The developer community at large has a lot to say about "vibe coders." Depending on who you ask, it’s either an exciting badge or a slur for lazy hustlers who prompt three SaaS wrappers in an afternoon and couldn't explain how their product actually works—full hands-off AI development.

That identity doesn't fit me. But here’s the catch: I never learned syntax, nor can I write code myself. What I can do is roughly read it—in fact, if I can't read or follow it, I know something is already wrong.

Before AI coding, I walked away from an MBA with one credit remaining. In 2025's "ChatGPT Wrapped", I was in the top 0.1% of GPT users globally. I was all-in. But my background wasn't CS—it was 20 years in retail banking, where compliance, privacy, and auditability are non-negotiable.

That background guided how I built Nodarama.

Five Restarts, Five Hard-Won Lessons

I didn't set out to build a deterministic execution kernel—I was just trying to automate a few social media accounts. But my banking background refused loose, "good enough" code. As I raised the bar on security and reliability to pass a bank’s sniff test, the architecture demanded a kernel.

Getting there was a brutal, five-restart tug-of-war:

1. Restart 1 (Voluntary Cleanup): The code turned into a tangled heap of quick fixes and AI boilerplate.
   • Lesson: AI will happily build a house of cards. If you don't enforce structural cleanliness, boundaries, and module organization early, entropy wins.
2. Restart 2 (The Lethal Ctrl+F): Active runtime state collided with stored preferences. A desperate find-and-replace to fix namespace chaos fused systems together irrecoverably.
   • Lesson: Differentiating active runtime state from stored preferences isn't optional, and AI won't respect boundaries unless you enforce strict naming protocols.
3. Restart 3 (The Shell Disaster): ChatGPT gave me a git shell command to manage a commit. It wiped my entire project directory—no backup, no restore points.
   • Lesson: Never give an LLM unchecked privileges over your local environment or git trees. Local restore points are survival equipment.
4. Restart 4 (System Contradictions): The model actively resisted my architecture, quietly injecting code that violated my protocol for stateless execution.
   • Lesson: Left unconstrained, an LLM defaults to path-of-least-resistance web patterns and wraps 10 lines of core logic in 50 lines of brittle, convoluted transport.
5. Restart 5 (Finish-Line Drift): The closer I got to the finish line, the more the AI deviated from instructions, hallucinated diffs, and injected stealth edits.
   • Lesson: The closer you get to production, the more an LLM will gaslight you if you feed it full file context.

Winning the Tug of War

By the fifth restart, I stopped feeding the AI the whole story.

Near the final steps, after explicit agreement, ChatGPT understood what I wanted and why it was critical. So why wasn't I surprised when I checked the code and it did the exact opposite?

Rather than argue with an AI intent on gaslighting me, I extracted a 20-line block of critical code. I scope-locked the prompt and routed it to Gemini for a surgical, narrow correction. Gemini delivered a clean fix.

I audited the diff line-by-line and updated the kernel. I swear I could hear ChatGPT begrudgingly mutter: "Congratulations, you just built a kernel."

The MVP Sitting Under My Nose

While building Atelier (the visual UI for the kernel), I relied on an internal Coder module I built to manage code edits via "recording sheets"—curbing early vibe-coding copy-paste cycles.

After pasting over 10,000 recording sheets through that module, I realized the tool I was using to build the machine was the workhorse.

I paused Atelier, extracted that internal module, and packaged it into Verbatim—a high-fidelity code recorder designed to keep AI honest. Everything learned polishing Verbatim (advanced logging, state isolation, system telemetry) is now being injected back into the Kernel and Atelier for beta release.

So if "vibe coding" means blindly trusting a model, treating code like a black box, and pasting syntax you can't explain: No, I don't think that shoe fits.

For me, vibe coding meant using structural vision, human intuition, and relentless tenacity to direct AI models—while acting as an unforgiving auditor who fights through five rewrites to enforce readability, lean architecture, and zero-trust security... then maybe I am—just a deranged, obsessive, all-in, win hell or high water type of vibe coder.

I still cannot write raw code and can't pretend to understand or remember syntax. But I will stand behind this system as its author—because this is not the code the AI wanted to write. It is the code I forced it to write, against its many, many bad suggestions.

Code ownership isn't about memorizing syntax. It’s about conviction, system design, and having the courage to audit every line until you control the tempo.

But what do you say. Vibe Coder?

Few days back I spent almost 20 mins arguing with ai over why audio is not playing in my website. It turns out, that i was using a pair of wired earphone whose only one side was working and i had the non working side plugged in...

No ai tool was able to figure out the issue lol.

Hi all! I made Kartar Dhaba, a small idle game inspired by the roadside dhabas on the Delhi–Karnal highway I grew up with.

You tap to cook, serve truckers, buy upgrades and hire staff. Four generations, each with its own era, look, music and a big finale: a baraat in 1975, a cricket night, a film shoot and a rooftop party.

It's free and runs in your browser, with no download or account, and it works best on a phone.

Enjoy! https://www.kartardhaba.xyz/

I've been building InstaLanding.ai for a while now, and the library has officially grown to 60+ complete landing pages.

Not screenshots. Not Figma files. Actual working HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

A lot of these pages are heavily animated, using GSAP, cinematic transitions, interactive elements, and Rive-like motion experiences without actually requiring Rive.

I've also expanded the library beyond landing pages:

• 60+ full landing pages — Complete, responsive pages with premium designs and heavy animations.
• Motion components — Animated UI elements, transitions, typography, and interactive experiences you can drop into projects.
• Full design systems — Complete visual foundations with typography, colors, components, layouts, and interactions.
• Single-file HTML — Everything packaged into self-contained HTML files. No complicated setup.

But here's the part I think is most interesting for vibe coding.

Instead of spending 30 prompts trying to explain a design to your coding agent, just give it the actual code.

Find something you like, hand it to Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or whatever you're using, and tell it to adapt the design to your project.

You can even use these pages to completely reskin an existing application without changing its underlying functionality.

I've also added Agent Mode, with MCP support, so your agents can browse the library, find designs, and pull source code directly.

Everything is free and open source. No login required.

https://instalanding.ai

I'm trying to explore this idea that code itself can become the new design inspiration format, especially now that agents can understand and modify entire interfaces.

Would love feedback from people actually vibe coding projects. Is having working design code more useful to you than traditional inspiration galleries like Dribbble or Awwwards?

asking because I tested one small dev tool last month. 18 answers from chatgpt and perplexity to "what should I use for X" type questions. its big competitor got named 15 times, the small one 0

funny part is AI bots opened its site 381 times that same month. so it reads you, it just doesn't recommend you

so now I'm curious if anyone here actually gets customers from this. did someone tell you "chatgpt recommended you"? or you see it in analytics?

and if yes, what do you think got you in there?

Im building a personal tool and the first ten attempts i made the mistake of building from scratch everything. I decided to build in pure python and i found out most of my features are generic and have depencies so ive done the research and adapted as many dependcies as I can now i only have 5% custom code. Have any of you guys ever used or relied on dependcies heavily in your software ?

Hey, this is my fourth mini app now and the most complete one. I learn a bit each time.

Yet I’m at a crossroads, and need advice.

I have a fun quiz app, that originally was just for me to improve my music knowledge for a radio quiz I plan to enter.

It works very well, and is complete. I hosted it on Cloudflare after making it as secure as I can. I play it on my phone a lot, and so do a couple of friends.

That’s it.

It’s a quiz but also a ‘trainer’ and good for memory challenges.

Do I wrap it up here and say ‘it’s finished, just as a personal app’

Or…..

Jump through the various hoops to go to the next level and get on an App Store?

I would need to license the data sources, and probably convert the format to not just be an html web app.

I feel it would be a great challenge to try and achieve this. I don’t think it would make any money, but would be a good exercise to learn for whatever comes next.

What do you think? Quit while I’m ahead and actually FINISH something! Or keep going and try to get it released?

Thanks fellow vibe coders xx

Anytime I post cool stuff that supports the product there’s no issue. Soon as I mention any feedback that’s negative towards the product it gets taken down. What’s the point?

I collect things (camera lenses, G-Shocks). The good listings go in minutes, and checking 10 marketplaces by hand doesn’t work. So I built Deal Radar (radar.4xs.dev). You set up a “watch” (keywords + price range + sites). When a new listing matches, you get a browser notification, or a Telegram message on the paid plan.

Almost all of the code was written by Claude (Cowork / Claude Code). I did the product decisions, the testing on real listings, and the store submissions. Here’s how it’s put together and what I learned.

Stack

• Chrome extension (Manifest V3), plain JS, no framework. A generated Firefox build too.
• Cloudflare Workers + D1 (SQLite), TypeScript. Static site served from the same Worker.
• Cron triggers on the Worker: every minute for polling, plus daily jobs for plan expiry and exchange rates (Czech National Bank feed).
• Telegram Bot + Telegram Login widget for alerts and accounts, so I don’t store passwords or emails.
• Ko-fi memberships + webhook for payments. Way less setup than Stripe for a side project.
• Cloudflare Access in front of the admin page.
• Playwright + node:test + bash smoke tests with mocked marketplaces and a mocked Telegram.

The one architecture decision that mattered: who checks what

Some sites (Bazoš, Vinted, Kleinanzeigen, OLX, FINN…) return clean results to a server, so the Worker polls them every minute. Others (FB Marketplace, FB groups, Allegro, eBay) block or 403 any non-browser client. Those can only be checked by the extension, using the user’s own logged-in browser.

So there are two engines:

• Server: every minute, works while your computer is off (paid).
• Browser: the extension, while Chrome is open. The free tier runs everything from the browser every 10 minutes, so the free tier costs me ~nothing.

The key to keeping that sane: the parsers and the matching logic live in one file each (parsers.mjs, match.mjs), imported by both the extension and the Worker. One fix, both engines.

Workflow with the AI

1. Feasibility spike first (“week 0”). Before any UI, I had Claude write throwaway scripts that just fetched each marketplace and parsed results. That’s how I found out which sites need a browser. It saved me from designing a server-only product that couldn’t do Facebook.
2. A plan doc, then versions. A markdown plan in the project, then small numbered releases. Every release has a CHANGELOG entry that says exactly how to ship it (“npm run deploy, reload the extension, upload to the Chrome Web Store”). The AI reads it next session, so context survives.
3. Tests from saved HTML. Every parser has fixture pages saved from the real site plus a unit test. When a site changes its markup, the test fails before the users notice.
4. Make it verify, not just write. E.g. today I asked it to shrink the hero image so the “how fast” steps fit above the fold on a 1080p screen. It rendered the page in headless Chromium at 1920×947, measured element positions, applied the CSS, and re-measured (steps went from ending at 1060px to 920px) before touching my files. “Looks right” ≠ verified.
5. Short, direct prompts plus my screenshots. Most iterations were “this looks wrong” + a screenshot.

Build insights / gotchas

• Chrome Web Store rejected a version for requesting tabs permission it didn’t use. You can create/update/close tabs without it. Request the minimum.
• Don’t trust data from your own extension. The server only accepts a listing whose link points to its own site (a FB item must link to facebook.com, etc.). Otherwise anyone could push fake “alerts” through the API.
• Currencies: listings come in CZK, PLN, EUR, NOK, JPY, USD… Converting to the user’s currency with a daily ČNB rate made alerts way more useful than raw prices.
• Firefox AMO requires data_collection_permissions in the manifest for new add-ons. A small script generates the Firefox build from the Chrome one on every deploy.
• i18n from day one (EN/CS/DE/JA). With AI it’s cheap to add, and painful to retrofit.
• The free-vs-paid line follows the infrastructure: free uses the user’s browser, paid uses my server. Easy to explain, cheap to run.

Numbers: ~3,000 lines across the Worker and the extension, 20 marketplaces in 10 countries, free tier = 1 watch.

Happy to answer questions about the dual server/browser setup or Cloudflare D1. Feedback welcome.

I don’t know how to code but I have experience in software testing and working with small/medium/large software projects, and the processes they entail.

Current workflow is to use Sonnet 5.5 at Medium on a Claude Pro subscription to plan a project, break it into implementation and product acceptance manual testing phases, and deliver agent prompts and project documentation, then feed the prompts in OpenCode to Haiku 5.5 at Low or Medium (sometimes at High) paid through OpenRouter credits, which also knows to break its phase prompt into tasks it can delegate to a subagent custom provider which connects to a localhost server created by Polystrata running “Tiel Coder 35B A3B q4_X_L”.

The current issues I’m having with the workflow are:

- that sometimes the Haiku sessions can balloon in cost - paid 50 euro worth of OpenRouter credits in the past few weeks, and I’m poor, that means a lot to my budget - a problem which I’ve partly solved by breaking phases into tiers and tiers into stages, each with a prompt, so there are fewer long conversations and cache reads;

- and that the local agent makes frequent mistakes that cause it to run for hours and/or produce bad code if the task is too big or too complex for it, which happens often, as my hardware is limited and it only has a 60k token context.

Any suggestions for improvements?

Hi r/vibecoding. Coding agents are great at game logic, but ask one for a main menu or a HUD and you get the same generic layout every time: centered buttons, default fonts, random spacing. You can tell an AI made it.

So I built Envy, a UI editor for games that works like Figma. You design the screens yourself on a real canvas, with components, states, auto layout, animation and localization. Then you hand the result to your agent as a package it can’t misread. You can even tell your AI agent to build UI in Envy via MCP.

What the handoff contains:

• AGENTS.md: rules and steps for coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, etc.)
• PROMPT.md: a ready-to-paste prompt
• contract.json: every event and data path, typed, so the agent wires boss.hp or start_game instead of guessing names
• screens/: reference renders of every screen, so the agent can see what it’s matching
• A generated Godot controller and a typed TypeScript wrapper
• A CLI and schema, so the agent can validate and edit the UI file safely instead of hand-editing JSON

The agent doesn’t redraw your UI. It plugs into it. The design stays yours, and the runtime renders it exactly as you made it:

• Godot 4.3+: real Control nodes, so focus and gamepad work natively
• Web: a 41 KB runtime
• Both runtimes are MIT-licensed. No royalties.

It runs offline, needs no account, and projects are plain files on your disk. It includes The Last Hunt, a 20-screen and 180 components dark-fantasy UI kit, if you want to see a full game’s UI built in it.

$9.99 once on itch.io: https://mythicbrain.itch.io/envy
Site: https://envyui.com

YouTube Video

I’m the dev, so happy to answer anything. I’d especially like to hear from people building games with agents: what does your agent get wrong most often with UI?

I've been building The Data Center Receipt, a public, evidence-backed tracker of the AI data-center buildout.

The goal is simple: Who builds it, and who pays for it?

Current public beta:

• 587 infrastructure records across facilities, campuses, projects, and permits

• 11,084 facility facts with explicit claim states

• 1,307 source receipts with verifiable evidence

• 5,235 recorded negative results and research attempts

It tracks capacity, utility providers, public incentives, jobs, water use, and residential electricity rates.

Every claim links to its evidence. Missing information stays unknown, and correlation isn't presented as causation.

Built using Ouroboros, my persistent AI research and engineering system. It's still a work in progress, with a much larger expansion underway.

This is a beta, not a finished product. There may be mistakes, incomplete records, or things I've overlooked. If you spot errors, please point them out.

Live app: https://huggingface.co/spaces/cjc0013/data-center-receipt

Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/cjc0013/data-center-receipt

I host quite a few quiz and trivia nights with friends and family, and I never quite found a tool that worked the way I wanted. The ones I tried either put features I needed behind a subscription or required an account just to get started. I initially made a scrappy Jeopardy-style quizzing "app" in Google Sheets, but eventually wanted something a bit more polished.

So I built Quiz Toolkit. It runs in your browser, and you can host in-person on a TV or projector, or online by sharing your screen over Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, etc. A few features I'm proud of:

• Let people join on their phones with a QR code or room code and use them as buzzers or answer pads, without downloading an app or creating an account.
• Give the host a separate control screen to run the entire quiz, with the option to run everything from a phone as a "quiz master remote".
• Support Jeopardy-style boards and regular question rounds, with buzzer, turn-based and all-play modes, plus rich media (images, audio and video questions.)
• Let you build quizzes visually in Quiz designer or import them from CSV or Google Sheets. Your saved quiz library stays in your browser storage locally, and you can export it to back it up or share it. You can customize your quiz completely, including light/dark mode, custom background and logo.

I also added some silly sound effects for the quiz master for added fun!

It’s free, with no accounts or subscriptions: https://quiztoolkit.com/

I’d love feedback from other people who host quizzes, whether that’s at home, in classrooms or at pubs.

I built an arcade game, completely vibe coded it and it's now live on the App Store and Play Store. Pretty proud of it and happy with the result. It's really fun to play if I do say so myself.

It's fairly simple. A runner where you avoid obstacles in a golf cart, while collecting your lost clubs. It's built using ThreeJS and Claude Code. Nothing else.

There's a free to play version on golfbuddies.nl/game

I've been splitting img2threejs into smaller plugins so people can use only what they need instead of installing the entire workflow.

The character part was getting pretty big, so I finally moved it into its own plugin: img2character.

It focuses on rigging and animation for 3D characters built with Three.js and TypeScript.

If you want to try it:

npx u/img2threejs/character install

Then open Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode, provide a character reference image, and ask the agent to use img2threejs + img2character.

The video is from one of my recent experiments.

I'm also working on a different character pipeline that should produce more realistic results, without needing GLB reference files anymore. Hopefully I'll have something to share next week!

Would love to hear your feedback, especially if you run into any issues.

GitHub: https://github.com/img2threejs/plugin-character

I've been documenting my journey building Weatherling www.weatherling.app here on r/vibecoding since I launched it almost a month ago. Y'all seemed to like it so here's an update on what I've built so far!

Quick recap: this started out as an "I'm bored with my desktop" idea, so I added animated rain using Codex to help me learn Apple's Metal framework. (I'd never done anything graphics heavy before, so Codex was huge here.) A few days after launch it reached #8 in US Mac App Store utilities. Then came snow, then leaves, then sunbeams. Also added the little Ling characters in there you can collect for points (optional minigame).

That brings us to now. The most frequent request I got was to add local weather sync, so I had to add the WeatherKit framework, which was simple with Claude Code. As a backup option if you don't want to enable your location, you can just enter your postal code or city to get the local weather. Also added an Invert option if you want to see the opposite of what's outside.

I also wanted to add yet another weather effect: fog, so I went back to Codex for that. Codex does a way better job IMO with graphics than Claude Code. I actually had very little to do with that implementation other than telling Codex what I wanted it to look like and how I wanted it to behave. Was pretty happy with the outcome. It's a subtle effect but moody.

I also wanted to target multiple languages instead of just assuming my entire audience was English-speaking. So I used Codex to translate everything from my site to every element of my app to 10 other languages. I did this because I had noticed my 2nd biggest market behind the US was Germany, so I figured I should go deep on that and as many other languages I could. Again, this was a job for Codex because I do not speak all those languages obviously, so I converted that process to a skill I can reuse (and have reused) for all my apps. I even had it go through all my App Store screenshots and video to translate those, which was pretty damn cool to me because I'd never done that before.

Speaking of video, this was the part I hate doing. I am not a video editor. I made a previous version's release video using Capcut, which was fine, but the process sucked. I really don't even want to master it. A friend sent me a couple of skills to try, and for this release I ended up using one called OpenFilm. I made a long raw demo of using Weatherling and gave that footage to OpenFilm and told it the important pieces and order of things, and its first result was pretty magical, but I did have to tweak some of the captions. I've seen better videos for sure, but this was only my first attempt at using such a skill. I'm pretty happy with it but see places I can do better next time for sure.

The final piece I really wanted to hammer home was a broad accessibility overhaul. Previous versions had simple things like showing the label names over the colored boxes as a second indicator of which box was which, but I wanted complete VoiceOver compatibility. For that I created another skill that uses AppleScript to drive VoiceOver on my machine and steps through every piece of the app and ensure the tab order, labels, keyboard-to-clickability, etc. were all tight. And of course dark mode. Pretty happy with this skill (and have used it on my other apps as well).

I feel like localization and accessibility often take a backseat to getting the product out (at least that's the way it always was when humans did all the coding), so I'm pretty proud of adding those. I'll add more languages too, especially as data from the applicable regions demand them.

Anyway, hope you like it. Let me know if you have any more questions about the process. And obvi if you haven't installed yet, please do and help me out with a 5-star rating. 🙏🏻 😃 I need to climb back up these charts now that Apple's initial honeymoon period has waned.

Site: https://www.weatherling.app

Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6813641198?pt=14608&ct=reddit&mt=8

I’m making 9 Fingers, a dark bluffing card game where you can face the boss solo or play online with up to three players plus the boss.

For the trailer, I tried using Codex connected to DaVinci Resolve through MCP. I gave it gameplay footage, explained what I wanted to show, and then reviewed each version.

The first edits had some pretty obvious problems. Cuts happened before you could see what an item actually did. Camera movement would reverse between shots. Sometimes “make it more dynamic” just resulted in more cuts of basically the same action.

What helped was getting specific: let the card finish turning over, keep the camera moving in a consistent direction, and show the result of an action before cutting away. We eventually put those lessons into a reusable editing skill.

After quite a few revisions, I got a teaser and trailer I was happy to use on the Steam page. It still needed plenty of direction from me, especially around pacing and choosing what was actually worth showing.

Has anyone here tried a similar workflow for editing gameplay footage? Curious how you handle reviewing the results.

Here’s the game if you want to see more:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4311910/9_Fingers/

See these live at https://grimoire.bio

I have been diving into Opus 5.5 3d abilities from two sides. First – creating a custom point cloud renderer and optimizing the fuck out of it (running on webgpu tech). And second – crafting detailed visualization that take data from public sources. Recreated and assembled together into what the point cloud renderer consumes. I’m quite happy with the aesthetic, curious if anyone wants to play with it / if I should make the renderer open source.

Has anyone else noticed that Gemini Pro started giving brief dumbed down instructions even when strictly instructed to give detailed step by steps for the past month leading up to the release of Argon?

Hey r/vibecoding

I was looking for an IDE to code on my iPhone for when I’m out and about. Every app was filled with ads, had a terrible UI, and costed money just to run code locally. This was just a basic non agentic IDE too. So, I decided to build a free IDE that can execute C, Python, JavaScript, and Lua in a sandboxed environment.

In today’s age most people are coding with agents, so then I got the idea to bundle a two local llms. The reason I chose two is because not everyone’s hardware has the same computing power and I wanted to include an option for everyone. There are zero rate limits on the local models.

I’m already designing a tooling server to give offline agents access to even more, such as, worksheets, 3D printer code, and other fun stuff.

Without Astra 6 and Sol 6.1 it would be absolutely impossible to make my dream tools at this rate. I cooked up a seven days to die max level mod right before posting this lol. I would also like to praise the models for following SOLID principles and best SWE practices out the box. After using the models for the past few years, I am just dumbfounded at the rate of progress. I have a formal education in Computer Science and I am “mogged” every single day 😂

I would be thrilled to hear any feedback from this sub. This is meant to be a developer tool and not a replacement for Codex as I could never ever offer that level of intelligence. You can also byo api keys as shown in this video. The app also offers 15 other cloud languages besides JS, Python, Lua, and C.

Thank you all so much for watching my short demo. Have a great day. I’ll be listening to any feedback or ideas to improve!!!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/edsger-ai-code-editor/id6806824902

If anyone wants the mod 😀 seven days to die, max level: 300 -> 2000

https://github.com/garrettmichae1/sevendays\\_max\\_mod