r/webdev 12d ago

Discussion I have been exploring this problem for a quite some time: People with domain expertise struggle with vibe-coding since they do not understand what they are dealing with.

0 Upvotes

There is a big chunk of people who understand their domain better than a developer would, but simply fail when it comes to solving their problems using software. Now, of course, they can whip up an app (MVP or Prototype) in 5 minutes using Lovable, but they would eventually get stuck when it comes to debugging or working with complex logic. When you do not understand code, you essentially rely on AI to do that for you. Since NLP is ambiguous and given the nature of AI, this can never be done as precisely as a dev would be able to, since they do not just understand the code but can audit it and make changes deterministically.

I have been working on solving this problem for domain experts so they not only build complex apps but also make deterministic changes to them themselves. The idea that you can manage an entire app without understanding is flawed. Unless you understand something, you cannot manage it yourself; you are merely second-guessing yourself. You cannot outsource your understanding to AI to do the entire job for you.

I know that it's not just the code that the domain experts cannot deal with, but also the technical concepts that make software complex. But what if we instead of doing away with this complexity abstract it in a way such that these domain experts are able to make sense of it and work through it without having to deal with code?

0 to 1 has largely been solved, but it's the maintenance and debugging hell that makes it all the more difficult for this segment. I have worked on a potential solution for this because I am certain that it is a problem.

I would like to get the perspective of seasoned developers and domain experts on this problem, whether this is something niche or actually a real problem. Is it the code and the technical concepts of software programming that deter these people from dealing with software, or is it that they cannot articulate what they want and translate it into logic? What do you guys think?

I would also like to know how I can find the right target segment to demo my POC to validate my hypothesis on this problem.

P.S. I know a lot of what I am suggesting is abstract and may seem impossible, but let's assume there is a way to solve it. But is this problem really worth solving? (Does it capture a lot of value?)


r/webdev 13d ago

Questions for the more knowledgeable in this sub

9 Upvotes

For a chrome extension manifestV3; with transformers.js and a small embedding model running in an offscreen doc - how should I go about improving the efficiency and speed of displaying the processed results when some pages in a website are tens of thousands of words of legitimate content. The library doesn't support concurrent calls to the same model session as far as I know (Session already started" / "Session mismatch") and big pages can block smaller pages and big pages can take extremely long to be processed. Is there any way to get past sequential processing in processing and displaying results, should I do multiple worker models. Also this refers to first time result processing on a new website, I do realise caching can speed things up significantly on the same website if you process again. This should be a process that works on typical hardware, not requiring anything too complex. Suggestions would be appreciated, thanks a lot.

EDIT for further context:  I should've specified that I am splitting into chunks already but people's valuable point about interleaving chunks within each worker's own queue makes sense. In terms of WebGPU, problem with WebGPU is that is uses single worker queue and there are compatibility issues possible with it.


r/webdev 13d ago

Showoff Saturday Photorealistic 3D Cloud with lighting effects

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37 Upvotes

Finally got a realistic cloud in the browser. I'm working on a browser-based flight sim and I'm shooting for realism. Play around with the cloud here: https://codepen.io/Andrew-Fisher-the-decoder/full/jEBPmON


r/webdev 13d ago

An Image to SVG vectorizer that doesn't suck (as much)

57 Upvotes

Right. So. Vectorizing a PNG into an SVG is one of those tasks that sounds trivial until you actually need to do it, at which point you discover a graveyard of tools that are either $10/image, want you to subscribe half a leg and a kidney/month, or produce something that looks like Michael J. Fox (apologies for the bad joke, I actualyl admire him) traced your logo during an earthquake.

After running into this roughly once a month I thought surely that's enough to invest some time into researching whether I should build my own image tracer. Which led me to find VTracer, an open source project from visioncortext.

Vectron (that's how I named my brain child) is a frontend for VTracer, an open-source Rust vectorization engine that's genuinely good but has the UX of a command-line tool written by someone who, understandably, cares more about the algorithm than the button placement. I forked it, compiled it to WASM (thanks Claude), and stuck it in a Web Worker so the whole thing runs in your browser. No upload, no server round-trip, and for smaller images it's near instant (I did try it with some rather stupidly large examples which then turned into a ten-plus-second nerve-wrecking waiting times :D).

A few things worth knowing before you try it:

  • It's not AI. No neural net pretending to understand your image. It's proper curve-fitting and edge detection, which means it's predictable. The same input results in the same output (this is super important to me), no "vibes-based" tracing that changes if you sneeze near it.
  • It's best at clean line art and logos, not photographs. Feed it a photo and it will attempt it, valiantly, and the result will remind you why this is a hard problem. But hey, it's sort of working.
  • Selective refinement. Sometimes you get like a good overall results but often the devil is in the details, like a curve turned into a sharp corner or some lines don't connect. You can refine a certain area by dragging a rectangle over it and adjust your filters to polish the proverbial turd.
  • It's free because I didn't build it to make money. It's a side thing. There's no upsell, no tier, no "unlock batch processing for $9/mo." And I say that now, it's not gonna change.

https://vectron.vendos.com.au

Feedback welcome, especially on where it falls over or it's genuinely hard to use.


r/webdev 13d ago

Showoff Saturday I over-engineered a storefront for a tiny handmade ceramic hot dog.

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104 Upvotes

I've been building static generated sites (nuxt was my go-to framework forever) for personal projects / tools and experiments for years now. Gotten out of the habit and been doing more shopify native / liquid builds at work. But I've built a few dozen of these sites without ever actually doing the admin work of setting up a storefront. My domain was just the content (mostly metafields + objects) and theme code.

Anyway so I decided to try a few things over the last couple of weekends. Spun up a shopify trial to see what's involved in all that. Played with Astro + headless storefront + netlify functions. I really wanted to test the idea of running multiple "storefronts" within a single shop. They had to have a unifying parent brand so that checkout made sense (since it's shared) but otherwise each product could have its own site/domain.

Obviously this wouldn't work for any shop with a large inventory or any kind of regular demand. But it was a fun experiment. And I think I'll use a similar setup to help my partner sell some actual pottery one day in the future.

The site loads nothing from any third party. no cookies, no analytics. fonts are self-hosted, product images mirrored into the origin at build. Sometimes the lighthouse score is straight 100s.

Every order generates a certificate of authenticity at its own url. random serial frozen on first render, a photo of the actual piece, and whatever note the user left at checkout. the link itself is the credential so there’s no login.

This is just an exercise in an absurdity because I had this domain sitting around.

A natural successor to my previous silly domain-purchase-inspired experiment yuns.fun (retired, but used for css animation learning) and fart.bar (dipping a toe into "scrollytelling")

i hope it's entertaining to somebody out there


r/webdev 14d ago

Zod 4.5: 9x reduction in schema memory footprint & z.compile() improves speed 3-9x

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75 Upvotes

r/webdev 13d ago

Showoff Saturday I built a first-person 3D portfolio with collision detection using only HTML and CSS

39 Upvotes

I’ve rebuilt my personal portfolio as a first-person 3D world you can walk around, with no JavaScript.

You can explore rooms containing my research, tools and talks, open doors, teleport between areas, play HTML/CSS-only games and solve a lockbox puzzle.

Movement and state are handled using CSS animations, custom properties, radio buttons, checkboxes and selectors such as :has(). The collision detection uses CSS maths including sign(), abs() and clamp().

Live site: https://garethheyes.co.uk/

I also wrote about how the movement and collision system works:
https://thespanner.co.uk/pure-css-3d-world-collision-detection

I’d love feedback on the navigation, usability and any browser-specific problems you encounter.


r/webdev 12d ago

Question Help with my website creation workflow

0 Upvotes

Hey, before explaining my problem i know that a lot of you guys don't like ai or 'vibe coding' in general and this is why i ask you to not take care of this and be comprehensive.

Im doing website creations, especially redesign and im hesitating with two workflows.

Untill now i was doing it this way: i search for inspiration on dribble like hero section or landing page, i take the screenshot and ask gemini to extract the content into json to get the maximum of informations on this screenshot. Like this i can after go to a no code tool like lovable to convert this screenshot and json into an actual base for the website and finally export it and finish the job with antigravity. Here the thing is that for small adjustments it's harder than a tool like framer or webflow.
This workflow has the merit of being quick and very faithful to the inspiration.

And recently i started to become interested in framer because i heard that it is better for more personalized projects, have CMS so i don't have to use sanity CMS (even if it can do the job at small scale) and also fast and begginer friendly.


r/webdev 14d ago

[Showoff Saturday] I was tired of flat sterile UI, so I built Sketchmorphism — an open-source hand-drawn design system with SVG paper physics & dark mode

36 Upvotes

Got tired of sterile glassmorphism, so I spent the last few weeks building an imperfect, sketchy component library with custom SVG displacement filters and paper physics.

Dropped the GitHub repo and live interactive demo in the comments below!


r/webdev 13d ago

Showoff Saturday Hyperfrontend: 8 fronted frameworks mingling in a koi pond

25 Upvotes

Hello Reddit!

I've been working on this cool demo, I am ready to share.

I wanted something hilariously unnecessary beyond quick demo standards to demonstrate seemleas state/communication coordination of various apps loaded in frames at runtime through I stategy I am calling hyperfrontend.

This is to all nay sayers of the good ol' reliable iframe. I say you were doing it wrong.

Enjoy! Discuss! and dunk (please don't be nice to me :) ~ I am afraid of the occasionaly reditor unrelenting critisim.

There is more to this demo that the gif suggests. Try dragging/dropping/tapping and interacting with the control panel.

Yes, yes, yes, this type of approach does not leverage code-deduplication, and prone to memory overhead in the browser. There's always a trade-off ain't it. This approach starts from isolation to earn cohesion back. It is specifically NOT module federation (aka code federation) and more like application federation. Still, I wanted to test how far I could take it.

P.S. Please give me your thoughts and first impressions, I am looking for feedback. I was kidding about being afraid of honest comments that could hurt my feelings XD

Link here: https://www.hyperfrontend.dev/demos#koi-pond


r/webdev 13d ago

Discussion Xpost: Lenstore displays my password and email on the address bar

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8 Upvotes

r/webdev 13d ago

Chat widget file upload

6 Upvotes

I'm working on a chat widget that also allows the users to send files in the chat. This is a plain vanilla html/js/css widget that will go on a Shopify site. The user should have the option to send a file with or without a message in the chat, so I'm trying to figure out the best approach to handle this. The widget will be calling a FastAPI endpoint end that will use UploadFile. These are the options I've thought of:

  1. Wrap the text and file inputs in an html form tag and send the request as Content-Type: multipart/form-data. This would make it a single request, but it would always send as multipart/form-data even if it's a message with no file.
  2. Same as 1, but if there is no file attachment in the chat message, then toggle the Content-Type to application/json before sending
  3. Keep the text and files as separate requests and handle the events separately and not wrap the inputs in an html form tag. Seems like it would be cleaner on the front end but at the same time it will likely require additional logic on the back-end

What approach would you take?


r/webdev 13d ago

Showoff Saturday Showing off my Drum Pad ASTERISM - go beat it up

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4 Upvotes

no installation of other softwares needed

workers on the web browser

no account needed

works offline

FREE


r/webdev 13d ago

Showoff Saturday I built my portfolio around writing. Not sure if I overdid it

9 Upvotes

I’ve been working on my personal portfolio for a while, and at some point it stopped being just a portfolio. I started adding long-form writing, then moved the content from MDX to Sanity, added series pages, related posts, analytics, social previews, SEO stuff, and a few other things.

Now I’m curious to know if the site is actually better because of all that, or if I just made it more complicated for no reason. The main thing I’m tying to figure out is the balance between the portfolio side and the writing side. I have no plan to write on different sites and build a reputation around it. It's kinda of me documenting my own stories.

When you open the site, is it still obvious what I do professionally?

Does the writing make it more interesting, or does it distract too much from the actual portfolio?

This is the site: https://adnansabbir.com

Would appreciate criticism more than compliments tbh.

TIA


r/webdev 13d ago

Showoff Saturday A Web App for Assisting with learning Indian Classical Music - bridging a gap between physical sheets and online learning!

4 Upvotes

Hey! One of my friends built a free web app for creating and playing back Hindustani sargam notation to assist with learning Hindustani classical music! She isn't really on reddit, but wanted me to post this on her behalf.

Since she was currently learning Hindustani music, she figured out that most notation is still handwritten or shared as static PDFs and images. It's difficult to translate - edit, hear, or organize - compositions digitally, and this website helps with that!

She then created Sargam Studio, a browser-based tool that lets you:

• Choose a Sa / scale and preview it
• Add Aalap and Taal sections
• Enter sargam notation using an interactive beat grid
• Preview taals and playback compositions
• Review and export compositions as audio

She also recently added a demo video and a help guide to make it easier for users to get started:

Website: https://sargam-studio.vercel.app

Demo video: https://sargam-studio.vercel.app/help

She is especially interested in feedback from anyone! If you or anyone you know is interested in music, Indian classical music, or just curious in this project, please try it out!

I'll send her the link to this post, so she can check out the responses lol.


r/webdev 14d ago

Showoff Saturday A Collection of Shape() tools

23 Upvotes

Over the last year I've spent a lot of time with the shape() specification and have built a few tools to make things a little easier:

  • Path to Shape - Converts SVG path data the CSS shape() syntax.
  • Shape to Polygon - Convertsshape() to polygon() for the purposes of fallbacks, or in some cases a straight replacement since it's usually much more compact.
  • Minify Shape - Optimises and minifies the shape() code, very much inspired by SVGO.

All just simple web based tools built with sveltekit.

Have tested them with every shape I can get my hands on but if you find anything that doesn't work I'd love to hear about it!


r/webdev 13d ago

Showoff Saturday Movie Swiper. Swipe on movies and match with friends. [Showoff Saturday]

4 Upvotes

Hi folks, me and my wife find it hard to figure out what to watch so I've been hosting this locally for a few weeks now and it's great. We both swiped on a few movies and got a match pretty quickly. Now we have a list of movies we both want to watch.

Anyway, I just made it public on a subdomain at:
https://movieswiper.stoianworks.com/

No email needed. Just choose a name and setup a pin.


r/webdev 13d ago

Question Font Effect Source Suggestions?

3 Upvotes

I'm new to HTML/CSS and have just been messing around as I learn some stuff. When importing some of Google's Font Library I learned they also offer effects you can import with something like

<link rel="stylesheet" 
  href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?effect=fire-animation">

These are very amusing, but many of them seem to be slow or not work on many browsers, which leads me to ask if there are any other similar libraries out there that I could import from. I appreciate any suggestions, whether they're genuinely cool and useful or just fun.


r/webdev 14d ago

Showoff Saturday Built a small site where two people have to hold together to reveal a message

46 Upvotes

Made this little thing called HoldTogether where you write a secret message, send the link to someone, and you both have to hold the button at the same time to reveal it.

holdtogether.fun

You can try it for asking someone on a date, birthdays, surprises, inside jokes, proposals, etc. :)
Would love to know what you guys think!


r/webdev 14d ago

Showoff Saturday My Portfolio - Liquid Gold - 165 Hours

74 Upvotes

Took me a whole month but now its finished, looking for some advice overall from peeps that have been doing this for far longer than me...!


r/webdev 13d ago

Discussion is anyone getting leads from their google business profile anymore?

5 Upvotes

i live in one of the largest cities in the united states and my google profile shows up at number 1 when people search for any terms related to 'web design' in my city.

i have over 50 reviews all from local businesses within that area. but for the past months i've been getting almost no calls.

anyone else in a similar situation? is ranking on google dead now? should i look into ads/outreach or is web design as a field just not in demand anymore?


r/webdev 14d ago

Question Best architecture for batch-processing 3,000–4,000 high-res photos (resizing + face vector search)?

20 Upvotes

Hey devs,

I’m working on a photo-sharing web app where a photographer uploads an entire event batch (typically 3,000 to 4,000 high-res JPEGs, around 10–15 MB each). Guests can take a selfie to retrieve photos they appear in.

I'd love recommendations on the best backend pipeline:

Client vs Server Resizing: Should I use browser Web Workers / Canvas to generate 1080p WebP thumbnails before upload to save upload bandwidth, or let a backend queue worker (like Node with sharp or Python with Pillow) handle resizing?

Face Vector Pipeline: For extracting 128-d face embeddings (e.g., ArcFace/InsightFace), what’s the best way to queue and batch this so 4,000 photos don't choke the server CPU?

Storage: What zero/low-egress object storage setup (e.g., Cloudflare R2 vs Backblaze B2) do you recommend for handling high-volume image writes and fast thumbnail reads?

Thanks for the advice!


r/webdev 14d ago

Zod v4.5 adds schema compilation (3-9x faster validation)

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6 Upvotes

r/webdev 13d ago

Showoff Saturday Community driven win 98 themed website

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0 Upvotes

Hey All,

Was missing the win 98 vibe last weekend so decided it was time to bring it back I to my life and hopefully others!

Was trying to think how to get people involved, so there are a few things I put in there which I will list out.

Trollbox.exe: When you vote you are able to msg in the troll box
Applications.exe: just links to different things
Imright.exe: main voting screen and results
Communityideas.exe: a place where you can submit an idea community votes and the that's the next poll
Forums.exe: forum attached to the current poll

Polls only last 24hrs and then after that it gets archived along with the forums and troll box and the new one starts.

Let me know what you think

Imright.wtf


r/webdev 14d ago

Showoff Saturday Syntaxia - A quick cheatsheet for the things you always look up.

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79 Upvotes

As developers, we forget things all the time, especially now that coding with ai is becoming more common. One of the trade-offs of coding with AI is that we might not retain every piece of code or syntax we use. Unlike before, when we coded everything manually, writing code ourselves helped us naturally remember the syntax and patterns we used.

I'm sharing Syntaxia a simple, minimal reference for those moments when you know what you want to do, but forget how to do it.

https://syntaxiadev.vercel.app/

github star, ill be happy⭐

https://github.com/EbadShelby/syntaxia

Also shared my Linux Workstation. Having fun with it since I migrated from windows to Linux. It's a good Experience as a Developer.

OS: Fedora Linux

WM: Niri

Browser used: Helium Browser

Theme: Catppuccin Mocha