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.
17 Aug 2026
A whole city redrawn as a pixel art map you can zoom around
What it is
A map of San Francisco, all 121 square kilometres of it, redrawn to look like an old isometric city building game, and you pan and zoom around it the way you would Google Maps. One person made it as a side project.
Why it is useful
It is a repeatable method for turning a real place into an illustrated map without drawing a single building by hand. He says the pipeline is not specific to San Francisco, so the same run would give you Southampton.
What it looks like
It opens with chiptune music and the whole bay laid out in pixels at a slight angle, like SimCity 2000. Zoom in and the blur resolves into individual rooftops, piers and trees you can actually recognise. Click a neighbourhood and it names itself. There is a search box, guided tours with little pixel mascots that walk you between stops, and a button that turns your current view into a postcard image you can save or share, because the whole position and zoom lives in the web address.
How it was made
This is the bit worth reading twice, and he wrote it all up honestly, failures included. He started from Google's photorealistic 3D buildings (the ones under Google Earth), pointed one fixed camera at the whole city and rendered it out flat in 440 square chunks. Then he made about 100 example pairs by hand, each one a flat 3D render next to the pixel art version he wanted, generating the pixel art with Nano Banana and approving the good ones by eye. Those 100 pairs taught a small bolt-on (about 200MB) to a free open image model to do that same conversion everywhere else, so he never had to draw the city, only show it what "correct" looks like a hundred times. The clever fix is the seams: generating each square on its own gives you a patchwork where nothing lines up, so instead he generated in overlapping windows, sliding half a square each time, meaning every new piece can see the already finished piece next to it and continue it. Then he reviewed roughly 2,600 finished tiles himself with a flag button in a little review app the agent built him, and regenerated the bad ones with their good neighbours as context. He credits coding agents with writing most of the code, and says flatly he would have abandoned it around step two without them.
What it would take you
Everything except the training is stuff you already have: Claude Code for the pipeline, darkroom for the reference images, and it ships as plain static files so Cloudflare Pages hosts it for nothing. The one real cost is renting a GPU to train the bolt-on, which he put at 10 to 15 dollars per run (he did two) plus about 4 dollars of image generation, so call it 40 dollars to have a go. Be honest with yourself about scale though: a whole city was months. One Southampton landmark, or the old town, is a weekend, and would make a lovely thing to hand a client.
A camera app that fires two lenses at once and fuses the results
What it is
An iPhone camera app. One press of the shutter fires two of the phone's lenses at the same time, then combines both frames into a single photo, so the middle has the real detail of the zoom lens and the edges keep the width of the main one.
Why it is useful
It removes the choice every phone photo forces on you, detail or field of view, pick one. At a gig you get the whole stage in frame and the band still sharp enough to crop into later. Every pixel comes off a real sensor, with nothing invented by AI, which matters if the photo has to hold up.
What it looks like
In use it is deliberately boring: you press the shutter once and the app does the rest, and what lands in your library is one high resolution photo. The selling is done on the website, where each example has a slider you drag across to compare the normal phone photo against theirs. The bookshop one is the convincer, every book spine across the room becomes readable. Free gets you unlimited shooting and editing but only five exports a month; paying unlocks unlimited exports and layered Photoshop files.
How it was made
Nearly every iPhone has two or three lenses on the back and normally uses one at a time, so the whole idea is just refusing to accept that. iOS will let an app run more than one camera simultaneously, which gets you two frames of the same moment from slightly different positions. The hard part is not the capture, it is joining them: the two lenses see the scene from a couple of centimetres apart, so the app has to line them up and blend, keeping whichever source is sharper for each part of the picture, without leaving a visible ring where they meet. On the comparison shots you can still spot a faint glow at that border, and to his credit he points it out rather than hiding it.
What it would take you
Not this app directly, it is iPhone only and you are on Android, and shipping an iPhone app means a Mac plus 99 dollars a year to Apple. The idea is what transfers, and it transfers to the desk rather than the phone: shoot a wide frame and a tight frame of the same interior on the R6, then merge them so the wide shot carries the detail of the tele in the middle. That is a script on your own machine, free, and an afternoon to prototype on one pair of images.
An explainer where the diagrams are running simulations, not pictures
What it is
A web article about why you always seem to be waiting for a lift. It was the most upvoted new thing on Hacker News all month, and the reason is the format rather than the subject.
Why it is useful
It is the best recent example of a page that explains something with moving parts by letting you play with it. That is a format you could sell, and one almost nobody local is offering.
What it looks like
You read a paragraph about how lifts decide who to pick up, and beside it a building is running, cars moving between floors, people appearing and waiting. Underneath, a chart of waiting times fills up as the simulation runs. There is a dial for how many people arrive per minute, and turning it up makes the queue visibly fall apart in front of you. Later on it runs two different scheduling methods side by side so you can watch one beat the other, and then watch that flip when the building gets busy.
How it was made
Nothing on the page is a video or a saved chart. There is one model of a building full of lifts running live in your browser, and each figure is that same model with different settings, drawing itself as it goes. That is why the numbers change when you touch a slider, and it is why the author can make a point like "the clever algorithm actually loses when the building is packed" and just show you rather than assert it. It is a normal modern website underneath, no unusual technology, the effort went into the simulation and into deciding which single idea each figure should isolate.
What it would take you
Free, and squarely inside what you already build. One figure is an evening of plain JavaScript drawing onto a canvas, no framework needed. The obvious commercial version is explaining a client's own thing this way, how a booking system fills their tables through a Saturday night, say, which is far more persuasive than a page of copy claiming it works well.
Draw any shape and hear what it would sound like as a drum
What it is
A single web page where you draw a shape with your finger or mouse, hit it, and hear the note that a real drum skin of that exact shape would make.
Why it is useful
Mostly it is just a lovely thing. It earns its place here for two reasons: it is a whole physics engine in a page with nothing installed, and the author does something almost nobody bothers with, which is proving his answer is right.
What it looks like
You scribble a wonky outline, tap inside it, and it sounds. Fat blobby shapes give you a low boomy note, thin spiky ones a tinny one. The number keys play the individual tones that make up the sound one at a time, which is oddly musical on its own. There are sliders for how hard and how wide you hit it, and a pair of preset shapes that look completely different from each other but sound identical, which is a real and famous piece of maths, not a trick.
How it was made
He states it plainly: no frameworks, no build step, no dependencies. The page covers whatever shape you drew with a mesh of small triangles, then works out numerically which vibrations that shape can hold and at what pitches, since for almost any shape there is no formula to look up. The browser's own sound engine then plays them. The part worth stealing is the checking: a few shapes (a circle, a rectangle) do have exact known answers, so he runs his solver against those on every change and it comes within a tenth of a percent. That is how you tell whether a thing an agent built for you actually works, rather than merely looking like it works.
What it would take you
Free, and it is one static page, so Cloudflare Pages hosts it as is. The physics is the hard bit and not really the point for you. The test-against-a-known-answer habit is the transferable part, and it costs nothing.
A working social site with no JavaScript in it at all
What it is
A small public place to post short notes, 280 characters, text only, no images or video. One person built it, it is free, and the code is open for anyone to read or run.
Why it is useful
It is a live argument that you do not need any of the usual machinery. No app framework, no images, nothing loading in after the page arrives, and it still works as a social network. Pages come down instantly and would work on a decade old phone.
What it looks like
Plain text on a plain page. You write a note, you follow people and hashtags, you reply. There are no likes shoved in your face, no follower counts to chase, no algorithm deciding what you see. The author has said in public that avoiding that stuff is the whole point and that he will take unpopular decisions to keep it that way.
How it was made
The notable choice is the absence: the browser is sent finished HTML and nothing else, so every action is an ordinary form submission handled on the server rather than JavaScript running in the page. That is the old way of building websites, and for something this simple it is still the fastest way.
What it would take you
This maps cleanly onto a Cloudflare Worker returning HTML with D1 holding the notes, comfortably inside the free tier, and a weekend of work. Worth reading even if you never build a social site, because it is a reminder of how much a page can do before you add a single line of JavaScript.
A search engine that only finds real people making things
What it is
Google, but stripped back to personal sites, portfolios, one-person software and odd little art projects. One bloke built his own private version over a weekend and catalogued 560,183 home pages.
Why it is useful
Search is drowning in corporate documentation and SEO sludge, so the actual makers never surface. This finds only them. The same machinery aimed at a narrower subject gives you a genuine niche directory, which is a real product, not a toy.
What it looks like
A plain search box, nothing else, no accounts. You type half a word and fuzzy matching still finds the right site. Each result is a site name, two or three sentences describing what the person actually does, a category and a handful of tags, all written by the machine as it crawled. The whole index sits under a gigabyte on his own disk.
How it was made
Four small programs running side by side. One grabs home pages (just the home page, never the whole site, which is why it stays cheap). One reads each page with a small AI model running on a rented graphics card and writes the description. One watches for a single company flooding the index with thousands of near identical pages and quietly blocks it. Two bits are worth stealing. First, he refused to block boring corporate sites, because a dull docs page might still link out to someone's brilliant personal blog. Instead he weighted the running list of what to fetch next, so links found on a portfolio push to the front and links found on corporate pages sink to the back. That was one text file of numbers, and tuning it by hand for an hour at a time was the whole steering job. Second, he seeded the crawl with ten deliberately chosen doors (small independent blogging platforms, a couple of webrings) and almost the entire final index traces back to links found from those ten, not from any big seed list. He also wrote down, up front, a list of what he was explicitly NOT building, specifically so the agents helping him would not quietly "simplify" it into something four times bigger.
What it would take you
The fetching and the database sit fine on Cloudflare Workers and D1, which you already pay nothing extra for. The only real cost is the summarising: he rented a graphics card at roughly 27p an hour and spent about £8 in total, working out at about 80p per 100,000 sites. You could dodge even that by sending pages to agy on Gemini Flash. Honest warning from him: he let the model invent its own categories and ended up with 671 of them and 121,000 tags, over half used exactly once, so decide your category list up front. This is a weekend, not an evening.
A to-do list you text, that texts you back every morning
What it is
A reminders app with no app. You send it a text message saying what you need to do, and every morning it texts you back whatever is still outstanding.
Why it is useful
It targets the exact failure where you dump a reminder in your notes app and never open it again. The list comes to you, in the place you already look forty times a day, instead of waiting patiently in an app you have to remember to check.
What it looks like
There is no sign up screen, which is the entire point. You text "hey faro" to a number and that is the onboarding, done. Then you just message it like a person: "renew the passport". Next morning a text arrives listing what is still open. When you have done something you reply in normal words, "sorted the passport", and it comes off. The reminders carry context rather than just nagging, so someone prepping a conference talk gets reminded who is going to be sat in that room waiting.
How it was made
The clever decision was refusing to build an app at all, which removes the install, the account, the password and the onboarding in one go. Behind the number it is small: a phone number rented from a text messaging company, an AI model reading each incoming message to work out whether you are adding something or ticking something off, and a once a day timer that sends the list out.
What it would take you
You have a better version of every piece already. Your WhatsApp Business connector replaces the rented US phone number and goes straight to your actual phone, Todoist holds the list, and a Cloudflare Worker on a daily timer sends the morning message. That is a free build and genuinely an evening's work. Given how much slips past you, this might be the most personally useful thing on the page.
See any website as if you were sat in another city
What it is
A free browser add-on that lets you hand each website a different location, language and time zone. Not one global setting, a separate rule per site.
Why it is useful
For client work it means you can check what a restaurant site, or its local search results, look like to somebody in Manchester or Bristol without touching a VPN. For everything else it stops every site you visit quietly learning where you actually are.
What it looks like
You save a preset, say Manchester with English and London time, then attach it to a domain. Open that site and it gets told the Manchester story while everything else in the same browser carries on as normal. There is a panel called X-Ray that shows which rule is currently active and, more interestingly, which pieces of information the site actually reached for. Watching a page silently ask for your coordinates while you are only reading a menu is quite something.
How it was made
A browser extension, so no server and no hosting bill, and it ships in the Chrome, Firefox and Edge stores from one codebase. The good idea is the per site rule rather than one blanket setting, because a blanket setting breaks half the web and you turn it off within a day. The X-Ray panel is the other half: showing people what was requested is what makes them care.
What it would take you
Nothing in money. Browser extensions are a format you have never built in, and they are a genuinely good delivery route for small personal tools, because there is no server to keep alive. Honest limit, and it applies to you specifically: telling a site you are in Manchester does not change your actual internet address, so Google can still see where you really are. It is useful for checking how a page behaves, not for faking your way into local search results.
Proper NES Tetris in a terminal window, played against a friend
What it is
Tetris, running in the plain black text window on your Mac, either on your own or head to head with someone else. Not a rough approximation, a faithful rebuild of the 1989 Nintendo version.
Why it is useful
It is not, particularly, it is fun. It earns its place for two things: how far you can push the boring text window as a place to put a real interface, and how the two player mode connects.
What it looks like
One command and it runs, with nothing to install first. The blocks are drawn out of text characters at eight by eight, and it keeps the original colour change every ten levels. For a two player game the host runs one command and gets a short code printed out. Send that code to your mate, they paste it into their own command, and you are in a best of three. No website, no account, no lobby.
How it was made
The fidelity is the work. He rebuilt the original rules rather than modern Tetris, so the falling speed, the way pieces rotate, the pause after a piece lands, and the deliberately unfair randomiser that made the 1989 game feel the way it did are all the Nintendo behaviour, not the current standard. The bit worth stealing is the connection: the two computers talk directly to each other with no server in the middle, using a short pasted code as the handshake, and only fall back to a relay if a home router blocks the direct route. That is a whole category of small multiplayer or share-my-screen tool you can build with no hosting cost and no accounts.
What it would take you
Free, and trying it costs one command. The direct machine to machine trick is the transferable part, and it is a fair bit more involved than a weekend if you build it from scratch, though the library he used does the hard part.
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.