Apps, sites and tools people actually built, mostly solo with an AI agent, pulled from Reddit, Hacker News and elsewhere. Filtered to things you could build with what you already pay for.
15 Aug 2026
Bento, a whole slide deck app inside one file
What it is
A PowerPoint replacement that is a single file. You double-click it, it opens in your browser as a working slide editor, and that same file is both the app and the presentation. Nothing to install, no account, nothing kept on anyone's server.
Why it is useful
It cracks the annoying part of single-file sites, which is letting a normal person edit the content without coming back to you. The file saves changes into itself. You email someone the file and they have the whole editor.
What it looks like
An ordinary slide editor in a browser tab. Slide thumbnails down one side, the current slide big in the middle, you type straight onto it. Press save and the file on your desktop updates itself. Send that file to a colleague and they open the same deck, and if you both have it open at once you see each other's cursors moving and text appearing as it is typed.
How it was made
Built with Claude Code on top of reveal.js, an existing open-source presentation library. Two clever bits. The app's own code is squashed into a compressed blob that unpacks in the browser, which is how a whole application fits in about 560 KB and never needs to fetch anything. Meanwhile your actual slide content is deliberately left as plain readable text near the top of the file, which is what lets the file rewrite itself when you save, and lets any other tool edit the content directly. The live collaboration goes through a small Cloudflare relay that only ever passes encrypted lumps around, so the server cannot read your deck. Free and open source.
What it would take you
This is almost exactly your stack, single-file vanilla HTML plus Cloudflare. The bit worth stealing is a page that saves its own content back to a file, which would let a client edit their own copy of a one-page site without touching your code or triggering a deploy. Free to build. The collaboration half needs Cloudflare Durable Objects, so $5 a month on the Workers paid plan if you are not already on it. An evening for the self-saving trick, a weekend for the lot.
Rescript, a $24 a month video editor rebuilt in an afternoon
What it is
A video editor where you edit the video by editing its transcript. Drop a clip in, it types out everything that was said, and when you delete a sentence from that text the matching piece of video goes with it. It runs entirely on your own machine, so nothing is uploaded.
Why it is useful
It does the main job of Descript, which costs $24 a month, for free and with no upload wait. For your work that matters because cutting an interview or a talking-head clip by deleting words is far quicker than scrubbing back and forth on a timeline. The author built it in roughly four hours with an agent.
What it looks like
Two panes. The video plays on one side, the transcript sits on the other with every speaker labelled. You highlight a rambling sentence, hit delete, and it disappears from the video as well. When you are happy you export a finished file.
How it was made
The transcription runs inside the browser rather than on someone's server, using a local copy of Whisper (OpenAI's open speech-to-text model) plus a second model that works out who is talking. The key detail is that it gets a timestamp for every single word, because that is what allows a deleted word to map to an exact frame. The export uses ffmpeg, the standard video tool, also compiled to run in the browser.
What it would take you
Usable as it stands, free, offline, no account. The genuinely reusable piece is in-browser transcription, which would give you automatic subtitles or a rough-cut tool for client video without paying anyone by the minute. Cloning the whole editor is a weekend. Bolting word-accurate transcription onto something of your own is an evening.
Customer bug reports that fix themselves on your own Mac
What it is
A setup where a customer complaint turns into an actual code fix without the developer sitting down at his desk. A small feedback box on the website takes the report, sorts it, then hands it to Claude Code running on his own computer. He approves each step from his phone.
Why it is useful
Everything else in this space charges per fix and wants a copy of your code sitting on their servers. Here the work runs on his own Claude subscription on his own machine, so nobody else ever sees the code and there is no metered bill. The phone approval is the real unlock. Instead of needing to be at your desk, you tap yes on the way to a shoot.
What it looks like
A visitor clicks a small feedback tab on the site and types "the booking button does nothing on my phone". A card arrives on your phone: what broke, how urgent, which page. You tap dispatch. Your Mac at home starts Claude Code, which works out the fix and asks permission as a second card, "edit checkout.ts?". You tap approve, and the fix goes out.
How it was made
Three pieces. A small embeddable widget that stamps every report with the site and page it came from. An AI pass that tags how serious it is and spots duplicates of things already reported. Then a dispatcher that hands the ticket to Claude Code on his own machine and forwards its permission questions to his phone. The design decision that makes it work is the split: the coordination sits on a server, but the code and the model never leave his Mac.
What it would take you
You already own every piece of this. A Cloudflare Worker and D1 to store the tickets, a small widget on client sites, and ntfy or your existing WhatsApp bridge for the approvals. On the Mustang and LDOT sites it would mean a manager reports a broken menu link and you approve the fix from your phone. Free on the kit you have. Realistically a weekend, because the phone round trip is the fiddly part.
Cloning your own voice, and teaching Claude a new service in one line
What it is
Someone recorded 15 seconds of their voice on their phone, and now Claude Code reads anything they write back to them in their own voice and saves it as an audio file.
Why it is useful
The voice clone is the headline, but the method underneath is the more valuable half. One command points Claude Code at a company's documentation and it teaches itself to use that service, with no plumbing to write. That works for any service with decent docs, so it is a general way of handing Claude a new skill in about a minute.
What it looks like
You run one line in the terminal, paste in a key from a free account, then talk to Claude normally: "clone my voice from this recording and make it my default", then "read this script in my voice and save it". An audio file appears in the folder.
How it was made
The one line is `npx skills add https://docs.fish.audio`, which reads the vendor's own documentation and writes a working skill from it on the spot. Everything after that is plain English instructions, no code at all. Quality comes down almost entirely to the recording: 15 to 30 seconds, quiet room, speaking normally. A noisy sample gives you an uncanny half-version of yourself.
What it would take you
Twenty minutes. Directly useful for video voiceovers without doing take after take, and it sits neatly alongside your Kling and darkroom work. Fish Audio's free tier is about 7 minutes of audio a month, so budget a few pounds a month if you start doing full narrations. Only ever clone your own voice.
Codeman, a control panel for your AI agents you can check from your phone
What it is
A dashboard for watching and steering the coding agents running on your own computer, from any browser or from your phone. It handles Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, Gemini, OpenCode and Pi, and you can have several going at once.
Why it is useful
It fixes the thing that actually wastes your time, which is that agents stop the moment you walk away. It spots when one has gone quiet and nudges it, and when you hit a usage limit it waits and picks the job back up when the limit resets. You can start something long and go out.
What it looks like
A web page listing your running sessions. Click one and you get the real terminal, live, exactly as it looks on your Mac. When a session spawns helper agents, each helper appears as its own small floating window, so you can watch three or four of them working side by side. On your phone it installs like a proper app and pushes you a notification when something needs a decision.
How it was made
The good decision here is that it rebuilds nothing. It launches the normal command-line tool inside tmux, which is a terminal session that keeps running when you shut the lid or lose wifi, then streams that terminal to the browser. So the full scrollback is preserved, nothing is lost when you reconnect, and it works with whatever versions of the tools you already have installed. Written in TypeScript. Free and open source.
What it would take you
Nothing to build. It is free and runs on the subscriptions you already pay for (Claude Max, Codex on ChatGPT Plus, Antigravity for agy). Install is one line in the terminal and it asks before it changes anything. Let it set up Tailscale during install and you get a private, secure address for your own machine, which is what makes the phone side work properly. An evening to set up and get used to.
Wallfacer, a searchable list of every coding session you have ever run
What it is
A searchable index of every AI coding session on your machine, so you can name them, tag them and drop back into the right one.
Why it is useful
This is your exact problem, written down. Sessions pile up unnamed, so months later you cannot find the one holding all the context about a job. This turns that heap into something you can search, roughly the way you search your photos.
What it looks like
A full-screen list in the terminal. Each row is a past session, showing when it ran and which folder it was in. You rename one to "The Grand menu rebuild", tag it, search for it later, then press a key to pick it up where you left off. Every action is also available as a plain command if you want to script it.
How it was made
One small program written in Go, installed with a single brew command. It records nothing new. It simply reads the session files that Claude Code and Codex already write to your disk and puts a proper interface over the top, which is why it works retrospectively on sessions you ran months ago. Free and open source. Named after the Wallfacers in Liu Cixin's The Dark Forest, people trusted with plans too sprawling for anyone else to follow.
What it would take you
Ten minutes with brew, free, no account. Worth it purely for tagging sessions per client, so the Grand menu rebuild is findable next year instead of you scrolling a 180 MB transcript.
Bernstein, runs several agents at once without letting an AI be the manager
What it is
A tool that runs a batch of coding agents across your projects at the same time, where a plain, boring script decides who does what instead of an AI making that call.
Why it is useful
When you let an AI manage other AIs, you can never rerun a job and get the same result, and you cannot check afterwards what it decided or why. Here the decisions are ordinary code, so the same run repeats identically every time, and every decision is written to a log you can check later. It is essentially your own "verify before you claim done" rule turned into a tool.
What it looks like
You hand it a list of jobs. It gives each job its own private copy of the project so the agents cannot tread on each other, runs them in parallel, and only merges a job back into the real project once the tests and checks pass. Anything that fails simply is not merged, and you see which. Afterwards you can replay the whole run and read every decision in order.
How it was made
The scheduler is plain Python with no AI in it anywhere, which is the entire reason runs are repeatable. Each job runs in its own git worktree, which is git's built-in way of having several working copies of one project open side by side, and merges only after the checks pass. Every decision is appended to a tamper-evident log, which is optional and off unless you turn it on. Works with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and around 40 other tools.
What it would take you
Free and open source, driving the same tools you already pay for. Even if you never install it, the idea worth copying is one private copy of the project per agent plus a test gate before anything merges. Go carefully though: it is beta, one person maintains it, the interfaces may move between versions, and it only went up on 14 August with almost no engagement yet, so treat this as an early look rather than something proven.
MailCue, your own email server in one download, with a mailbox for Claude
What it is
A complete email server that runs as a single download on your own machine, which an AI agent can also use as its own mailbox to read, send and sort mail.
Why it is useful
Two separate uses. As a test inbox it accepts mail sent to any address you like, so you can confirm a client's contact form genuinely sends without cluttering a real inbox. And because the mail server itself is built to talk to AI agents, Claude can be handed a proper mailbox of its own rather than you wiring it into Gmail and fighting with permissions.
What it looks like
A normal webmail inbox in your browser, message list on the left, message on the right, plus a settings page for domains and certificates. Submit a test through a client's contact form and it lands instantly. You can also connect it to Apple Mail like any other account.
How it was made
The interesting choice is the packaging. Running your own mail normally means six or seven separate programs, one to receive mail, one to serve your inbox, one to sign outgoing messages so they are trusted, one for spam, and so on, all wired together by hand. This puts the lot into a single container with one supervisor keeping them alive, so it starts with one command. Changing a single setting flips it from a throwaway test catcher into a real production mail server.
What it would take you
Free to run on your Mac, and useful immediately for testing client contact forms. Running it as a genuine mail server is the expensive part in effort rather than money: you need a small server with a clean reputation and correct DNS, roughly £4 to £5 a month, and getting mail to land in inboxes instead of spam folders is a real faff. Do not move Padharo or client mail onto it casually. The fun experiment is a mailbox purely for Claude, your comps burner address or a First Light one, that it can work through by itself.