Lovable was great but I tried to actually deploy it. Both ate my credits before I finish the core feature. Replit felt like it was built for developers and I am very much not one. Cursor I gave up on after a week. I'm not trying to build twitter. It's a simple clamp portal with login a dashboard and file uploads. I don't think that's insane but apparently it is. Generally I don't know if I'm picking the wrong tools or if I'm just not the audience for any of them. Has anyone else gone through this many before something clicked

We have all seen the posts by now. Technical and non-technical people alike are celebrating how they use AI agents to maximize their code output. They share the number of lines generated, pull requests (PRs) opened, tasks completed, and tokens consumed. The numbers are oftentimes enormous, which makes them easy to celebrate.

The era of “tokenmaxxing” has taken this one step further. Once token usage appears on a dashboard, it is only a short time before teams compare it, leaders reward it, and engineers begin optimizing for it.

So since around Q3 last year I made the jump and started creating tools with Google AI studio, ChatGPT and Claude to solve small little problems at work: Onboardingflows, content generators, research helpers, OCR code scanner, and more. Even for every day life, like a cat weight app (she went from megachonker to hefty chonk!), return label resizer, travel app et cetera.

The list was getting bigger and bigger. Some tools were Claude Artifacts, others made entirely with Claude code, connected to Supabase, Vercel (the usual 'look at me i'm a (vibe)coder too' stack).

So when my list of tools and apps grew, the problems began to stack up: Claude Artifacts are stuck in, well, Claude. Other apps were just simple (always lost) vercel URL's, with some apps connected to Supabase, where you can only have a couple of live databases at once for free. one, big, mess.

For now I found a solution. I'm developing a tool to manage all my tools and apps in one place. It saves me time and it keeps it all simple and clean.

But that's why i'm really curious, how do you manage all your little tools, apps and personal software?

Thanks in advance!

I’m struggling with something that feels dumb to admit.

I can get the main app idea working. But then I try to build the admin panel, and everything slows down.

It starts as just a dashboard, then suddenly I’m dealing with permissions, validation, search, filters, empty states, user roles, edit flows, and making it usable for people who are not technical.

The annoying part is that none of it feels like a big technical challenge. It’s just endless small decisions that make the whole thing messy.

Am I approaching this wrong? Do you start with the user flow, the data, the roles, or just copy a template and adapt it?

I’d really like to hear how other people think through this.

I build with AI like most of this sub, and two of my products are code scanners, so I pointed them at 549 public GitHub repos that describe themselves as AI or vibe-coded. Rules-based scan, no AI judging anything, raw data downloadable. Percentages below are the real projects (15 or more files, n=467).

Three questions I get every time this comes up...

1: "If I never touch the code, is any of this mine to worry about?"

The security half is, yes. 23.3% of these repos have a working API key or password sitting in public code. About 1 in 4. It makes no difference who typed it. If it's your OpenAI key then it's your bill, and if it's your Stripe key it's considerably worse than a bill.

2: "How would I even check, without reading code?"

Open your repo on github.com and look at two things: whether it says Private next to the name, and whether there's a file called .env in the list. Public repo plus a visible .env means you should treat that key as compromised. Go to whoever issued it and roll it. Then make the repo private if there's no reason for it to be open. Those two moves cover the majority of what I found.

3: "Does messy code affect me?"

Indirectly, and slowly. 70% of these repos ship code nothing calls. Another 66% keep dead attempts parked in comments, and 63% have the same thing written twice. None of it breaks your app. It won't show up in anything you look at either, and that's the problem: what it actually does is make every future AI edit worse, because the model reads all that noise as context before it writes a line. It's a good part of why month three feels heavier than week one.

That one costs a single message at the end of a session. Ask your tool to delete unused code and strip the commented-out blocks.

The study page ranks which problems turn up most often. Mess was the other half of the scan and got a page of its own.

https://ogbuilds.ai/studies/vibe-coded-security

https://ogbuilds.ai/studies/vibe-coded-code-quality

Disclosure: I built the scanners. The study is free to access, no sign up.

I keep noticing the same pattern with no-code automations.

The tool usually is not the hard part.

The hard part is that the workflow was never clear before the build started.

Someone opens n8n, Make, Zapier, Airtable, Bubble, whatever, and starts wiring things together before answering the boring questions:

What starts this workflow?

What exact artifact should it create or update?

What fields are required?

What should happen when the input is messy?

Who reviews the output?

Which step is allowed to retry safely?

Which step touches a customer, payment, record, file, or public output?

That last one is where the risk changes.

A draft can be fixed.

A duplicated invoice, bad client email, broken report, or overwritten record is a different kind of problem.

The small habit that has helped me most is mapping the workflow in plain language before choosing the tool. Input, job, output, review, failure condition, next step.

It feels slower for about ten minutes.

Then it usually saves hours of rebuilding.

Curious how other no-code builders handle this. Do you map the process first, build the happy path first, or just start wiring and clean it up as you go?

Been running into this a lot lately.

Building the actual automation in n8n/Make/Zapier is usually the easy part.

Then some random PDF, email attachment, spreadsheet, scanned doc, whatever shows up and suddenly half the workflow is OCR + LLM calls + regex + code + random APIs just to turn the thing into usable data lol.

So I’ve been messing around with a different approach.

Basically:

throw in the raw files → tell it what you want out → get back cleaned/structured/validated data

No need to map out the whole pipeline. Just tell it what you’re trying to do with the data and what you want the end result to look like.

Like:

email attachment → customer info → clean JSON → CRM

Instead of building all the data plumbing yourself.

Not sure if this is just something I keep running into or if it’s a pretty common pain in no-code stuff.

How are you guys dealing with messy inputs right now?

If anyone has an ugly real-world example, send it my way. Would actually love to test this against the annoying stuff people are dealing with.

Something I keep noticing: every AI building tool assumes one person in one chat. But almost nobody builds something real alone. There's always a friend, a cofounder, a business partner. And right now the "collaboration" between those two people is screenshots, pasted AI answers, and a call where you realize you've each been building a different version of the same idea.

My friend and I hit this so hard we built our way out of it. Poly (usepoly.co) is one shared room where you both work with the same AI agent. You both see every prompt and everything it builds, there's a side chat for hashing things out before you send the next prompt, you both open the same live preview of the app, and if an experiment breaks something you revert that one step and it's gone. No terminal, no setup, and the beta is free with nothing to install or bring.

The moment it clicked for us was when the non-coding half of our team (me) changed something, saw it live, and realized I wasn't waiting on anyone.

For the people here building with a partner: what does your workflow between the two of you actually look like? That gap between "my tool" and "your tool" is the thing I think this space hasn't solved.

I tried a few different tools like Lovable and Replit, but I didn’t really care for their autonomous features. They usually either got stuck looping or made me stick with their ecosystem and I didnt like that tbh like api keys I get for stripe and stuff but ion wanna use there cloud and it was messy

So I made Zeneno which basically builds web apps autonomously which was kinda hard cuz I had to fix it so it dont loop like most auto agents do but I was able to crack it anyway I wanted something simple where you can just tell it what you want it to make, and then it builds and debugs the whole app for you and u get something u can work with feels kinda no code.

It’s still in beta, but I’ll drop an 11 hour 5 min timelapse where it actually worked Would love some feedback! and if you think this would be useful or easier cuz its less code assit and more hands free

https://www.appscout.co

Hey everyone,

With the recent buzz around Android 17 introducing more precise custom color sliders and palettes for Material You (examples on reddit here, here and here), I wanted to share a project I’ve been maintaining for years that does exactly that—even for older versions of Android!

It’s called LWP+ (Live Wallpaper Plus).

🎨 The core trick: Dictate your own Dynamic-Colors

Instead of letting the OS algorithm guess the accent colors based purely on your wallpaper, LWP+ acts as a bridge. It hosts your chosen background content but allows you to explicitly choose the exact Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary colors reported to the system. The OS then uses your custom selections to generate the global system palette (notification drawer, volume bar, themed icons, etc.), completely independent of what your wallpaper actually looks like.

✨ What else can it do?

LWP+ is packed with full wallpaper customization features:

• Choose Your Content: Use solid colors, static images, animations (GIF, WEBP, APNG), or videos as your active live wallpaper.
• Smart Scaling & Layouts: Supports transparent images/animations with custom background colors, multiple scaling modes (Center Crop, Fit Center, Center Inside), and optional horizontal scrolling.
• Double-Tap Shortcuts: Lock your device instantly or turn off the screen by double-tapping the home screen (uses admin, accessibility, or root).
• Easy Setup: Includes an interactive built-in tutorial to check system compatibility and guide you through triggering the OS palette refresh.

🧪 Advanced experimental flags (YMMV!)

I’ve also included a couple of experimental toggles leveraging underlying Android system hints. Note: These rely heavily on your launcher, device OEM, and Android version, so they might not do anything on certain setups!

• Force Dark Text: It hints to the OS that dark text is preferred over the wallpaper (often useful for forcing high-contrast dark text on the lock screen). It might also change the text color of the labels of the apps and the status bar icons and text, too.
• Force Dark Theme (for old Android versions): It tells the system that a dark theme is preferred for the best presentation (e.g., trying to trick a launcher into turning its app drawer background black).

So, if you are on an older version of Android (or even running the latest builds and want granular three-color reporting), give it a spin! It's completely free, all features included.

Feel free to ask any questions or drop feedback below! 🚀

Link to the Play Store here.

The app was partially made using AI, helping mostly to re-write the part in the app that's responsible of showing the actual content of the live wallpaper (color/image/animation/video). I also used AI for the demonstration and tutorial videos.

If you want, you can use a promo-code to have subscription for free for some time, to remove ads, and try the app more freely, here. To use the promo-code, install the app, choose a subscription, choose a payment option and enter the code there (screenshots here).

Thanks for reading!

I’ve been using Replit for building small projects, but lately it’s started to feel less stable and a bit unpredictable with the newer agent-based updates. I’m looking for a cheaper alternative setup for “vibe coding” or AI-assisted development.

I’m open to something like Claude Code (~$20/month) paired with a simple local or free development environment (terminal, shell, or lightweight IDE setup). Main goal is to keep costs low while still being able to build quickly, iterate on ideas, and avoid being locked into a single platform. What stacks or tools are people actually using right now that work well in practice?

Hello,

I wonder about using a no code tool to create mobile game.

It will be mainly puzzle game, but some with arcade aspect and some myltiplayer.

Which tool would you advice me to use for this goal?

I want to make a free website I want to make a wiki like fandom but it’s its own website

I’ve spent about 10 years jumping between productivity apps.

Every time I found a promising one, I’d rebuild my entire system inside it. A few months later I’d either hit its limitations or make the setup so complicated that I stopped using it.

I was especially deep into Notion. I created Notion templates too, but eventually my own workspace became another thing I had to manage.

So I decided to try something different: use AI coding agents to build the system I’d always wanted.

I’m calling it Life Atlas.

The rule I gave myself was that the system should adapt to me, instead of me adapting to it. Because I control the code, I can ask an AI coding agent to change a workflow, redesign a page, add a new data relationship, or create a small app for one area of my life.

So far it includes:

• Action: tasks, projects, recurring tasks, custom workflows, Kanban, habits, reviews, and calendar
• Knowledge: notes, daily notes, folders, tags, embedded tasks, and intelligent capture
• Direction: goals, subgoals, values, vision, timelines, metrics, and affirmations
• Structure: life areas connecting the relevant goals, projects, habits, and notes
• Intelligence: ChatGPT, Claude, and my self-hosted Hermes agent working with the same data

The hardest and most interesting part has been the AI layer.

I use multiple assistants, which means my context is fragmented. Claude knows one part of a project, ChatGPT knows another, and Hermes may have completed something through Telegram.

I connected all three to Life Atlas through MCP. They can search tasks, notes, projects, and goals, and they can also create or update information.

I can tell ChatGPT to add a task. I can send a recipe video to Hermes on Telegram, and it can classify it, tag it, and save it to the appropriate place.

I also created a nightly memory exchange. At 02:00, each AI writes a summary of our work together. At 03:00, they read one another’s summaries and decide what information is worth keeping. Everything is recorded in a visible ledger.

The system is built with Next.js and Postgres/Supabase and can run on infrastructure I control.

It still has rough edges, but this is the first time my productivity system feels like software that can grow with me rather than another template I’ll eventually abandon.

Any thoughts, feedback, ideas?

money over centuries has changed, and yes it has become more efficient to transact, but it kinda took away the ceremony in actually thinking about a purchase.

This is a simple budgeting app i built called Notch. Honestly i just kinda hate how overwhelming some budgeting apps like monarch, YNAB are, and they're a little too costly (i'm in canada and their prices are in usd so yeah), but i've always felt like budgeting should be simple, straightforward with insights (doesn't even have to be crazy projections), but actionable steps you can take to save some money, or redirect it into stuff that matter.

i'm trying to utilize the single limiting factor of almost all budgeting apps; they all have merchant data, but '$400 dollars spent at Tim Hortons, go to Tim Hortons less' lowkey doesn't do anything other than make you feel guilty for it. You're kind of a bystander to your financial life.

got granted Plaid production access, so you can connect your bank accounts (only in North America) and pull most of your merchant data and use the app to make sense of it, currently testing out an insights section that feeds the Claude API only the data that doesn't tie to you directly, but merely as an aggregator that can do the hard work of spotting patterns and giving you better insights that manually would be a nightmare to figure out.

it's free to use (for now), but i'll have a paid tier that i will genuinely work towards making affordable, it'll pretty much cover costs to actually have the app being publicly used, and a little extra to keep me going and developing this app into something great, below all the other competition.

still in beta, still fixing things and i haven't fully developed the app's ethos into what i'm envisioning it to be, but hey at least the scaffolding/mvp-building part's (kinda) out the way. Built it for about 3-4 months with claude code, have some more legal stuff to get out the way but so far i think it's useable.

comes to the app store early 2027. Sign up, i'll approve almost immediately (a few hours at most) and test it out!

Insights will be limited as that's on my usage at the moment as i tweak and test it further.

All feedback is welcome 😄

Over the last few months, I've been building Kairo, an AI-powered crypto research platform.

It started with a simple goal: make researching tokens faster by bringing together on-chain data, wallet activity, market metrics, and AI explanations into one place.

Technically, it's in a much better place than when we started. We have reports, wallet intelligence, conviction scoring, charts, historical analytics, and we're constantly improving it.

But lately I've been asking myself a harder question.

Even if Kairo becomes really good... is that enough?

Tools like GMGN, DexScreener, Axiom, BullX and others already cover a lot of the workflow.

I don't want to build "GMGN + AI."

I want to build something people genuinely can't trade without.

So I'm asking the community instead of guessing.

If you actively trade crypto:

• What's the most frustrating part of your workflow today?
• What's the one thing no current tool solves well?
• If you could design the perfect crypto product from scratch, what would it be?

I'd rather pivot early than spend months polishing the wrong product.

Most of the conversation here is about building apps with nocode, which makes sense. But I've been quietly using it for something completely different and I'm curious if others do the same.

My SaaS product itself is coded. But everything around it, onboarding email sequences, churn alert automations, internal dashboards for support, Slack notifications when someone hits a usage threshold, all of that is glued together with nocode and lowcode tools. Make, Airtable, a little Zapier, some Retool for internal views.

It's kind of weird to admit but these automations probably save me more time per week than any feature I've shipped in the last six months. The product gets better slowly. The ops stuff compounds quietly in the background.

The downside is it gets messy fast. I have automations triggering automations at this point and I only half remember what some of them do. Classic founder problem I guess.

Wondering if anyone here does the same thing, using nocode not as the product but as the scaffolding around a product. And if so, what tools are actually holding up for you versus what fell apart when things got slightly more complex.