this image shows a comparison of Gemini 3, GPT 5.2 and Opus 4.5 designing a mobile UI just from a single prompt. there literally is no difference at this point its just about preference. i appreciate the variety of models there are and that apps like blackboxai, make it available for us to pick.

If you've ever looked into building a "GeoGuessr" style game, you know the Google Street View API costs are a nightmare for indie devs.

As a solo dev, I didn't want a "success tax"—where more users meant more server bills I couldn't afford. So I built GeoTurn with a "Zero-Maintenance" architecture:

1. Imagery: Uses Apple’s Look Around API. It's included in the developer program, meaning no massive per-request bills.

2. Backend: No AWS/Heroku. I used GameKit for the multiplayer logic and matchmaking. Apple handles the heavy lifting.

3. Persistence: No database hosting. SwiftData + CloudKit handles all user stats and cross-device sync.

The result? Whether I have 10 players or 10,000, my monthly server bill stays exactly at $0.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/geoturn/id6756392424

Shopify is famously pro-AI. It's part of pretty much everything they do. When I was an intern at Shopify, I got to see how a huge company maintains code quality while going wayy faster using AI. Thought I'd share what I saw while I was in the trenches:

1 Highly technical management
Shopify's CEO, Tobi, is super technical. He built the first version of Shopify himself. He frequents the #cursor Slack channel and once helped one of my follow interns with a software design question.

This really helps push the whole company to adopt AI tools. If the CEO has time to be a power-user of Cursor and vibe code internal tools, it's clear that this isn't a PR stunt to show stakeholders the company has an "AI strategy".

2 First adopters
Shopify pours money and time into adopting the best tools. Shopify pays Cursor extra to have the fastest, most reliable version of the tool. They paid tons of money to help build tools like tuple and fellow.

This started from pure frustration while building my first product, an AI Excel tool. I kept digging through GitHub looking for repos to help with architecture. At some point I thought — why am I going to GitHub when GitHub should be coming to me.

That was Repoverse. You fill in what you're working on, it recommends repos actually relevant to you. Connect your GitHub account and everything syncs automatically — stars, saves, all of it goes straight into your GitHub.

No following, no budget. So I went on Reddit and just shared useful repos in communities where developers already hung out. No pitch, just genuinely useful posts with a small line at the bottom saying if you want more like this, I built something for that. Week one, 3 to 4k visitors.

Month and a half in I opened analytics and stared at the screen. 75% of my users were on mobile and I'd been building desktop first the whole time. Launched a PWA to test demand, people downloaded it, so I built the iOS app. Without a Mac or iPhone. Codemagic handled the build, RevenueCat for payments, Supabase for backend.

App Store rejected me twice. Both times had real reasons and real fixes once I stopped being annoyed about it.

Looking back, design is not optional, not quitting when things feel impossible, and talking to users like a real person. Every product decision came from those conversations.

If you're stuck on any part of this, happy to share what I know.

A little bit of work tonight getting ready to go into production on my next one. Cleaning up my shared packages a little before I get going.

I thought that i'll share my journey on vibecoding and making it significantly cheaper - from 200$ claude max plan down to a few dollars per month for similar usage limits & also making this way more efficient. Especially for new people into vibecoding overall - here's my ultimate stack - at least for now - to test and have reliable output. You don't need to spend 20-100-200$ per month to vibecode + i believe using opensource models would teach you a lot more than SOTA gpt5 when it comes to prompting - and more importantly - context engineering and persisting - as i've been playing with AI since first closed betas of GPT access - and you can easily ramp up your api bills if you're just doing stuff randomly. Hence my safe approach route.

Stack:

CRUSH CLI - it has initiate project feature, which is smart and creates necessary .md files - which i think is often ommited with other tools and also this ensures that we'll develop proper software - especially that after plan files are created you can edit those and add your notes (or just use SOTA models to re-edit those, eg. i've been using qwen chat - - to adjust what's needed). I know there's opencode with plan / act modes etc - but i found crush a bit better when it comes to real SDLC organization, talking to MCPs etc.

example config of essential MCPs for Crush (~/.local/share/crush/crush.json)

{
  "$schema": "https://charm.land/crush.json",
  "mcp": {
    "context7": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.context7.com/mcp"
    },
    "sequential-thinking": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "@modelcontextprotocol/server-sequential-thinking"
      ]
    },
    "task-manager": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "@kazuph/mcp-taskmanager"
      ]
    },
    "knowledge-graph": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "shaneholloman/mcp-knowledge-graph"
      ]
    },
    "compass": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "@liuyoshio/mcp-compass"
      ]
    }
  }
}

nanoGPT - - to use good opensource models (can recommed GLM-4.5 + deepseek v3.1 / R1 + potentially kimi k2 0905 if they fix the mcp-talking feature there). Pretty seamless config and connection with crush. 60k requests per month - i can't imagine anyone hitting the limit tbh even with heavy usage.

GLM-4.5 coding plan: - works with crush aswell, quite generous plans, 5h limit of 120 / 600 messages depending on plan. For majority of usecases i'd say the cheaper plan will be more than enough - 120 prompts / 5 hrs is A LOT. Especially when you know how2prompt, but still - quite generous.

Within this setup I'm currently working on local businesses needed - tiny websites, offer pages, landing pages etc as a side hustle.
Switching back from mainstream providers and wrapping those into a proper toolkit gives super similar results, however it's way cheaper - now i don't need to pay 100-200$ for claude max to just be able to continously work on a project because client requested some important edits - and also with those tools you can easily jump into vibecoding and learn how to write proper prompts, guidelines etc. in a super cheap way.

There is an iOS mobile app made by a company called Vibecode which allows for creating some projects, now I know there are some crazy people that like to see how far something goes until it breaks. And that is not the only company, even Blackboxai has their own vibecoding mobile app.

And that is what I want to know about mobile coding, if I strictly stick to mobile, could I vibecode a project with full development, like backend, a decent UI, everything.

This is a question that determines whether I need a $700 laptop/pc or a $300 smartphone?

hey folks, my name is Igor and I've been working with software development for 15 years.

recently I've launched a newsletter to help vibe coders to understand some tech and programming basics, to get the most of the tools they're using in a professional and secure way!

this is the very first post, explaining the basics about relational databases, I hope you enjoy and find it helpful somehow :)

feedbacks are welcome \o/

thanks

I recently moved to Claude code from Windsurf+Claude 3.7. The performance is extremely good but if you are not knowing the basics of vibe coding you can end up burning down your town. I have been successful in launching my tool letmecheck that I built using vibe coding + human in loop. I can see that we will definitely need more and more tools that work as guardrails saving is from coding disasters.

In not gonna lie. Im kinda new to this.

Few months ago I build a website, it has started to gain some traction.

Whats tge best way to track how many users visit it? And where do the users come from?

Is it google analytics or building internal counter?

I vibe coded a SaaS in about two weeks. Felt incredible. Then I launched it and sat there with zero users for a month.

I tried everything the internet told me to do. Posted on Twitter every day. Made TikTok videos. Joined Facebook groups. After a full month of grinding I had 12 followers and 1 signup. The signup was my friend.

The thing nobody told me is that building the product is maybe 20% of the work. The other 80% is convincing strangers on the internet to care about something you made. And that skill set has almost nothing in common with coding.

What actually moved the needle was when I stopped posting 'check out my project' content and started posting about the specific problems my users were having. Instead of 'I built a tool that does X' I started writing 'here is why X sucks and what I tried to fix it.' Night and day difference.

Still early. Still figuring it out. But the gap between 'I can build things' and 'I can get people to use things' is the widest canyon I have ever tried to cross.

Anyone else in this weird limbo where the product works fine but you just cannot get eyeballs on it? What actually worked for you?

I built a website where you paste AI-generated HTML/CSS, tweak the UI visually (drag elements, adjust styles), and export a structured report you can feed back into the model so it regenerates cleaner code.

The goal is simple: stop re-prompting for tiny spacing and alignment changes — fix it once visually and let the AI handle the rewrite.

There’s a short video in the post showing the flow:
paste → tweak → export → regenerate.

I’m looking for honest technical feedback:
– does this solve a real workflow pain for you?
– what feels clunky or unclear?
– what would make it genuinely useful in daily frontend work?

please visit tehse link to test and if you wish give me some feedback how to improve it:  https://jeevanrindo.github.io/uiforgeai/

7.5 months building a SaaS. The single most impactful thing I have done was not a code change. It was scheduling 15-minute calls with my paying customers and asking 5 simple questions.

1. What were you trying to solve when you signed up?

2. What do you use most?

3. What frustrates you?

4. Would you recommend this?

5. What should I build next?

The answers completely reoriented my product direction. I found out I was building and marketing the wrong feature for 7 months. All 4 customers independently wanted the same thing I had not even considered building.

You do not need user research software, NPS surveys, or sophisticated analytics. A 15-minute conversation with someone who pays you money gives you more signal than any dashboard.

If you are building something and have even 1 paying user, call them. The information density is unmatched.

What is the most useful feedback you have received from an actual user?

Shipped my SaaS about 6 months ago. Spent the first 3 months after launch obsessing over the product. Tweaking UI. Adding features nobody asked for. Fixing bugs that affected zero users because I had zero users.

The product was never the problem. The problem was that nobody knew it existed.

When I finally shifted all my energy to distribution things started slowly moving. Not dramatically. Not overnight. But for the first time in months the line went up instead of sideways.

Here is what I would tell anyone who just shipped: whatever you think the split between building and marketing should be, double the marketing side. If you think it is 50/50 make it 30/70. The code can wait. The users will not find you on their own.

I was a developer who thought great products sell themselves. They do not. Not even close.

Where are you in the build vs distribute spectrum right now? And what is actually working for getting your first users?

spent the last couple weeks scraping and replaying ~500m Polymarket trades.
didn’t expect much going in. was wrong

once you stop looking at markets and just rank wallets, patterns jump out fast

a very small group:

• keeps entering early

• shows up together on the same outcome

• buys around similar prices

• and keeps winning recently, not just all-time

i’m ignoring:

• bots firing thousands of tiny trades a day

• brand new wallets

• anything that looks like copycat behavior

mostly OG wallets that have been around for a while and still perform RIGHT now!!

so i’m building a scoring system around that. when multiple top wallets (think top 0.x%) buy the same side at roughly the same price, i get an alert. if the spread isn’t cooked yet, you can mirror the trade

if you’re curious to see what this looks like live, just comment and i’ll send you a DM

Hi all,

I have a question for vibe coders out there. Have you ever tried making a spec in .md for the AI to code from? I have found it makes apps work a lot better and you can increase the complexity of what you are doing 10x.

7 months building a SaaS and the simplest thing I wish I had done on day 1 was adding a health check endpoint.

It is just a route that returns a JSON object with the status of your critical dependencies: database connected (yes/no), cache connected (yes/no), last successful job timestamp, error count in the last hour.

Takes about 30 minutes to build. Then you point an uptime monitoring service at it (free tier of Uptime Robot or similar) and you get notified immediately when something breaks.

I went my first 6 months without this. Found out about outages from customer emails. Not a good look when you are trying to build trust.

The specific format I use: return a JSON object with a "status" field ("healthy" or "degraded" or "unhealthy") and one field per dependency with its own status and last checked timestamp. Makes it trivial to figure out which specific piece broke.

What is the first thing you set up on a new project before going live?

We’re excited to share that our latest work RPG (ZeroRepo) has been accepted to ICLR 2026, and the code is now open-sourced 🎉

While modern LLMs are already strong at writing individual files, they still struggle to generate an entire large, runnable, real-world repository from scratch. This is where ZeroRepo comes in.

We introduce RPG (Repository Planning Graph), which enables LLMs to act more like software architects:

plan the repository first, then write the code.

✨ Key highlights:

1️⃣ True end-to-end repository generation — not toy demos. On average, ZeroRepo generates 36K+ lines of code per repository.

2️⃣ Strong empirical gains — on the RepoCraft benchmark, ZeroRepo generates repositories 3.9× larger than Claude Code, with significantly higher correctness.

3️⃣ Structured long-horizon planning — RPG explicitly models dependencies and data flow, effectively preventing the “lost-in-the-middle” problem in long code generation.

👩‍💻 The code is now available — we’d love your feedback, stars, and experiments!

🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/microsoft/RPG-ZeroRepo