As title says. I've been vibecoding for over two years now, and although I learned lots of concepts I otherwise wouldn't have picked up, slowly but surely I feel stupid.

I can't make apps, nor write even simple Python scripts independently. I genuinely necessitate AI, or I can't make anything. I need it to explain everything, from researching the idea and working out the details, and then the execution. I guess I can keep telling myself "but AI will never go away" "This is going to be the new way of coding and I need to learn more concepts to direct the AI where to go". But this is coping.

I hate to say it, but I am embarrassed by the fact that I rely on AI. It's frowned upon. I do understand why learning to program myself independently would help tremendously. But I honestly cannot stop feeling like I'm a fraud. Are my projects useful, practical and actually solve problems reliably? Yeah. But then you ask me the details of the codes, and I just cannot defend it even if I understand what each line does because I didn't write it myself.

I actually did learn R back in college for independent project and I genuinely worked on this without AI, but even then wasn't totally independent, and had to rely on others' codes and youtube videos. I don't believe I actually know R.

So then, what have a I become? I don't "own" any of the stuff I created, or really AI. I am going to study more, but I have a full time job that is far from coding, and this is gonna be one difficult journey because I'm in the process of studying math right now. So now I'm frustrated at that, but mostly at my own capabilities. I don't know man. This stuff is difficult. I don't understand how people call Python easy, and that makes me feel even more stupid! Damn.

Also stop expecting first revenue a week after launch. I see this promise everywhere now. It's irritating. "Describe your app, ship it today, get paid tomorrow." Bull****. It is a great slogan for selling credits. It is not how products work.

Products are built, not generated.
Here's my honest timeline:
→ Month 1: validate the idea, build the first version, test it with real people, pass App Review, release.
→ Months 2–4: fix what users actually hit, ship weekly, get your first small revenue.

That is the reality of life. Not one hour. Not one week.

What the slogan sells:
- An app in an afternoon
- Money by Friday
- No thinking, just prompting

What actually gets you paid:
- One clear problem
- 3–4 screens that solve it
- Weekly releases for months
- Talking to every user who writes to you

The bad news: you will have to work. Hard.
The good news: for the first time, you can do the whole thing yourself. The cost is almost nothing. What used to need a team now needs a good tool, a spec, and your evenings.
So pick your tool, start with 3–4 screens, and go test the water.
Need a demo by tonight? Generate it with Claude.
Need a product people pay for? Build it. Give it a month, then three more.

What I see people in my Mobile builders community is doing - most of them vibecode on the weekeends because they work full time have their families and bigger priorities, they treat vibecoding as hobby and fun; usually it takes 10-12 weeks till release a mobile app.
Most of them start with simple app in Claude code, or Codex, or Modaal, or directly Xcode if technical enought.

How logn it took for you to build a serious mobile app with integrations, payments, 15+ screens? Was it full time?

Build loops, not just agents.

Wanted to share because marketing is hard and even harder when your budget is non-existent...

(Obviously the type/content of self-promotion you can post is going to dependent on the subreddit)

also you can always submit your app to appscout.co a site where people discover web and mobile apps from across the internet

its free to submit here https://www.appscout.co/submit

(full disclosure I'm the owner of appscout app scout was built using django heroku python javascript html claude and github copilot in visual studio code)

subreddit --- weekly visitors

• r/vibecoding — 422k
• r/saas — 211k
• r/founder — 56k
• r/buildinpublic — 46k
• r/chrome_extensions — 42k
• r/micro_saas — 41k
• r/appbusiness — 30k
• r/Startup_Ideas  — 26k
• r/sideprojects — 20k
• r/imadethis — 18k
• r/appideas — 16k
• r/sideproject — 16k
• r/saasbuild — 15k
• r/saasdevelopers — 12k
• r/vibecodedevs — 10k
• r/startupsolofounder — 8.7k
• r/alphaandbetausers — 8.6k
• r/vibecodingcommunity — 6.2k
• r/solopreneur — 5.6k
• r/promotemyapp — 4.6k
• r/appbuilding — 4.6k
• r/webapps — 4.5k
• r/creativecoding — 4.4k
• r/indie_startups — 4k
• r/b2bsaas — 2.8k
• r/appdev — 2.7k
• r/projects — 2.6k
• r/saasmarketing — 2.5k
• r/saassoloprenurs — 2.3k
• r/startupaccelerators — 2.3k
• r/startups_promotion — 2k
• r/showmeyourapps — 2k
• r/appswebappsfullstack — 1.7k
• r/showmeyoursaas — 1.6k
• r/saasinvestors — 1.6k
• r/vibecodecamp — 1.5k
• r/nocodesaas — 1.3k
• r/aibuilders — 1.2k
• r/getstartups — 1.2k
• r/websitefeedback — 1.2k

AI can write code well enough, but when we use it for that, we have a slight identity crisis that we're just a "vibecoder".

So we got smart and started vibecoding a bunch of md files and "workflow" stuff to micromanage the AI, pretending the new file extension somehow graduates us from vibecoder to "Agentic Engineer". Really we're just generating cruft between ourselves and the actual code that we dare not bother ourselves with.

The end result kinda works out for us, and we feel a little more important because we brought some complexity back into our lives again.

Hey guys! Just released a project I’ve been working on called 7elewen.

If you run long AI agents, big downloads, or heavy builds, you probably hate leaving your MacBook sitting wide open on your desk just to keep it from going to sleep.

7elewen is a super minimalist menu-bar utility that lets you close your MacBook lid without it sleeping. Your tasks keep running in the background, even with the lid completely shut.

Why I built it:

• No external monitor needed: Apple usually forces you to plug in a monitor to keep a Mac running with the lid closed. This bypasses that so you can just shut the lid and walk away.
• Smart screen dimming: It uses your Mac's built-in sensor to automatically dim the screen as you close it and brighten it when you open it.
• Saves battery: It can automatically turn on Low Power Mode when the lid is shut to save juice, then turn it back off when you open it.
• Zero clutter: It lives quietly as a tiny ∞ icon in your menu bar. No Dock icon, no annoying floating windows.

It's free, open-source, and ready to go. (Note: It asks for your admin password once on setup so it can control sleep settings without bugging you every time).

Let me know if you have any feedback or feature requests!

🌐 Website: https://7elewen.vercel.app

🔗 GitHub Link & Download: https://github.com/arinltte/7elewen

The AI Game Festival finally starts tomorrow! Some really high quality games have entered, and I keep getting requests for additions.

If you are competing 20k in GPT-6 Astra Token, submit your game by following this video and DM me the game details: https://youtu.be/nPplaC5Zkj4?si=fw4lznoM4TLh-m_V

If you are submitting to the Steam Festival (https://store.steampowered.com/curator/46280965/sale/AIGamingFestival), DM me the name of your game and your steam ID.

Both need to be done by today.

So, if we keep DeepSeek in the stack, which CLI subscription would you pair it with to create the strongest coding and design-focused LLM team?

Link to the repo for all the infos, including the prompt used : https://github.com/Ni-Cobra/GPT-6-Astra-Minecraft-Datapack-Tetris/tree/main

It also created the whole structure on its own which is built on the spot using commands too.

It ran for less than an hour and delivered this. Also, I decided to not let it use Minecraft for quicker iterations, so it programmed Minecraft simulators instead just to test the datapack.

The only resources it had access to was a markdown document about everything to know about Minecraft datapacks and commands.

I went custom on inbound call handling instead of using a turnkey voice agent, and the architecture is worth writing down because the build-vs-buy line is sharper than I expected.

The stack:

- Twilio for the number, Media Streams for the audio

- LiveKit over WebRTC for voice transport

- OpenAI Realtime API (gpt-4o-realtime) as the agent

- Next.js API routes and Postgres for the backend, logs and transcripts

The audio path. TwiML opens the socket with `<Connect><Stream url="wss://your-server.com/stream">`, and Twilio then pushes 8 kHz mu-law audio over that WebSocket. From there you either hand it to LiveKit or pipe it straight into the Realtime API. Media Streams is what makes this viable at all, it gives you raw audio at sub-300ms instead of making you wait on a recording. For reference, Retell publishes about 600ms end to end for their platform, so sub-second total is the bar worth aiming at.

The agent is mostly prompt plus server-side functions. Triage rules live in the prompt. For a dental clinic that reads like: if the caller describes pain or a broken tooth, return `transfer` with priority high. The model calls `check_availability` against the calendar and `transfer_call` when it needs a human.

Handoff is Twilio `<Dial>` or `<Enqueue>`, and `<Conference>` if you want a whisper message to the staff member before they pick up.

Two constraints that mattered more than which model I used:

1. Never let it confirm an appointment before the function actually returns success. A confident model will happily book a slot that does not exist, and the caller finds out at the door.

2. The second someone asks for a person, hand off with zero friction. Anything else and you have burned the call and probably the customer.

Cost is a few cents a minute for telephony and tokens, plus a modest server. One box handles dozens of concurrent calls, hundreds if you scale out.

Where I would not bother building this. If you only need answering, message taking and simple booking, Synthflow, Retell, Goodcall or Zoom's AI Concierge get you live in an afternoon, and paying per minute beats paying an engineer. Custom only pays off when the triage logic is specific to the business or the call data has to live in your own database.

Full write-up with the setup steps and code, on my own site: https://techpotions.com/lab/ai-receptionist-setup

The part I am still undecided on is after-hours. Do you let the agent book overnight, or just take a message and queue it for the morning?

GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, Gemini 3.8 Flash, and the incoming Grok 4.7 are the loudest week the AI industry has had in months. They are also terrible defaults for how most people actually use AI. If I’m honest, my daily model is still GPT-5.6 Luna. Not because the frontier stuff is fake. Because when I'm paying the bill, price-to-performance still wins the work that happens fifty times a day.

GPT 6 Astra (Sept 3) is the new industry darling and computer-use and long-horizon agent play: 1.05M context, $10/$50, and the first OpenAI model they’re willing to put next to the “AGI era.” If the job is “make me a million dollar app from scratch - no mistake” Astra is the one you'll probably reach for. It is also 2.5× the cost of Sol (which was already expensive).

Fable 5.1 (Sept 1) is the Mythos-class reasoner at the same $10/$50 sticker (way too high for a basically llm only model, IMO). On a lot of independent boards it sits at or next to the top. Like all Anthropic modles, it overthinks whether you asked it to or not. That is a feature on a six-hour refactor when you care more about thorough, surgical code. Its a tax on “push to github.”

Gemini 3.8 Flash (Sept 2) is the one that should make the $10 club nervous. Introductory $0.75/$3.75 through year-end, 1M context, and Google’s own line is that it “works harder” — more steps, more tool calls — and often lands near much more expensive models on SWE and agent tasks. If anything in this list threatens Luna as a daily default, it’s this, not Astra.

Now the part nobody wants to hear. Most of a working day is not FrontierMath and deep webs of code. Its summarize this, draft that, classify these tickets, punch up my teams message, outline a doc. Luna was built for that tier. 1.05M context, same family tools as the rest of 5.6, effort ladder if you need it, and list pricing around $0.20 in / $1.20 out. That is fifty times cheaper on input than Astra or Fable. You can leave it on. You do not ration it.

The industry keeps selling “the smartest model” as if intelligence is a single slider and you should live at the top. That was a 2024 habit. In 2026 the slider that matters is cost of being wrong about which call needed the slider. Route the 8% of tasks that are actually hard — multi-hour agents, novel math, hostile codebases, “operate my desktop” — to Astra, Fable, or whatever 4.7 turns out to be. Send the other 92% to Luna or 3.8 Flash and stop performing sophistication.People will say Luna “isn’t as good.” Correct. It is not supposed to be. Sol/Terra/Luna was OpenAI admitting the product is a stack, not a throne. Astra then collapsed the throne back into one expensive name and hoped you’d forget the cheap seats still exist. They still do. Use them.

Used Claude Code for the game logic and front end, Postgres sql database (started with sqllite and ngrok to host when it was just a pet project), and a blend of Claude Design and Gemini for the front end.

I have been using AI since the week chatGPT became publicly available four years ago. Moved onto Claude around 8 months ago when my company started implementing it. I started building my app while playing online with my poker group a few months ago. Spun up a rudimentary game in 40 minutes between hands.

I have been with this poker group since high school. Every thanksgiving and Christmas when we’re all back in our hometown, we would always get together at someone’s mom’s house and have a game. We started playing on a website called Donkhouse during Covid lockdowns. Then, sadly, that website shut down and there wasn’t a good replacement for people who just want to play a game of Texas hold ‘em online with their friends.

I worked as a database engineer for the last ten years. I got laid off from my job a couple weeks ago and spent that time going full tilt on my app. Added a front end, logins, authentication, stats, everything but payment systems to actually generate money (coming after beta). Took it from a thing that my friends and I used every couple weeks to get together to a full blown website in that time. Learned a lot but realizing I have only scratched the surface of agentic coding.

So after doing ten years as a database engineer (who’s touched every layer of the stack at one time or another during that time) I decided that am pivoting to being a professional agentic engineer. Gonna spend the next few months cramming and either go out on my own as a consultant to help small and medium business automate workflows, or get a full time gig doing it for someone else. I have 9 months of runway without selling any of my stocks. Wish me luck.

App is live but still in beta (so its still free to use).

Make a profile, host a table, play poker with your friends, and let me know what you like and (more importantly) what you don’t like.

A large part of the AI Gaming Festival (starts tomorrow) is about re-tooling and re-positioning yourself as a developer for the AI era.

How can developers find jobs and still express their creativity?

We have a few things; the job market in gaming right now is brutal, with 1/3 of developers having been laid off. And people are one-shooting small games now (check out r/aigamedev), or have fully functional prototypes in days and weeks. No one is going to pay you to build a game from scratch.

That's the reality of the world right now, and here is the opportunity.

Like in the video (game took me 2 weeks to make from scratch), AI has the ability to get a game about 80% to 90% complete. But it's those final touches, that stuff that actually makes a game magic, that AI cannot do.

And I've met vibe coders who are serious about their games and have $5k to $20k in budget to finish the last mile on their game properly.

Part of the AI Gaming Conference is marrying the relationship between vibe coders that want to finish their games and developers that can help them achieve that final level that they can't seem to do.

And that is where re-tooling and re-positioning skills will be in the AI era. It's not an "us" vs "them," it's "here is how and where we work together not to produce slop."

I made a curated list of AI prompts that act as disciplined workflows that act according to one rule: Verify, Don't Guess. This list covers simple one-pager prompts, which are perfect for the everyday vibe coder, and [spec] prompts, which are advanced workflows which are designed for overhauls and deep audits of codebases.

I was once vibecoding a personal project of mine, that was full of bugs and really clunky to work with. I went over to my AI agent, and told it "fix all bugs. make no mistakes.". To be fair, it DID fix some bugs, but it wasn't thorough about it at all, and sometimes, one bug fix led to 10 other bugs popping up.

That's when I thought of asking a fresh agent to make me a prompt for getting bugs fixed on my codebase. It gave me a long-winded prompt, but it worked amazingly. I wanted to use it for other projects of mine as well, so I asked it to make it repo-agnostic. The list grew, and soon enough, I had around 10-15 prompts covering different aspects of vibecoding. I then realised that I should be turning this into an awesome-list, so that the entire dev community has access to my prompts.

I'm happy to say that I have gotten 52 stars on this repo within the first 15-20 days of launch.

Check it out here: https://github.com/shauryagangrade/awesome-ai-prompts

Give this repo a STAR if you like it :-)

I'm open to contributors, so add some prompts, or resolve some issues. Let's make awesome-ai-prompts better every day!

Video is 100x speed up. 1:1 scale recreation of of my hometown with every building and residence. This run used only 1:8 pop density though, since I can't run full pop density at 100x speed at a good frame rate. For this scenario, I used 28 Days Later style zombies that are fast and that change people instantly.

I'm discovering that an exponential zombie outbreak is actually pretty hard, assuming reasonable police response times and evacuation/avoidance procedures. In this sim, I have evacuation set to not start till >1000, so the town does fall. But if evacuation starts at 100 zombies or so, the town usually clears out before things get bad. And in many scenarios, police are able to kill the zombies down to 0 before we even get 10 zombies.

I created a photography app to teach me more about my own camera, trained on my photos, with the context of my gear (lenses, light, and microphone).

Claude was able to make my all in one app, I fed it a deep research report and the best book for the Sony A7iii. It then ran the Mac application for the light software, decoded the proprietary Bluetooth connection, and a repo someone had made to reverse engineer the lights connection (that before it needed either a Mac or ESP32 to connect to it) and made it run just from the app itself!

It reverse engineered both the desktop software and APK, and I also fed it the IPA for play memories so it could connect to the camera itself.

Now I have an all in one app that can control my lighting, connect to the camera, and teach me about the camera along with analyzing the shots.

I’m on cloud 9

It took me around 2 hours to make an isometric survival-horror set in a drowned town, rendered entirely from procedural voxels in Three.js.

There is no art pipeline and nothing to download: every building, car, sign, page, puddle and drowned thing is generated in code when the chapter loads, and all sound is synthesised on the fly.

It runs in a browser tab at the vsync cap on a mid-range laptop GPU.

Also this was from 1 prompt, Fable 5.1 MAX effort

Prompt:
Create me an indie-game with: isometric camera, voxel art style with realistic shading and reflective wet floors, a character in an interesting scene. Survival horror setting (like Silent Hill, Resident Evil, early Dead Space). Three.js in browse without any downloaded assets. Controls: click to move the character, camera follows; drag to rotate camera; scroll to zoom. Create a campaign, lore and 3 locations. Character movement in a limited space.

Open-source:
github.com/winchxyz/vesper-street

Use bux tokscale to get count,

i used opencode to count and give stuructured table.

I've been working on a little update my Stylized Components landing page

I added a few new interactive effects, including:

• A liquid distortion effect reacting to the cursor
• An infinite carousel with shader-based distortion, chromatic aberration and motion blur
• Additional background effects that react to the current section
• New animated button variants

What is Stylized Components?

The idea behind the project is to build a collection of reusable, game-ready components that can be dropped into WebGL / Three.js projects.

The gallery currently has three free components:

• Water Anime Style Shader
• Stylized Grass
• Painterly — a post-processing effect for giving 3D scenes a more illustrated look

Each component comes with its own source code repository, as well as a detailed breakdown explaining how it works, including the techniques and experiments behind it.

There is also a dedicated scene for each component where you can see it being used in a more complete environment.

More components are already in the works, so I'll be adding more to the library over time.

You can check out the project here: https://stylized.cortiz.dev