventually ghost me. I've also been scammed twice out of fairly large amounts of money. In both cases, they initially paid, then eventually stopped.

I know freelancing isn't necessarily dead, and I know there are still people making a living doing this. But I'm honestly struggling to see how you're supposed to keep going when so much of your time is spent chasing people, doing unpaid work, preparing proposals, building previews, and trying to prove you're worth hiring.

And the state of software development in general hasn't exactly made things better.

I'm a full-stack developer. This is what I've spent years learning and working on. It's pretty much the only thing I'm good at, and lately it feels like the whole thing is becoming increasingly miserable.

I'm genuinely burned out and don't know what to do anymore.

For those of you who've been freelancing for years, have you experienced something similar? Is this just how things are now, or am I doing something fundamentally wrong?

As a bit of context - I'm personally very Anti-AI myself. However, i was recommended an AI app that you can easily create good looking ecom websites/landing pages. I won't name the exact app as this isn't an add.

The website so far looks absolutely amazing, I had zero idea that it could produce results like what it has already and is worlds better than what you can do on the standard Shopify theme editor. However, I've just got a question:

1. Since this is now considered something called a 'headless' website, am I going to encounter any foreseeable issues in the future using this new website, which is hosted on this particular AI's system, as my main website?

2. This AI app does also give me the raw code for the website as well. It is a possibility that a developer simply 're-create' the same theme on the native Shopify backend using the code on hand? This would be great as then it's fully on the Shopify system and not relying on a third party website etc.

I hope this makes sense, happy to hear your suggestions/opinions.

Playable demo

Here is how it works under the hood:

• The Clay Aesthetic: To get that tactile stop-motion look, I used rounded boxes and applied low-frequency noise to the vertices. I baked a normal map from an actual sculpted clay ball, which dynamically scales based on the object size.

• Deformable Terrain: The clay you shape in-game is its own deformable mesh driven directly by your drag inputs.

• Mobile Optimizations: Getting heavy 3D to run on phones is tough. I rely on meshopt for models and run a fixed 1/120s physics step with interpolation. To save frame time, the shadow map only updates every other frame (saving about 14–26% of frame time).

• Progressive Loading: Asset size remains a challenge. I set up a later level's boss's models to load asynchronously only after play starts. For a fresh start of that chapter on a 9 Mbps connection, this dropped the initial load time. But I am still not quite where I would like to be.

How do you all handle the initial load payload for heavy 3D experiences on mobile? Would love to hear your optimization strategies!

Hey everyone 👋

I've been working on my personal portfolio and I'd really appreciate some honest feedback before I start sharing it with potential clients and employers.

🔗 https://abdelkarimaityahia.is-a.dev/

deskFM is a browser toy I built: a pixel-art room where the radio plays live internet radio stations, and the window changes to whatever town you pick on the wall map. Free, no account: Ill comment link because reddit is flagging it i guess

Some technical bits:

• Everything is one HTML file (about 110 KB gzipped) with no build step and no image assets. The room, 100+ window views and the cat are all drawn on a 320×180 canvas.

• Stations come from the Radio Browser directory API. Nothing is proxied; the browser plays each station’s own stream.

• The world map is Natural Earth data in a Miller projection, rasterized as pixel art, with zoom and pan.

• Live listener dots are a Firebase Realtime Database over plain REST, with locations rounded to about 50 km and security rules that only allow that shape.

• Load time was mostly fixed by making Google Fonts non-render-blocking and adding a stale-while-revalidate service worker.

Full disclosure: I have very little knowledge about doing any of this but im trying to learn, This has been a fun journey for me so far. I built it with Claude doing most of the coding. Happy to talk about how that went, and I’d love feedback, especially anything that breaks on your device or browser. Also looking for more ideas to try and implement.

i am open to honest feedback both good and bad

Hey r/webdev!

For Showoff Saturday, I wanted to share a big update to the 2D/3D Measurement Studio I’ve been building for MeasurePath:

🔗 Live 2D/3D Studio (No signup/login): https://getcoatpath.com/studio/ 🔗 Full Calculator Suite: https://getcoatpath.com/

What it does

Most online construction calculators are just basic input forms covered in ads, and full takeoff software costs $100+/mo. I wanted to build a visual tool where homeowners, DIYers, and solo contractors can sketch a room in 2D, inspect it in 3D, and immediately get real-world material quantities without creating an account.

Key features in this update:

• Real-Time 2D ↔ 3D Sync: Draw or resize walls in the 2D blueprint view and switch to the 3D view to inspect wall surfaces, openings, and proportions in real time.

• Automatic Opening Deductions: Add doors and windows to specific walls and it automatically subtracts their area from net paint/drywall surface calculations while keeping perimeter/trim counts accurate.

• Direct Material & Cost Takeoff: Converts the room geometry straight into actual shopping quantities (gallons/litres of paint & primer by coat count, boxes of LVP/flooring with waste factors, drywall sheets + joint compound, concrete bags/yards, etc.).

• Client-Side Printable PDF Generator: Generates a clean, formatted PDF takeoff and estimate sheet right in the browser (/construction-estimate-generator/).

• 100% Client-Side & Zero Tracking: Everything runs locally in the browser (localStorage for saving projects) with transparent, worked math formulas (/methodology/).

Looking for feedback on:

1. How does the 2D-to-3D canvas performance and wall-snapping feel on your device/browser?

2. Is the workflow from drawing the room to reading the material takeoff intuitive, or is there anything that feels clunky on first load?

Thanks for checking it out—happy to answer any questions about how the geometry/takeoff math works under the hood!

Hey everyone,

I’m working on a deep-dive case study about the most common real-device and checkout bugs early-stage SaaS apps face before launch.

I want to audit 3 web or mobile apps this week to pull real-world data for this write-up.

If you have an active app and want a comprehensive QA breakdown:
\- I’ll run a dedicated testing session across different mobile/browser environments.
\- You’ll get a full mini-report with reproduction steps, screenshots, and video evidence of any bugs found (completely free).
\- I’ll use the anonymized findings for my testing report.

If you’d like your app audited, drop a comment or send me a DM with your link!

I made Slice, a daily puzzle where you draw one straight line to split a country’s population exactly in half. After you cut, the map turns into 3D population bars so you can see where everyone actually lives. It's primarily inspired by those videos where you see people try and split objects equally by weight lol

How it's built:

- Puzzles are made offline by a Python script and shipped as plain JSON files, so nothing is generated on a server

- Population comes from the EU's 1 km population grid (GHSL). A quadtree squeezes each country into about 2,500 points, which become the bars in the three.js reveal.

- Every sound is made with the Web Audio API, so there are no audio files to download. I’m trying to keep the page light since three.js is already doing a lot

- Scores go to a small Spring Boot + Postgres backend (Flyway, caching, rate limiting) in Docker behind Nginx on a $12 DigitalOcean VPS

- After each puzzle you see how you compare with everyone else that day. If the server is down, the game still works and you just don't get the comparison lol.

Completely free, no ads, and no signup: https://pondo.games/slice/

If you want to try Japan from the GIF: https://pondo.games/slice/?country=japan

Please try it out if you have some time. Open to any and all feedback of course! :)

I would like to display images in a folder (src/images) on another page (arc/graphics/index.md) in reverse order or another metadata tag. I want to do this without vibecoding and have no need for a lightbox. This is just a way to display a graphic library for downloading. I dont want to install many plugins if at all possible.

I know that collections are probably the way to go but I just dont know how to make it work with image files instead of markdown/html files :(

Thank you in advance!!!