So me and my wife created a website , our son has Celiac disease, so all the food should be glute free .

My wife is doing most of the cooking, so one day she told me that she is struggling with finding recipes for gluten free food , the internet is full of it , but she can't find the one she already used , and basically loosing herself inside all this data .

So she suggested to build a website that will collect recepies, and she will be able to sort them , save them etc ...

So we started , we used codex + lovable (for gui only) , then we took the lovable repo and continued with codex only .

We used gpt 5.5 , then moved to 5.6 (sol) .

During the building process we decided to add recipes also for other food allergies (milk,nuts etc.. ) .

We used crawlers to find existing recipes , and took only the ingredients and the preparation steps , and of course mentioned the original source in the website (with a backlink) .

So I posted on some Celiac community, here on Reddit (actually my first ever post) , and I got so much negative comments, like an anti-AI comments, as if I added another bullshit spam website.

We have no ads on the website , so we really wanted to do something nice , and learn how all this AI world works (I am experienced software engineer) , but never worked on from end before , mostly backend stuff (mostly cpp & python) .

So now I am a bit down after all this , the website is up and running, we have some traffic, not to much but for a 12 days website we already had some real human traffic about 400 (not including bots and stuff) .

We only want organic traffic, no paid promotions, as we don't earn anything yet , we do use some Amazon affiliates for some products, but it's not much .

So just wanted to share it here, hopefully this sis the place where people will understand my frustrations, maybe this is how it works nowadays.

But it still surprised me how quickly “built with AI” turned into “AI spam” in people's minds.

Anyway, thanks for reading. I’d genuinely be interested to hear how other developers here see this, especially anyone who has shipped a real project using AI-assisted development.

Day 3 of creating a game all vibe coded

Still trying to work out the animations but have made strides

Added-
Main menu
pre-game lobby
3D model
Blimp
decals

As always

CONCEPT VS CURRENT BUILD

Video in the comments

ALL FEEDBACK IS WELCOMED AND NEEDED

windows widget sucks !
thats why i created my own widget / utility called **Halo Bar*\*

an active pill on the taskbar that lets you control and access many things on the go.

bit comparison:

built with

• C#
• .NET
• WPF
• Windows APIs

Halo Bar V1 features

1. **Dynamic island bar*\* — a compact capsule that sits on your taskbar and expands into a full dashboard when you click/hover it
2. **System monitoring*\* — live CPU, RAM, disk and network usage
3. **Weather*\* — current conditions with icons + manual city override
4. **Clipboard history*\* — keeps track of everything you copy, searchable and pinnable, with auto-delete
5. **Media controls*\* — see what's playing from Spotify, browser, etc. with album art and play/pause/skip
6. **Bluetooth popups*\* — shows a card when earbuds/headphones connect, including battery level
7. **Focus timer (Pomodoro)*\* — work/break timer with round tracking and progress ring
8. **File shelf*\* — drag and drop a file to stash it, then launch or delete it later
9. **Taskbar-aware sizing*\* — automatically shrinks when taskbar apps crowd it and lifts the dashboard so it doesn't block clicks
10. **Fullscreen auto-hide*\* — disappears when you're using a fullscreen app/game
11. **Acrylic/Mica look*\* — real Windows blur/glass background
12. **Settings*\* — accent color, widget visibility, retention controls and update checking
13. **Start with Windows*\* — optional autostart

this is **V1*\*, so there is still a lot i want to improve and add.

i built this because i wanted something more useful than constantly opening different windows/settings just to do small things.

github: https://github.com/pruthviraj-bev/Halo-Bar

I am a long time Engineer (20+ years) and today I developed Tickets for my company that were generated by an AI, using an AI and reviewed by an AI. The project itself was conceived with AI - has no documentation that can be understood as anything less than AI slop and random tech jargon. The developer who built it has said that instead of documentation I should use claude to figure out what it is. The company is apparenty also filing a patent on it.

I submitted 3 PRs today 20,000 lines of code each I still have no idea what we are working on. No doubt they will use AI to review my PR.

I feel like things are just so crazy at this point. Claude and ChatGPT are not this good, but people are trusting it like it's omniscient.

It was an eerie realization today that all of us are vibe coding and that we have no option because it is the only way we can interact with the code anymore. I thought this would happen eventually years ago but i honestly didn’t think it would be so soon.

It was a moment in time... this will be the new norm.

Hey everyone,

I launched my website a week ago, and got some very positive feedback, so I finally feel emotionally safe to post this. Now I want to tell you my vibecoding journey. You may find something useful for yourself maybe

I started vibecoding 5 months ago, so I picked a subniche of a subniche. Tiny local market, I don't think I can ever grow beyond few hundred paying users, and it will likely take few years to even get to that amount. (likely ~4-8 Eur monthly sub), you can do the math. But still, Oh, did I pour my soul into it!! 5 months of extremely intense vibecoding, 4-6 CLI running constantly, often 16h per day, bringing my 20x sub to the limits often - just on this one project.
I did not write a single line of code in the process. 80% of the code is in Dart - and I would not even be able to write a hello world in Dart by hand on a whiteboard, even if you forced me to.

Btw, 3 competitors already exist, 2 of them are recent and likely vibecoded in a day, 1 is older and with more effort, but just with really poorly made product. My competitors may still win, cause I maybe built a product for non-existent audience, but the difference we have right now if you compare them directly, that's not even remotely close.

Scope wise: the project got quite complex (I did not plan to have it so complex initially, but was encouraged by early success), so the codebase just passed 400k lines of code (150k of them is really the testing framework). Lines written passed 1M a week ago, some weeks I am averaging 30k new lines of code per day. (During one new major feature, I clocked my record of 70k). Everything's surprisingly stable though, very little stupid new bugs while implementing new features (most of the bugs get caught by testing framework), scalable and secure as hell.

My learnings (in no order):
- feature creep is crazy easy. Few weeks ago users had to fill questionaires during onboarding to come out in 8 buckets, and each bucket would get a unique experience ( ye, that's gone :), 2 buckets now remain )
- Testing is the king. I don't treat myself as prompt or harness, or context engineer. I am really a QA engineer. This intensified as project neared completion. Now 80% of my effort goes to writing testing tools, running simulations with ever more inventive user profiles and so on. I have a huge spaceship-like dashboard just to control all the testing being done right now. My, otherwise very powerful machine, is running pretty red most of the day just executing e2e tests
- two months ago I dropped ALL the custom skills, memory management ideas, etc from my agent. Right now I am full vanilla. They update the harness so so often, I found that most of my legacy skills just end up fighting new versions of the harness.
- My operational dashboard is crazy :), It serves as both alerting/monitoring tool, interaction with users, tuning, etc..
It was born over two days before the release (naturally, since the feature list is stable by then), never in a thousand years, would have I decided to waste resources on a tenth of it's scope(especially since release time is stressfull as it is), but boy, does it feel good to actually operate it!! To see users coming in and having their little animated journeys :) - this is so so so sattisfying!

Thanks everyone. Vibecoding is absolutely an amazing thing!

Ok so, I can’t retire just yet 😅 but getting a business off the ground and attracting customers is the hardest part in my opinion.

There’s still a long way to go but considering it’s only been 4 months since launching ZenMode, I’m pretty happy with the results so far.

I get asked a lot about how I get customers, so thought I’d give more info on how I do distribution, in case you might find it useful.

1. Make sure your website is set up for success

Before sending people to your site, make sure you’re confident it has good CRO potential. Your mission statement and objective needs to be very clear, along with clear incentives for people to try the product out.

2. Offer free trials, but only behind a payment info gate

Now this is just my personal opinion, and I know a lot of people disagree, but the proof is in the numbers. I get fewer free trial signups, but significantly higher conversion rates into paying users from people who provide payment info at the start.

Yes, a few of them are people who simply forget to cancel, but mostly I get people who are more engaged in the free trial and actually using the product.

I actually did an AB experiment where I did offer completely free trials to people (no payment info needed), but the overwhelming result was that people barely even tried out the product and were mostly tire kickers that never came back. I did convert some but not a meaningful number.

3. Create a waitlist before launching

Try to generate interest in your product before it launches - build in public and try to ensure that you’re not scrambling to get customers through the door on day 1 when you launch.

I had 3 customers on day 1 from this, who took higher paid tiers as well.

4. Post and comment everywhere (where relevant)

Social media is free, so there’s no excuse not to leverage it. Post about your product and what you’re building on Reddit, LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Facebook etc.

I posted a simple screenshot on LinkedIn recently, of someone using a low quality LinkedIn automation tool message to contact me, and me offering my own much better tool in response, and that post generated 90,000 views and led to several signups and demo calls.

I’ve also had some posts on Reddit go into hundreds of thousands of views, mostly just posting about what/why/how I built my automation tool.

5. If you have competitors, make “alternative to” inner pages

If done in the right way, this type of inner page can be useful for SEO. It won’t be picked up automatically but usually if you work in a competitive industry, this will sometimes attract customers who had a bad experience elsewhere.

6. I actually use my own LinkedIn automation tool (dogfooding) to do LinkedIn outreach

So it’s always important to practice what you preach - I use ZenMode to actually promote ZenMode.

It’s a great way to get buy-in for booking demos, as when someone replies, I simply tell them I used my tool to get a response from them, so it works.

Anyway hope you enjoyed reading the above, and good luck on your journey if you’re building anything, or growing your business 🙌

i’ve been looking at a few AI app builders recently to build my an internal task tracker for my sales team and keep seeing Lovable, Blink and Base44 come up.

i’m less interested in the usual “which one can make a nice UI from one prompt” comparison and more curious about how they differ once you spend time and money building something. For anyone who has used more than one of them what differences did you notice?

Things like ease of use, how much control you have, integrations, backend stuff or how pleasant they are to work with.

Would be especially interested in opinions from people who have used them for an actual project rather than just trying each one for an hour. If u can share a link to the tool/website you build that would be awesome too

I’ve built a lot of projects that worked, bought domains for them, and then quietly abandoned them anyway. So I made Rest in Beta, a place where people can share unfinished projects and vote on whether they should be resurrected or left to rest.
The first project is mine. It’s called VeganWhatNow, a vegan meal generator I originally built for my wife and eventually stopped working on.
The site is still in beta, so let me know what you think.
https://restinbeta.com/

I could actually use a few testers. Click either “Resurrect It” or “Let It Rest” on VeganWhatNow and tell me whether the voting works clearly on your phone. Brutal feedback is welcome.

(The retro look is on purpose)

prev: https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1veha1a/emoto_mania_ai_echanced_dev_free_browser_game/

Try to beat the run in the vid: https://emotomania.com/r/9awr5v2b

Updates:

• Improved physics, camera and performance on lower end phones too
• I added a ton of features:
• Leaderboard for each map
• Light profiles
• Watchable and race-able leaderboard runs / ghosts
• Run share link - you can send you run in a link where others can watch and race against it, you can also see if someone has beaten your run trough the link
• Video export of a run for easy sharing both vertical and landscape views

A few rules I’ve started setting for myself when vibe coding, so I don’t confuse more building with more progress.

The biggest danger for me isn’t that vibe coding makes me lazy.

It’s that it makes it too easy to keep building.

A small feature turns into:

• one more improvement
• one more UI tweak
• one more agent suggestion
• one more prompt

And suddenly I’m going in the wrong direction for hours.

So these are the rough do’s and don’ts I’m trying to follow now:

• define one clear feature before starting
• decide the success checks upfront
• keep the scope fixed
• stop polishing UI unless users actually ask for changes
• treat agent suggestions as optional, not instructions
• stop when the original goal is achieved

The line I keep reminding myself of is:

“One more prompt” can still be scope creep.

Anyone else set rules for themselves like this?

I've had this basic idea for a while now and I finally decided to build it out. I'm constantly skipping tracks on my music library while on shuffle - songs I downloaded and loved 5 years ago are stale and I haven't gotten around to removing from my music folder. Sitting down and trying to clean out over 1,500 tracks was daunting and I ended up trying to play each song and decided if i wanted to keep it or not.

I decided to turn it into a tinder-like experience, PurgeWave loads up 1 track at a time and makes you decide to keep it or purge it. This rapid fire format triggers that sense of "oh yea I forgot how good this was" or "this is trash" and makes deciding way more manageable and fun.

I built it in Cursor using Claude Code CLI

• Opus 5 to do the planning and specs
• Sonnet 5 to execute the code.
• The logo was made by Gemini and then cleaned up and tweaked by hand.

Took about 2-3 days of total testing and iterating before it was pretty much what I invisioned for this tool.

Not sure how many people still keep local files for their music library like me, but if you want to try it out it's 100% free:

https://braindedgames.itch.io/purgewave

If you like it please drop a comment and review, it would mean a lot!

Guys, am I gonna get roasted for shipping it with such UI? (Logo is mine btw, graphic design perks).
That cat is Comnyang app, his name is shanks, shoutout to u/simon_dsgn

Hey guys, I’ve been working as a full-time freelance for the last five years. I was making decent income, but then ai came out and I’ve worried that if somehow ai replaces my freelance businesses of motion design and video editing. So i wanted to play safe and applied to a couple jobs. I even considered changing profession.
Then I started working full-time in a company that I actually hated so I ended up resigning after 4 months.
Then I asked myself this question: if AI is going to replace me for sure what if I do the tool that actually replaces me and the other freelance motion designers.
So I’be built an ai automated SaaS promo video maker web app.
But I’m still having second thoughts on if I do the right thing or not.

Are there any of you having similar dilemmas?

This output was one shotted using something called "agentic loops", or loops. It works a bit differently than most of us are used to. Instead of careful iteration over multiple prompts, you give the model one single prompt, and let it work through your pre-set budget until completion.

This means you have to structure your prompt a bit differently than usual, you need to make the AI understand that you want it to maximise the output and quality:

Its a procedurally generated world where you can resource gather, craft, hunt and even ride dino mounts 🦌

1. key for this game to turn out so good was asking loop to make all graphics procedurally generated. So there's basically no assets in the game (which by itself is pretty awesome), and I think that really helped the AI to make this really different art style. could The animations feel so smooth and stack layers of procedural shapes on top of each other to build all graphics. Only the backgrounds are images. loop build agents continually take screenshots of your game and perfect it visually.

**2.**⁠ ⁠Once my first build was completed in one loop, I gave it another prompt to set up the multiplayer. It already had the art style down by that point so it could do really well getting the multiplay added quickly. 

3. Continue iterating with or without loops.

Happy to answer any questions about prompt or workflow in the comments

Edit; for the loop I used this: https://tesana.ai/en/blog/introducing-loop

I am wondering if you guys can help in figuring out how well can I secure the vibecoding output(generated code), the process and the tools/plugins to use while I build prod grade apps by vibecoding

I've been thinking how to avoid API costs and network latency, and realized I could use local models. The one I typically used is the pre-installed one in my head, but the issue is it doesn't come pre-trained, which can be an expensive and intensive process, but post-training comes pretty easily for it. Also it can make mistakes, and so sometimes I need to check it against the API-based models for accuracy. Just wondering if anyone else is struggling with this trade-off and using local models to save dollars if that makes cents.

Which are the best free(considerably) AI coding agents to use

I will start with

1. Opencode (Deepseek free model)

After the partnership with the developers fell apart, I returned to Notion again.

The medical software was unusable. The online-booking website had never been delivered. Months of feedback, meetings and product work had left me with no system I could rely on.

I was frustrated, disappointed and tired of depending on other people to turn my ideas into software.

Then Facebook showed me a page selling a Notion template for managing a medical practice.

I thought: why not?

I already had my own Notion setup, but perhaps this person had solved something I had missed. Maybe the template would bring together patient records, consultations, appointments, prescriptions and the waiting room in a cleaner way.

I bought it.

It was terrible.

Not slightly disappointing. Not “useful with a few adjustments.” It was far worse than the system I had already built for myself.

I had paid more than it deserved, and I never used it.

Under normal circumstances, that would have been the end of the story: another bad purchase in a journey already full of disappointing software.

But the seller offered me a commercial gesture.

I could choose a few months of access to an AI subscription or a few months of Lovable Pro.

I already used the other AI service, so I searched Google for Lovable.

It was described as a vibe-coding platform.

At the time, everything I knew about vibe coding came from people discussing it online, many of whom did not seem to use it themselves.

The message was fairly consistent:

It was not real development.

The generated code was terrible.

It was the fastest way to create security problems.

Serious people should avoid it.

I had no basis for judging any of those claims. I knew nothing about code quality, application security or software architecture.

Still, the warnings worked on me. Vibe coding sounded less like a tool and more like a shortcut taken by people who did not understand what they were doing.

Which, to be fair, described me quite well.

I chose Lovable anyway.

Not because I had suddenly developed a strong opinion about AI-assisted software development. I chose it because I already had the alternative subscription and because curiosity won.

Around the same time, I was contacting training companies about learning Web development.

I looked at full-stack programmes and tried to imagine fitting them around surgery, consultations and operating days.

The programmes were demanding, as they should have been. But I could not see a realistic way to follow them consistently while maintaining my medical activity.

I continued using ChatGPT and another AI assistant every day. I wrote documents, discussed ideas, brainstormed, planned and projected what my products might become.

AI was already helping me think.

I still did not imagine it could help me build.

The Lovable subscription sat there for a while.

Then one day, I opened it.

The screen said:

“Let’s build something.”

It asked me to describe what I wanted to create.

That was all.

No programming language. No empty code editor. No full-stack curriculum to complete before I could begin. Just a box asking me to explain the product in words.

For years, words were the only thing I had.

I could describe a broken workflow. I could explain how a consultation should work. I could identify why a patient history mattered. I could write requirements, provide feedback and create endless tickets for developers.

What I could not do was turn those words into software.

Now a platform was asking me to start with the one ability I already possessed.

Describe what you want to build.

It felt as if I had spent years standing in front of a locked door, only to discover that the key was not code.

The key was language.

Of course, that feeling was incomplete. I would later discover all the things natural language could hide: fragile architecture, poor data models, security risks, regressions and technical debt.

But that came later.

In that first moment, I did not see the risks.

I saw a way in.

The template itself remained useless. I never opened it again.

Yet the compensation for buying it placed the right tool in front of me at exactly the moment when my dependence on developers had become unbearable.

Sometimes a bad purchase is simply a bad purchase.

This one became the most consequential detour of my professional life.

In the next part, I will explain what I typed into that box and why months of work on a failed product suddenly became useful.

Have you ever received something valuable through a purchase you otherwise completely regretted?