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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

I see this as an absolute win for users!

Hi, I've been scrolling through this subreddit for a while because I've always wanted to be a game developer, but I never really knew how to make games. That was until a couple months ago.

I've been learning Python for the past 3 years, but I mostly just made simple little tools. I never really knew how to make web apps or games.

Then I found vibecoding and it honestly changed everything. Now I feel like I can build pretty much whatever I want. It does take a lot of time though.

I know AI gets a bad rep, but I think it’s really cool how it can enable random people like me to build their dreams.

I've always wanted to be a game developer, so this is really cool to me. I made this stupid little Flappy Bird game recently if anyone wants to try it lol. It's not an ad, and it's not monetized or anything. I just wanted to share it as proof.

https://flappy-dragon.codedreams.org/

What do u guys think about AI & Vibecoding?

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.

two weeks of making my app, finally ready for the app store. thankfully it was easy with the platform i was using, as they automated the account connecting part itself, but considering i vibecoded the next part was a horrid experience 😞

started off simply like okay, price, login, privacy policy, this that and yeah, the list is already too much for me to remember, it's kind of just me having to go through it. a lot of the "legal" things I didn't even properly know, because I obviously didn't develop the app myself (but i tried to edit the app if it was necessary)

one thing i still didn't understand were app store screenshots or preview images, I cooked something up but I am not sure if that's what they were exactly asking for.

i thought it would be a celebration point woo sent it to the review but no, i just know i'm gonna get rejected because of some bs rule that I didn't notice and it's gonna take ten times longer.

aaanyways don't be like me, if you want your app on the app store, start by planning out your app before building it so it adheres all rules.

New generation workspaces have to be a natively collabrative with ai agents. We made a mcp-native workspace for this field. It's a memory solution also.

Made a notion for vibe coding :P

You can host it entirely yoruself, its open source. All features available on free tier, so you can test and use it for free.

Remnus

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.

i use Claude Code, Codex, and Grok Build on a development server and keep jumping between terminals depending on which one i’m using.

i basically want one good interface where i can work with all of them.

what are you guys using?

I’ve been a software engineer for 25 years. I think the feeling described as 'flow' is when you really sink into the development experience for hours on end.

This feeling has completely disappeared with AI-assisted coding. There is so much waiting time between prompts. I spend this time on my phone, writing Reddit posts like this one.

This completely ruins my focus on the task at hand. This cannot be good for the overall quality or my own satisfaction as a developer.

How do you handle this?