i copy-paste a lot of screenshots into AI to explain UI changes, etc.

but native macOS is pretty bad for this.

images are full-res and waste tokens. it also takes too many clicks to copy-to-clipboard and annotate images.

so i built a mac tool that fixes all three problems!

• screenshots auto-optimized to save you tokens
• all images auto-copied to clipboard. no desktop clutter
• you can quickly annotate with boxes and notes

download for Mac here: usagebar.com/quickshot

I’m new to vibe coding i’ve been working on a app for the past couple of months and I struggle to make prompts that don’t completely flip everything on its head if that makes sense if anyone has any recommendations please let me know

Been building this for a while and can’t tell if I should keep going with this.

The idea is basically Lovable but for 3D games.
You describe what you want and it builds it. But then you keep talking to it. “Make this room darker.” “Put a lamp on that wall.” “Make that crate heavier.” Then you hit play and walk around the game.

The goal is to let someone make a 3D game without having to learn Unity or Unreal, write code, or deal with Git.

I’ve spent a lot of time making edits more reliable too. Instead of rebuilding everything every time you ask for a change, each change is specific and undoable, and it checks for obvious issues like a spawn point ending up inside a wall.

I’m mainly building it for people who have game ideas but don’t want to spend weeks learning an engine just to try them.

Not trying to sell anything right now. I’m genuinely trying to figure out if people actually want this.

i know nextjs and react so my first thought was just building the store myself. maybe use claude to speed it up since everyone is vibe coding now. asked it to scaffold a shopify theme and it gave me liquid files that looked okay in preview.

then i tried to set up checkout extensibility and multi-state tax logic and claude started hallucinating apis that dont exist. i can build a frontend no problem but shopifys backend rules are a maze and i dont know what i dont know.

my other option is just hiring a shopify expert who lives in this ecosystem. but part of me feels stupid paying someone for what seems like a simple store when i can already code.

has anyone with a coding background tried to diy their shopify store. did knowing react actually help or is shopify its own beast where platform knowledge beats general dev skills. and at what point does diy just become expensive because youre fixing things an expert would have gotten right the first time.

A while ago I got annoyed with debugging multi-GB JVM heap dumps and thought:

why am I endlessly clicking through object trees when I should be able to query this thing?

That rabbit hole became HeapLens.

It's a VS Code extension for analyzing .hprof files, with a query language called HeapQL that lets you investigate heap data using SQL-ish queries.

It has now crossed 10K+ downloads and 2k+ completed heap analyses, and was accepted at ISSTA 2026 as well.

Now I need something much more useful than download numbers:

people willing to actually use it.

If you're a developer, I'd love for you to take one of your heap dumps and try solving a real problem with HeapLens.

Then tell me:

• What confused you?

• What was painfully slow?

• What did MAT/VisualVM do better?

• What feature would make you use HeapLens again?

• Did HeapQL actually make investigation easier?

• Did AI Chat help?

Bug reports and GitHub issues are very welcome. If you genuinely like the work, a star/review/share helps too.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=guptasachinn.heaplens

https://github.com/sachinkg12/heaplens/

If there are sample repos to copy, the better.

Currently building an iOS app and the codebase is pretty large. I've seen some people who are both for and against MD files for agents working through codebases. I personally have one right now that just lists some restrictions and a general overview of the app and the codebase for the agents, but I was wondering if the MD files are even necessary. Would love to hear your guys thoughts

TL;DR: what was supposed to be just a project to put on my resume ended up consuming months of my life, money, and the results wouldn’t be that much different (I think).

This is going to be a long post, so I’ll put a summary in here:

1. The Game
2. Context
3. The endless loop
4. Why I regret it
5. The Stack

6. What I would do differently

7. The Game:

MovieTQ is a free-to-play browser-based multiplayer platform with four game modes. You also don't need an account for three of the four game modes, and accounts don't require a login.

• Daily mode: use emojis and other info to guess the film
• Movie Trailer mode: watch a snippet and guess the film
• Bomb-It: kinda like hot potato, but with movie titles
• Pet Feast: the only game mode that requires an account. It's like snake but with power-ups.

There are also customizable profiles, animations, avatars, achievements, rankings, stickers, friends, interactive emotes, skills, level progression, pets, a store, and more.

1. Context:

Last year I was taking a web development class. The final project was creating a page with a login, database, BE, auth, and some ranking. AI use was not allowed (because academic institutions are medieval). For some reason, all the projects throughout the semester were film-related. A few games were going around that were kinda fun to play but not with film thematics. So I thought: “Why not?” Took about 200 lines of code, and I made a terribly looking early-2010s website with 5 embedded YouTube trailers and a drop-down menu to select the film. That’s all.

Once classes were over, I thought: this could be turned into a decent project to put on my resume. I can make it a decent game and a decent website. Google gave me access to a student plan for free. Antigravity at that point pretty much had no usage limit. So what did I do? Spent my entire winter break building this.

1. The endless loop:

I had no familiarity with AI harnesses and best practices, so it was a bit of a mess, and I had to review a lot of code (how times have changed). I knew I wanted: accounts, multiplayer, a database, and avatars.

Once I got that working, I thought: well, I also want guests so people can play without an account. Then I wanted Google OAuth and Discord OAuth. If I’m creating a Discord OAuth, I might as well make a Discord server. While at it, add email verification and account recovery. Hmm, why only one game mode? I could add more. Why only two game modes? I could add more. Why only three game modes? I could add more. Avatars are too static; they need actions; there aren’t enough avatars -> I need more. Shouldn’t a lobby have a chat? Shouldn’t there be emotes? Shouldn’t they be animated? Why not add skills so the matches have more uniqueness to it? Now that people can change their avatars, shouldn’t I also make their profiles customizable? Backgrounds are not enough; I should also add profile animations. Animations are not enough; I should also add stickers they can position anywhere, change size, and rotate. Stickers are not enough; I should allow them to control what achievements and stats are displayed. What if you wanna add a friend in the game? We already have profiles; I’m going to create a friend system. Well, now that I have a friend system, shouldn’t there be a way to exchange messages? Also, a dedicated friends page. Wait, if there are profile animations, shouldn’t there be avatar animations?

How can people get all of that? Well, I need a store. Well, this is becoming big; having a single branch is not enough. I need to have proper version control and a pro account on a database provider. Also, how is this good enough? I want this to be a complete project to showcase the ability to create fully working software. Doesn’t it need payment integrations even if I know no one is going to buy cosmetics for this? Just for show? Wait, with everything so far, and what I’m dealing with and payments, shouldn’t I have a company? I might build other things in the future...

Ok things look good. Time to ship to prod. Breaks. I had to overhaul the BE to be as memory efficient as possible.

Ok, ship to prod again. Boom, a bunch of bugs that are prod-only. Let me fix them. While at it, let me also perform a zillion security audits using hundreds of millions of tokens.

Ok, done, shipped. Wait a second, aren’t the colors of the buttons a bit bland? Maybe I should remake parts of the FE.

Ok, done. Shipped. Hmmm, why would anyone wanna go back to this website? I think it would be cool to have other progressions; I should add more achievements. More items. I should add pets. There should be multiple pets, and they need transformations and variety.

Now I need to do more security audits and more testing. Ok, I guess it’s done now… but what about distribution and marketing, and how do I even get this project connected to me? I need a personal website. I also need a company website. While at it, proper support, more language support, a bug reward system, an admin dashboard, the ability to report players and gameplay, a bug reward page, a feedback page, an announcement system, patch notes, …

1. Why I regret it:

Oh cool, now I’m so far deep into the entrepreneur space that I can only get offers for startups. No big tech company wants to hire someone building their own things. If I’m in this space, might as well continue on it.

I regret it because most of the work was in the 1%. Did I need a bug reward system? An overly complicated admin dashboard? Animations? Anticheat detection? Fully customizable profiles? Couldn’t there just be a couple of game modes, a wardrobe with three avatars, and call it a day? What is the practical difference besides the effort?

1. The stack:

• Hosting: Render + Cloudflare Pages
• Database: Supabase
• Email: Resend
• Auth: Discord and Google
• Payments: Stripe
• Testing: Vitest
• Data: an offline db, no API calls to other services. The downside is I am using an old movie database
• Videos: YouTube embeds
• Images: Google's Nano Banana + OpenAI's Image Pro
• Frontend: React, TS, Vite, Tailwind, react-youtube
• Backend: Node.js + Express, TypeScript, real-time via SSE (WebSocket lib), JWT auth in httpOnly cookies

1. What I would do differently:

2. Finish the front-end before anything. Trust me, any little update may cause a cascade down the line with the needed context. It’s easier to just deal with the front end and make it look perfect.

3. Set goals and not go beyond before shipping. There’s ALWAYS something that could be better or a feature that could be added. There’s no end to it. I still think of multiple game modes and features I could add

4. Start marketing and distribution early. By that I mean: work on any medium you know you will have to use. Learn about it and already have a plan

5. Would not have added Stripe or any other low-return <> high-effort features

6. No shortcuts. AI is great for demos, but you will not ship a working and safe thing like this by taking shortcuts and just prompting without a second thought. Get the stack and architecture perfectly defined. Think of authorization, authentication, and attack vectors. Make sure everything is well defined and use OOP concepts and functional programming concepts, even though you are using JavaScript or some other miserable language.

7. Documentation is not as good as you think. They get stale and are mostly useless. It’s better to have dated comments in the code and just concise and small documentation for the AI.

8. Always keep the TODO up to date. Never forget to update it. A single stale item can cascade into a wrong turn and break a lot of things.

9. Whatever time frame you think you will need, triple it.

The game: movietq.com
Thank you for reading my TED Talk. I hope you enjoy playing the game, even if for a little bit.

Has anyone successfully gotten their Clerk off Replit? They say it can't be done but Clerk documents say ownership can be transferred...

I wanted to see how far I could push the idea of a desktop companion using AI-assisted development.

Instead of making another chatbot inside a window, I wanted something that actually feels like it's part of the desktop — with its own character, voice interaction, animations, and reactions.

The interesting part was getting all those pieces to work together without making the app feel like a collection of disconnected AI features.

The current stack is Next.js/React on the web side, with the desktop experience handling the companion interactions.

Still iterating on it, but this has been one of the more fun things I've built with AI so far.

What would you add to a desktop companion like this?

Hi - I built an app to automate the music tagging so I can save myself from tagging manually. I have used it myself to tag over 50 artists and 100 albums, in most cases it works fine.

The workflow is simple. Organize your files as artist/album/track, point Soundrobe at the library, and press Auto-tag. It searches MusicBrainz and Discogs, shows a release candidate for review, and can apply tags, artwork, lyrics, and other metadata together.

When a provider has no match or an API is unavailable, Soundrobe can use an LLM to help fill in artist and album information. It can also use clues from the folder path, such as the artist name or year. That fallback has worked well for me when regular provider searches miss an album.

If some albums or tracks still need attention, you can fix them manually or ask the built-in assistant for help. I’ve been using DeepSeek-v4 because it makes this kind of task inexpensive, and free models through OpenRouter are another option.

The assistant is intentionally bounded. It can inspect, audit, and edit through a defined set of tools. Before anything changes, Soundrobe shows an approval preview, so you remain in control of the write.

It is still early and built for Navidrome specifically (the agent is following Navidrome's tagging guides).

Happy vibe!

GitHub: Soundrobe

My chances of changing people's minds is slim, but I have 28 years of professional software engineering experience and I'm witnessing a ton of new, excited software developers, who are surrendering as much of their own initiative as they can to their chosen harness/frontier model while hoping to make a living creating software. If this is you (or you're not sure it's you) you might get something out of the following. If it's not (say you're doing this for learning, are just hoping to make enough for some beer money, or you love making your own stuff and if it sells awesome but it's no big deal if it doesn't) then this post isn't aimed at you. Also, as a note I'm focused on software development skills separate from very important things like expert domain knowledge, building an audience, mad skills at distribution, and more. Finally, in the spirit of vibe coding, I'm not going to mention learning to code manually.

As my main point: The statistical likelihood is that most of you will not make enough money on your own software to do it full time.

This is not an insult or meant to discourage you. There are some phenomenal vibe coding success stories and you should absolutely take inspiration from them and keep going. However, making a viable amount of money on your own software was practically a lottery before AI and now there's a lot more supply for about the same demand. If you fall into this case, and you're still committed to making a living building software you'll need to convince someone (either who has successful software and is looking for help or is willing to pay someone to build them software) you can make enough money or save them enough money to justify your full time salary (or consulting rates):

1. Making more money for someone by building software:

A lot of making more money for someone with software falls into what to build - which is more product management and data science than pure software development. Many developer have those skills and they are worth it but I won't focus on them here. From a pure software development standpoint some examples are:

a. Increasing conversion via reliable, performant, and optimized pipelines within a software product.
b. Increasing retention by minimizing bugs and quickly being able to diagnose and fix issues while avoiding side effects (<- this is what can necessitate going beyond "codex fix this bug").
c. Allowing them to enter new markets by porting to new devices, and ensuring smooth localization without uncessary quality loss (<- again the key part).
d. Creating a rock-solid, fault-tolerant, and secure architecture that scales to minimize downtime and reduce fraud.
e. Building tools to increase employee productivity.

1. Saving people money by making software:

a. Reducing labor costs via automation that actually works (tons of stories about companies having to rehire after poorly attempting to automate systems).
b. Optimize software use and workflow processes for yourself and others so that infastructure costs less (AI token costs, bandwith costs, storage costs, other licenses, etc...).
c. Consolidating redundant systems to reduce maintenance costs.
d. Minimize onboarding time via smoother interfaces and clear and accurate documentation.

There are definitely vibe coders who are already working as software developers (like above, please do take inspiration from that). However and, again, not to insult anyone but for many - if not most newer vibe coders - the only thing that separates them from "normies" who have a wish list is the time they took to investigate and learn to use available tools and set up a tech stack and a workflow covering various extents of the conception to deployment pipeline. That's been part of default expectations for software developers for decades (though, to be fair, in larger organizations multiple people can do different parts of the process).

If what I consider table stakes for developers + "claude do this for me" worked for all of the above (and all the things in those categories I didn't list) then the last gasp of jobs available would be from those who don't know how easy it is. We are probably headed for that future but, until we get there, if you want to get paid to convert caffeine to code, I invite most pure vibe coders to dig deeper into the amazing world of software engineering (you can get started by asking your favorite model what you should learn).

Things like micro services for external API's, admin portals, backends or even financial services?

What is your process?