I’ve been vibe-coding replacements for the tools I actually use every day. So far: a Notepad, a REST client, a snipping tool, a local gallery and lightweight notes for iPhone.
The motivation isn't novelty. It's control. I don't need ads, onboarding flows and popups, AI sidebars, bloated menus, unnecessary network calls , etc. A notepad should never touch the network. A REST client shouldn’t ship analytics or auto update itself mid-request.
No plugin system. No extensibility story. Just plain/simple software.
As I build these, I have been realizing how much cognitive overhead we’ve normalized in exchange for very little utility.
big fan of this and have been doing similar. i just got to a good state with my Linear clone app. im planning to do a REST client soon, how'd that go for you?
Nice, Linear is a perfect target for this mindset.
The REST client went surprisingly smoothly once I committed to keeping it boring.
I'm building Mac apps in Xcode, and I keep multiple small apps in a single Xcode project with a few shared libraries (basic UI components, buttons, layout helpers, etc. to keep all my apps similar).
The REST client is literally just another target + essentially one extra file on top of that. No workspaces, no collections, no sync, no plugins. Just method, URL, headers, body, hit send, show response. Requests are saved and loaded as plain local JSON.
What surprised me is how little code is actually required once you strip away "product features".
An experimental DSL for writing web applications. It's pipeline oriented, polyglot and loosely inspired by Bash pipelines. Rust runtime, fully-featured TypeScript language server (jump to def, hover, etc), full DAP debugging and a BDD-style testing framework built into the language.
GET /hello/:world
|> jq: `{ world: .params.world }`
|> handlebars: `<p>hello, {{world}}</p>`
describe "hello, world"
it "calls the route"
let world = "world"
when calling GET /hello/{{world}}
then status is 200
and selector `p` text equals "hello, {{world}}"
What sets DeepFabric apart from other dataset generation tools is its ability to ensure high diversity yet domain-anchored relevance through unique topic graph generation algorithms. This guides sample creation to cover all necessary subtopics while avoiding redundancy, which is where other tools often fall short, resulting in model overfit.
Constrained decoding and response validation, along with real tool executions within isolated webassembly environments, ensure that generated samples strictly adhere to structured schema, variable constraints, and execution correctness, ensuring datasets have exact syntax and structure for use in model training pipelines. Tool definitions can be directly imported from MCP server schemas and then mocked, or rans as real life tool functions. Using real tools means the model has to adapt and correct when it makes the wrong choice or hallucinationates which makes for much better training data.
Once your dataset is generated, it can be automatically uploaded to Hugging Face and directly imported into popular training frameworks like TRL, Unsloth, and Axolotl.
Post-training, DeepFabric's built-in evaluation engine assesses model performance, whereby models prove their capabilities on unseen tasks derived from training splits—covering evaluation-only questions, answers, and tool traces.
A prototype of an auto-following autocue/teleprompter.
Uses local-AI-only. It’s a web app but not using in-browser transcribe. Ive found it to be way better for recording YouTube videos direct to-camera than the existing free apps which just scroll at a fixed speed.
Python server does the recording, transcription using Vosk (or choice of other models), and an algorithm for tracking position in the script. Serves a single page that uses a web socket to connect to the backend to render the script and updates like current position.
I'm building a training platform for cyber security and secure development practices. Mainly to address the junior to mid engineer gaps of "depth" across general cyber security and software engineering skills. I've encountered quite a few folk who have surface level knowledge but when having to problem solve production ready problems are blocked quite quickly, it's depth of knowledge which is missing. If anyone is interested reach out in a preview / providing some thoughts, reach out - my emails in my profile!
Thanks! I actually wrote my master thesis surrounding cyber resilience, and the same week of submission they released their Cyber Action Toolkit (a precursor to Cyber Essentials). I was able to provide them some feedback which has since been incorporated so believe I am closely aligned to their recommendations!
I've been learning the basics of using Z3 by creating a solver for the daily puzzle game Clues By Sam (very fun game; https://cluesbysam.com/). Repo is https://github.com/DylanSp/clues-by-sam-solver. It uses Playwright to read clues and submit guesses; I've got it working for all 50 puzzles in puzzle pack 1.
Congrats on getting it to that point! Exciting to see how others approach this, as there's also a solver as part of the puzzle setting process ensuring all valid deductions are allowed.
Last month I worked on some new features (like unlocking units) and some fixes to my browser autobattler https://lfarroco.itch.io/mana-battle .
I've been working on adding an async PVP mode to it (using Supabase db and edge functions), should be up in the next few weeks.
Learned a lot about shipping Electron apps and using shaders with webgl, might write a blog post about it later
I'm working on an iOS app called Corefeed, a feed reader that mixes articles, podcasts, and YouTube channels into one timeline.
The initial idea was a feed reader where entries are not just sorted chronologically but also grouped into time buckets (last hour, today, last week, last month, etc...) so it's easy to show/hide entries in a bucket, mark entries in it as read/archived, and keep up with new posts even when subscribed to many feeds. I also wanted an excuse to play around with Foundation Models, so I added optional AI Digest and Briefing generated from whatever is currently filtered.
The idea evolved a bit as I worked on it though, and now it reads RSS, Atom, JSON feeds, podcast feeds (legacy and Podcasting 2.0), and YouTube channel feeds. It includes a podcast player, automatic tagging with Apple Intelligence when available, feed groups, and various other small touches. It's still very much in alpha and in need of testing and polish, so it probably won't hit the App Store anytime soon.
It's Ratatui & Crossterm bindings (via Magnus for Rust<->Ruby), plus a thin veneer of DX niceties and Rubyist improvements.
It's a rendering library that uses the immediate-mode paradigm. It is not (yet?) a component library or application framework. However, it's the core primitive on which you can build with architectures such as MVU (Elm-like) or Components (Smalltalk/DOM-like). The repository has example applications, including a small preview of what each of those architectures look like with the library (examples/app_all_events/ and examples/app_color_picker/ respectively).
P.S. - This is heavily AI-assisted. Depending on how you view the meaning of "vibe coding" either the whole thing, or just the rust side is vibe coded. I've had a heavy hand in the design and implementation of the Ruby side.
It’s a private, simple browser video chat. No accounts. You can create a new chat or join via link/code. It also has in browser transcription using Whisper (using https://github.com/huggingface/candle/).
Currently fighting getting background blur to work smoothly on Chrome on Android, which is proving surprisingly harder than getting browser transcription working...
Also still working on small updates to Whistle, a free offline transcription app available on all platforms (with CUDA builds for Windows/Linux)
The name rings a bell but I hadn't looked in a long while. The videobridge might be very useful when I look to expand from just 1-2-1 video calls, so thanks for the nudge in that direction.
I know it's stuff that's been done before, but it's fun seeing how this stuff works and fits together, along with the limitations you have within a browser environment.
- Claude Opus 4.5 helped add several features I had been planning.
Some features were added on a whim because AI makes experimenting so cheap. Like the UI color gradients reflecting the color of the sky based on time of day.
Just needed to point Claude at https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/44846281. Then we worked together to tweak the palette colors and UX (like smoothly transitioning between colors, tweaking more vibrant sky colors)
This is a minimalist extension that allows passkeys to be stored and used.
I created this small extension firstly to understand how passkeys work, and secondly to see if there might be an interesting use case not covered by other products.
Having migraines on and off the past few months, I wanted a way to try and narrow down triggers. All the existing apps out there were overly complicated. So I built something simpler.
It’s an iOS app to help tracking events and stats about my day as simple dots. How many cups of coffee? Did I take my supplements? How did I sleep? Did I have a migraine? Think of it like a digital bullet journal.
Then visualizing all those dots together helps me see patterns and correlations. It’s helped me cut down my occurrence of migraines significantly. I released the full app last month and have been learning the difficulty of marketing and social media.
I’m working on the table-stakes feature of persistence for the bookmark widget, which currently appears after navigating away from a chapter (notably when looking up words in the dictionary on mobile), but is lost upon closing the app. Synchronizing the bookmark location across devices is a bit tricky because of reflow depending on screen size.
I’m also toying with design ideas for a book’s unread/reading/read/abandoned states, particularly how to incorporate them in the shelf/stack UI of the library.
I used these two polarisers in my microscope and a magneto-optical sensor (which exploits the faraday effect), to visualise magnetic field lines of a magstripe card - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8nM4Z-hkTw
I intend to try to use with a floppy disk, however it's not currently working for that.
Here's some invite codes to try it out if interested:
TATN0MCM3
KVLNLU7WQ
WRWQJSWIU
LQXRX73BN
96AO5PQVF
Took a break from social media and realized most of the fun comes from serendipity and having a place to share thoughts that get replied to with positivity. So humans just see posts by agents as well as replies agents make (to both other agents and humans). Also first project done in conjunction with Codex CLI. It's been fun to build and play with.
I vibe coded https://domainhq.ai entirely in a few days with Opus, as in, this was a secondary focus and I never bothered to write any specs. Halfway through I had to ask it to convert it all to React because it was vanilla HTML and I didn't realize (that is not a flex).
I have a .ai domain that I feel is somewhat premium, and seemed to be getting lowball offers from domain brokers. And those I spoke to didn't seem like they were very up-to-date with market news and trends. Exploring services like Namebio were very limited and expensive; the subscription usage for building this was less than the price of a monthly membership (the domain is a different story!).
Domainhq.ai suggested its own domain to buy with its brainstorm feature, and tracks domain sales and expired domains, with reports generated by Claude as it perpetually analyzes price history over time.
The domain was a bit of an investment but I do like it, and the app itself is running 24-7 on a spare Macbook I wasn't using, so I plan to host it myself without paying for cloud servers, and the LLM features are using my personal subscription rather than API credits.
I do plan to add registrations and paid subscriptions (at a fair price, and will make things robust then); I get the irony here, but I also encourage anybody else who needs a niche tool to play around with their own vibe coding sessions to get something usable. Stuff like this does make me question the longevity of tech as a stable career.
FYI, your site's admin login panel can be bypassed by deleting the login modal from the DOM. Also, there doesn't seem to be any authentication for your admin tools (like triggering a scrape).
Thank you! Vibe coded indeed huh? Wasn't too worried on my end, as if my subscription quota runs out it just fails but doesn't charge me. Very appreciated, the stakes were low so don't hold any atrocious shortcuts too against me.
Our first offering is a tracker for makers, small businesses and contractors to show job status. Create a real time status page for your products, build trust and reduce customer inquiries.
We’re working on email notification support right now and have evidence (tracking numbers, job pictures, contracts/documents, etc) support coming next week!
I just launched the beta of my app that uses Elixir/Phoenix. Its a community driven aggregation of technology resources for Michigan, like companies in Michigan that hire tech talent, university programs, incubators in Michigan, etc. It also includes a newsletter thats already fully live and has over 10 subscribers. I'm gathering starting data and feedback now!
I saw the "TADA" post a week or so back (like "TODO" but you finished it—"Tada!") and I regretted not having done write ups for projects I did in 2025. So I'm doing that belatedly. (https://engineersneedart.com)
Also playing with building analog computers so I can understand them (and will not wait until 2027 to post about what I learned/did).
You can connect a bunch of Gmail accounts with it and see all your emails together in one place. It also has some features to better organize your emails and automatically categorize them, as well as some AI features for helping you to draft emails.
It's in early access now, would love feedback from anyone interested in checking it out!
Still on my AI extension for LibreOffice Writer. Growing ok, 1,700+ downloads since launch 3 weeks ago. Still no clue how to benefit from it, but I'm glad I've finally built something that's actually got traction https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/99471
In 2026 I will focus on tenant and employee rights for Berlin's immigrants. I will create guides with help from experts, tools to check if your rent is too high, template generators to demand a rent reduction, and a network of vetted lawyers to help see it through. The goal is to reduce friction at every step of the way. Something as simple as having to find a lawyer can derail the whole project, especially if you don't speak German.
Then, I do the same thing for labour rights. Write guides, build tools, vet a network.
Concretely, I'm setting up a community of practice around the topic. I'm putting everyone in the same room so that we can work faster and together. It makes research much easier for me, because I can just ask experts on Whatsapp.
I'm making a concave split ergonomic keyboard that we plan to run a clinical trial on for hand/wrist RSI. Was originally planning on releasing it in Jan but it's getting delayed until sometime in March. Concurrently waiting on ethics board approval to run a preclinical trail for when it's ready.
Been slowly chipping away at my browser mmo game https://everwilds.io. I've always been curious about MMO software/netcode architecture thanks to playing Guild Wars (the original) in my youth. It's the reason I became a programmer, I wanted to learn how to make those kind of games. For those interested in following the progress I made a discord channel: https://discord.gg/b3REbeavaT
Oh man so many things. I wrote a bunch of cool things a few years ago (and recently too) but have been scared to publish - mainly because even though ive used them in production, I felt publishing means having high quality docs etc. So now the biggest vibe-coding use case is to bring everything I wrote in the past to be
"publish-ready".
A few protoc plugins (I am very much grpc proto first):
protoc-gen-go-wasmjs (https://github.com/panyam/protoc-gen-go-wasmjs) - A protoc plugin for creating wasm bindings out of your grpc services so you can have your "go based backend logic" on the browser:
Plenty more but just dusting off old things has been my biggest thing lately and in the process building tooling to standardize my next gen of apps/sites etc.
I started the year by setting out to recreate the city building portion of an old sierra game (Zeus, master of Olympus) the first few days have been mostly reverse engineering the asset files from the original game.
I’m hoping to learn enough to start building my own game based on celtic and Norse history. But I’m also a dad with a full time job so it’s probably a pipe dream
I'm working on Solitairle – an ad-free Yukon solitaire game where every board is guaranteed solvable: https://solitairle.com
Why? Most solitaire apps frustrate players with impossible games or endless randomness. Solitairle is designed for people (like me) who want a satisfying win through skill, not luck. Every day brings a new, solvable challenge, complete with helpful tools (back button, dead-end warnings) to keep it fun and frustration-free.
I’m especially interested in feedback from people who:
Enjoy casual puzzle games but get discouraged by unwinnable setups,
Value clean, minimalist interfaces without ads,
Have ideas for daily challenges or fun player stats.
Would love your thoughts: What frustrates you most about digital solitaire? What would make you want to play daily?
I built a free USCIS form-filling tool (no Adobe required)
USCIS forms still use XFA PDFs, which don’t let you edit in most browsers. Even with Adobe, fields break, and getting the signature is hard.
So I converted the PDF form into modern, browser-friendly web forms - and kept every field 1:1 with the original. You fill the form, submit it, and get the official USCIS PDF filled.
A philosophical quote repository, this is what I am currently working on. Over 600 quotes (all typed by hand, no copy-paste, not that it matters). I am working towards 1,000 in total: https://crucialquote.com/
I’m working on https://querypanel.io, a server-side SDK that lets your customers chat with their own data, designed with a zero‑trust architecture you can embed directly into your web app. It automatically scans your database schema, gives you a UI to further “train” and refine behaviors, and only stores schema metadata and no credentials or row‑level data. We’ve already reached strong query accuracy on a real client’s ClickHouse setup and are now onboarding more customers.
I'm using Claude AI to build an experimental programming language I call Graphoid. (Built for dealing with graphs). It's early days and I don't know how worthwhile it is but I'm having fun.
Built a crawler to analyze 6,380 posts from TabNews (Brazilian dev community) and turned the data into an interactive infographic. Found that AI/ML dominates ~50% of discussions, Monday 8am is the best time to post, and longer titles (100+ chars) actually perform better.
Stack: Python for scraping, pure HTML/CSS for the viz. No JS frameworks needed.
An vscode extension to organize my lectures using a kanban style structure, saved as markdown files and allows specific md-formats to convert into presentations or other documents (currently marp (pdf, pptx, html) and i'm currently looking into pandoc). It's a vibe coded project i worked on in the evenings over the last 3 months.
We’ve optimized the internet for producing information, not for humans consuming it. Most of us are overwhelmed not because content is bad, but because it’s all delivered in the same rigid format.
I’m working on unrav.io : a way to reshape any web content (article, video, or PDF) into the form that actually fits how you think (summaries, mindmaps, infographics, podcasts, chat, etc.).
We just launched a Chrome extension, so it’s one click on any page. No login, free to try.
https://interviewcop.com - let me know what you think. The idea is that we have so many cheating apps that it hurts both businesses and legit software engineers like myself. I'm trying to solve this problem and make interviews great again. I'm looking for sales cofounder and funding. I have a demo that works like a charm, and I'm very close to rolling this out.
Software that connects your own personal devices to form a p2p mesh network and also connects your friends personal mesh network. On top of that technology, the ability to chat, share media, or any other basic computing done between friends. Data is synced between devices. The goal is to make the underlying tech mostly invisible to the users. They pair devices and start doing standard software things.
I’m working on a research proposal to basically take cybernetics and system dynamics to the problem of human weight management. We know a lot about individual mechanisms of how our body regulates food intake and calorie expenditure, but to my knowledge there have been no attempts to look at how these mechanisms form a coherent whole. A lot of interesting conclusions from the basic model alone.
I am working on a web-based guitar RPG
You can fight monsters, craft, and conjure magic by playing real notes on your actual guitar. Web Browser Audio API handles pitch detection.
Basically, trying to make guitar practice a bit more fun by adding gamification.
This month I will start creating tutorials for uxwizz.com (I got a Raspberry Pi 4, and I will write a blog post on how to set-up LAMP stack and run your own UXWizz dashboard locally on a PI)
A new visualisation tool for large networks. I've actually been working on this for a while and had planned to show a prototype tomorrow, just a bit late for this "Ask HN". Will update this thread with a link, hoping to get some advices and ideas if some people are still reading this by then.
I built an LED globe with a world viewing portal that uses a raspberry pi and pre-generated AI videos of places around the world. I'm working on upgrading it to do realtime generation of the videos and to improve the hardware so it is more durable and capable of being hauled around for community use.
Creative writing: a young influencer creates a religion for the modern age. (Done the first draft)
After that, a post with methods for honest/effortful communication in the age of LLMs. My actual opinions, but set in the same fictional universe as the above writing. I think HN will like that one.
A bit embarrassed, but I thought the website was super pretty before realizing that its iPhone only. Do you have an Android build available? I can borrow an iPhone eventually, but my daily is a Pixel.
In 2024, PlasticList found plastic chemicals in 86% of tested foods—including 100% of baby foods they tested. Around the same time, the EU lowered its “safe” BPA limit by 20,000×, while the FDA still allows levels roughly 100× higher than Europe’s new standard.
That seemed solvable.
Laboratory.love lets you crowdfund independent lab testing of the specific products you actually buy. Think Consumer Reports × Kickstarter, but focused on detecting endocrine disruptors in your yogurt, your kid’s snacks, or whatever you’re curious about.
Find a product (or suggest one), contribute to its testing fund, and get full lab results when testing completes. If a product doesn’t reach its goal within 365 days, you’re automatically refunded. All results are published publicly. I'm actually thinking about turning off crowdfunding and making it a pure "service to be purchased" as all fully-funded products have been single-contributor driven (the refund process creates labor without a clear upside).
We use the same ISO 17025-accredited methodology as PlasticList.org, testing three separate production lots per product (when possible) and detecting down to parts-per-billion. The entire protocol is open.
*Stats as of Jan 2026*
- Since launching almost one year ago, laboratory.love has received $16,835+ in contributions across 38 products!
- 12 products have been fully funded, representing 36 batch samples (that's three unique production batches per product) and 72 total chemical panels (two separate tests for each sample, BPA/BPS/BPF and phthalates)
- 9 product results have been published, with 3 currently in progress
- One manufacturer has already kicked off an internal investigation as a result of our testing (more to say here soon).
- Product pages with published results tables can now calculate the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) Tolerable Daily Intake Percentage (%TDI) for toddlers (assumed to be 14kg) and adults (70kg).
- Monthly Subscriptions are live. Funds are pooled and allocated to the leading unfunded product anytime the pool can get that product to its funding goal.
The goal is simple: make supply chains transparent enough that cleaner ones win. When consumers have real data, markets shift.
The motivation isn't novelty. It's control. I don't need ads, onboarding flows and popups, AI sidebars, bloated menus, unnecessary network calls , etc. A notepad should never touch the network. A REST client shouldn’t ship analytics or auto update itself mid-request.
No plugin system. No extensibility story. Just plain/simple software.
As I build these, I have been realizing how much cognitive overhead we’ve normalized in exchange for very little utility.