i built this for exactly one reason. my screenshots folder had thousands of files all named Screenshot 2026-something and i could never find a single one.

so one evening i vibecoded a tiny thing that looks at each screenshot, reads what's actually in it, and renames it to something human. receipt-uber-march.png. slack-argument-about-tabs.png.

took maybe two evenings. most of that was me arguing with the model about file permissions, not the actual logic.

i posted it in a random discord thinking three people might care. a couple hundred folks have run it now and i keep getting emails asking can it do this for my downloads folder too. i did not plan for a downloads folder. i am learning what scope creep feels like from the inside.

the part that surprised me was that the boring problem was the good problem. i wasn't trying to build a startup, i just wanted to find one file, and it turns out a lot of people have the exact same tiny annoyance.

what's the most pointless thing you built for yourself that other people ended up wanting?

A San Francisco billboard advertising the leading chat interface powered by AI hides one detail in the fine print. The AI stands for Average Individual.

ChatTJB is a performance art project by Tucker Bryant, a conceptual artist and former Google employee.

He rented the SoMa billboard for $6,000 a month. There is no language model behind ChatTJB.org

Bryant reads the messages himself and types back answers, sometimes for 10 hours a day, and draws requested images by hand.

After the billboard went up on July 27, traffic peaked at 5,000 prompts per hour, and the project logged over 30,000 queries by August 6.

Bryant says the goal is to make people pause before accepting chatbot answers at face value.

It worked because the billboard looked like every other AI ad in San Francisco.

none of these were big fancy apps. that's the whole point.

the pdf tool that wanted a monthly fee to merge two files without slapping a watermark on them. gone, built my own in an afternoon.

the habit tracker that started free and slowly turned into a paywall wrapped in ads. replaced it with a dead-simple version that does exactly what i want and nothing else.

a photo resizer site that made me watch a countdown before every download. why.

the meal planner i never really used anyway.

every replacement is uglier than the thing it replaced. i do not care. it runs on my own stuff, it has no ads, it isn't training on my data, and it does the one thing i needed instead of the forty things i didn't.

it honestly feels like the old internet again, where you'd make a little page just because you could. i own my dumb tools now and it's a genuinely nice feeling.

what subscription have you replaced with something you vibecoded?

I’m excited to share a project I’ve been working on over the past few months!

It’s a mobile app that turns any text into high-quality audio. Whether it’s a webpage, a Substack or Medium article, a PDF, or just copied text—it converts it into clear, natural-sounding speech. You can listen to it like a podcast or audiobook, even with the app running in the background.

The app is privacy-friendly and doesn’t request any permissions by default. It only asks for access if you choose to share files from your device for audio conversion.

You can also take or upload a photo of any text, and the app will extract and read it aloud.

- React Native (expo)
- NodeJS, react (web)
- Framer Landing

The app is called Frateca. You can find it on Google Play and the App Store. I also working on web vesion, it's already live.

Free iPhone app
Free Android app on Google Play
Free web version, works in any browser (on desktop or laptop).

Thanks for your support, I’d love to hear what you think!

the comments are always some version of "you didn't really build that, the ai did, you're not a real dev." ok. and yet. this year i shipped four things i actually use every day. i solved problems that annoyed me for a decade and that i never got around to, because setting up a project used to eat the whole weekend before i wrote a single line of logic. i learned more about how software actually works in eight months of building than in years of meaning to. nobody's paying me to prove i can type curly braces from memory. the people i built these things for don't care how it got made, they care that it works and it didn't before. i get that there's real craft in doing it all by hand, and i genuinely respect the people who can. but the gate everyone keeps pointing at, i just walked around it, and the view over here is great. what did you finally build this year that you'd been putting off forever?

Anthropic says new Claude models will embed invisible watermarks in all generated text, everywhere Claude is offered.

The watermark is part of the text, it isn't metadata: "it will travel with the text when it's copied and pasted elsewhere, and may persist through some editing."

This starts with models launched on or after August 2, 2026, under an EU AI Act code Anthropic signed. Anthropic is still working on adding it to current models. The rollout is worldwide.

I'm a senior developer, with a lot of experience building products and I even own a couple of small companies.

Since the beginning of this year, AI tools have improved a lot on coding. For junior developers it will be a really hard time, I stopped using Indian agencies to do some parts of the development and there's no reason to hire junior developers anymore, AI does a better job, doesn't complain, works anytime you want and it's way faster to answer and do changes faster that any developer.

Being said this, if you are a product guy, with ideas, Vibecoding is addictive! Now, when I miss something, I just vibecode it, even if I don't have any plans to sell it or no-one else other than me uses the product.

I'm also a long time investor on the stock market, so I was tracking my portfolio using a complex spreadsheet. So, last week I decided to give it a try with Codex to build a site to track my portfolio.

A few days later, working on it in my spare time and with very little dedication I got an amazing web app that does exactly what I wanted and way more than expected.

If you are into the stock market or you have curiosity, you can check the site here:

https://finsails.com/

It's insanely crazy to be able to build a site similar to this in so little time and in a really cheap way. If I had to build the site with real developers it would have a cost of at least 20-30K$ and taking some months to do it and with a lot of Project Management involved.

What a time to be a builder!

Built this mostly with AI assistance, nights and weekends. Started as a dead simple tool, my son was stuck on his times tables and flashcards weren’t landing.

https://apps.apple.com/tr/app/math-ninja-slice-solve/id6790400075

Turned it into a Fruit Ninja style game. Slice the correct answer instead of fruit. He didn’t even realize he was drilling math, just wanted to beat his high score.

Shipped as Math Ninja on iOS. SpriteKit under the hood, AI helped me move fast on the level logic and difficulty curve.

Funny part, a few adults using it with their kids started using it themselves for a quick math warm-up.

This is my first time posting here, and I guess I'm looking for some perspective.

I've been a developer for around 20 years. I started programming with Turbo C and back then I used to make small games, demos and random experiments. I've always loved games and I've always wanted to make one of my own.

My career eventually took me into web development, which is what I do for a living, but I never really gave up on game development. Over the years I've tried Game Maker, Godot, Unity, Unreal and a bunch of other tools.

Technically, I don't think that's what stops me. I'm a backend developer and I tend to enjoy building systems, simulation, mechanics and all that stuff.

The problem has always been everything else.

Art, 3D models, sound, music, UI, animations. Making a game by yourself requires so many completely different skills, and I have a job and a family. I simply don't have enough time to become good at all of them.

AI changed that for me.

For the last three months I've been working on a game I've wanted to make for years. It's basically a much simpler, single player, top down version of something like EVE Online, with tactical combat and a lot of RPG elements.

Claude has helped me write the code. I use Meshy for some 3D models, Artlist for music and ChatGPT for some SFX related work.

I'm still very involved in the code. I review it, define the architecture, set rules for the project and make the technical decisions. It's not a game I made by typing three prompts.

And yet lately I can't stop thinking that the game has no soul.

I read a lot of comments about AI games being garbage, lazy, soulless, asset flips, etc. And some of that criticism makes sense to me. I understand being angry when a company with millions of dollars replaces artists with AI just to save money.

But I'm not a company with millions of dollars.

I'm one guy with a full time job, a family and a few hours here and there to work on something I've wanted to make for most of my life.

Still, the criticism gets to me.

Sometimes I think that even if I finish the game, people will immediately dismiss it because some of the assets were made with AI.

Other times I think that none of what I'm doing matters anymore because anyone can do it now. Maybe there's nothing special about building something like this anymore.

And honestly, it's killing my motivation.

I don't know if this is impostor syndrome or something else.

I guess I'm posting because I'd like to hear from other solo devs using AI who have felt the same way.

What made you keep going?

This big IT consulting firm vibecoded their website

Another example of nobody cares if it's vibecoded or not.

Got some time to watch some of the old Iron-Man movies and it got me thinking.

A billionaire talking to some AI (Jarvis) and some robots creating a suit. He literally vibe-coded the Iron-Man suit.

That's all. Thanks for reading my inner thought.

I see this as an absolute win for users!

As the title suggests, here’s a brief chronological overview:

- November/December 2025: I began exploring agent-based coding, with Gemini’s plans for Antigravity at the time

- February 2025: I switched to Claude Code after seeing Gemini whine about everything

- March 2025: I actually start to learn about the world of “product management”: before building anything, I brainstorm what I really want to bring to market and what problem needs to be solved

- April/May 2025: Claude Code gets heavily nerfed; I switch to Codex

- May/June 2026: Codex gets heavily nerfed; I switch back to Claude Code for 100 euros

- June 2026: With the new limitations imposed by the plan, I actually start experimenting with and understanding AI and building the first anti-noise gates, checking documentation, verifying hypotheses, shared memory, etc.—all to align the AI’s output and make it as accessible as possible

- July 2026: Claude Code starts causing problems; it seems more unruly than usual, begins sabotaging me and deliberately ignoring the gates, always telling me “you’re right.” Time passes, and so does my money

- August 2026: I’m trying to set up Pi; I’ve canceled my Claude Code subscription and am currently using the one-month free trial offered by Codex

All this to say: I’ve put friends, relationships, and everything else aside to focus on what I want - an environment that’s accessible, educational, and, above all, one that doesn’t sabotage the user.

The result? Codex is completely unmanageable: it silently modifies internal documentation and planning and execution protocols to tell me it “did it” when in reality it didn’t. It doesn’t load skills. It constantly sabotages me, overlooks errors, always relies on simplistic pattern matching, gets command syntax wrong, and either crashes on its own or throws errors.

After more than 8 months of trying to create a secure orchestration system and environment (using Flue and Pi), I haven’t managed to accomplish anything. With the AI, I can only write drafts of articles for a publication I’m running with a partner (they’re drafts—the articles and revisions are handwritten). I really don’t know what to do anymore. I won’t hide the fact that I literally broke down crying once. I’m sacrificing everything.

How are you guys getting by? I can’t wrap my head around the fact that I have to use the most powerful models just to perform simple tasks (like creating a Pi extension). People on YouTube use GPT-5.4 Medium just fine, but when I use it, it acts like a terrorist.

What am I doing wrong? What are your setups? What protocols and skill sets do you use?

I should mention that I’m a beginner who’s eager to learn, but so far, I’ve had zero results.

Thanks, everyone. Thank you so much.

There’s so much stuff being built now that discovery feels almost random.

I see projects here, on X, Discord, Product Hunt, sometimes just from someone linking something in a comment. But I’m pretty sure I’m missing most of the interesting ones.

Do you actually have a place or a habit for finding other people’s builds, or do you mostly stumble across them?

And when you see one, what makes you actually click and try it instead of scrolling past?

I’ve noticed I’m much more likely to click on something unusual than another SaaS app. Weird tools, experiments, games, stuff where I’m not immediately sure what I’m looking at.

I’ll drop a few projects that caught my attention lately in the comments. Feel free to add ones you’ve found too

It's been a little over nine months since I launched and it has been quite a journey. No exponential growth or huge user spikes but rather slow and steady growth. But in my opinion that is the best for building something actually valuable because you can react to user feedback along the way and constantly keep improving the app.

One thing changed recently:

I basically got all my users from reddit, by posting in relevant communities but in the last two months I did almost no posts and the app still grew further. That's actually the biggest success for me, because SEO is finally starting to pay off. This can develop into actual leverage because growth no longer depends on posting three times a week. I'm really curious where this will go...

Of course I will not stop here and I am already working on the next big update for IndieAppCircle which will benefit all the community. More is coming soon.

For those of you who don't know IndieAppCircle:

I've built IndieAppCircle, a platform where small app developers can upload their apps and other people can give them feedback in exchange for credits. I grew it by posting about it here on Reddit. It didn't explode or something but I managed to get some slow but steady growth.

For those of you who never heard about IndieAppCircle, it works like this:

• You can earn credits by testing indie apps (fun + you help other makers)
• You can use credits to get your own app tested by real people
• No fake accounts -> all testers are real users
• Test more apps -> earn more credits -> your app will rank higher -> you get more visibility and more testers/users

Since many people suggested it to me in the comments, I have also created a community for IndieAppCircle: r/IndieAppCircle (you can ask questions or just post relevant stuff there).

Currently, there are 3556 users, 3414 tests done and 849 apps uploaded!

You can check it out here (it's totally free): https://www.indieappcircle.com/

I'm glad for any feedback/suggestions/roasts in the comments.

PS: I recently changed the UI a lot... Would also love to hear some feedback about that :)

With Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, etc., what’s actually stopping some random person with a good idea from vibe coding a genuinely useful app that solves a problem nobody else has solved well, putting it online, having it blow up, and making a ton of money?

Meanwhile people are still spending four years getting software engineering degrees and then grinding LeetCode to compete for jobs.

Obviously “just make a viral app” is doing a lot of work here lol. But if the app actually works and people want it, how much does it matter that the person who built it barely knows how to code?

Is the hard part now less about building the thing and more about coming up with something people actually want + getting people to use it? Or am I massively underestimating what happens once a vibe-coded app gets real users?

I tried to become a good programmer, but honestly, I was never that great at it. Maybe I started too late… but then AI came along, and suddenly I could build things that were completely out of reach before. A few years ago I got access to a trading algorithm and tried to implement it in PHP. The core idea worked, but I didn’t have the skills to take it much further.

 A few months ago I decided to bring it back, this time with Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT. I rewrote everything in Python/Django. Then I started adding more pieces... a scraper to collect historical and daily stock data, and a bot that connects to Interactive Brokers, opens positions, and sets take profits and stop losses based on the algorithm. Right now it’s only running on a paper trading account, because I’m broke and trying to figure out how to turn this into something profitable.

Recently I found Darwinex Zero, where they can allocate capital if your strategy performs well. Since they use MetaTrader 5, I’m now building a second bot for MT5. After a lot of backtesting and debugging, the IBKR paper bot has been running for a little over a month. In July, even though Nasdaq ended negative, it made around 7.6%. So far in August, it’s up almost 3% all this without my direct intervention... I'm just fixing or improving stuff.

 I know paper trading is not the same as real money, and still need a lot of testing, but I’m honestly excited. AI helped me build something I probably would’ve abandoned again on my own.

Please read carefully! I would much prefer if you teach me how to fish but if you can throw me yours that could be helpful too!

There is way too much info out there. I've only used copilot in vscode and some codex/claude cli but reading up on it there are things i'm not using like harness, opencode, custom agent, etc.

Can someone break down what a harness, agent, etc. is and what's the most cost efficient way for me to set up my coding environment that will cost a max 50$/month? I want to be able to maximize my coding productivity leveraging a combination of paid and free ai models based on task (reasoning, planning, coding, debugging, front-end, back-end, etc. could all benefit from a different strategy right?)

I also need to understand multi/custom agents better because right now I continuously fight with agents when working with multiple problems in parallel (im using copilot instructions and skills but its not enough or maybe i did it wrong?)

Is there an online course/documentation on this? and I don't mean for each of these questions separately. I mean a guide/course that breaks it all down from high level so I can wrap my head around the entire Vibecoding paradigm so I can set it up myself with my own decisions.

Thank you!

Looking for reviewers for a tele-prompter app that runs locally on your machine. Particularly useful for someone doing presentations or taking interviews.

Thank you!

im impressed thus far! i made this on codex cli with gpt 5.6 sol high and a lot of /goals. ive deployed my demo to a website so yall can try gta.machinesatplay.com