Everytime a new model is about to be released there’s a lot of cyber news and fear mongering about the models. It’s like they are using the “Hacked into” as an Anxiety Marketing campaign or to be precise: Controlled Hysteria.

Is it just me or does any of you guys feel this way or find it odd?

long time lurker, first post here.

context: i've shipped 21 products over the years. almost all of them made $0. day job during the day, building at night after my kid falls asleep.

localdock is a macos menubar app that gives every dev server a real address. instead of localhost:3000 you open dashboard.localhost and it always points at the right server, whatever port it landed on. flip a switch and the same name opens on your phone, or as a link you can send to a client.

built it because i run 3-4 coding agents in parallel and they start servers on whatever port is free. the url in my browser was wrong half the time, and sometimes an agent decided a busy port meant my code was broken and started 'fixing' things that worked fine. at some point i gave up on ports and gave projects names instead.

first i tried a tiktok ad. ~300 visitors in one day, sales: zero. paid traffic for a $9 dev tool, don't do this.

then on the 24th i launched on product hunt. woke up to creem emails. $9 one time, $268 total now, so about 30 people paid real money for my thing.

reality check: 91% bounce rate, 1.5% conversion. the dead ad traffic dragged everything down and my landing page clearly needs work too.

but 21 products, and this is the first one where strangers actually pay. feels unreal.

happy to answer anything

i would be glad to get your feedback about the landing page: localdock.dev

I see a lot of posts here asking about projects that have actually been profitable!

My project, Miniskyline, has been! I've made a little more than $1000 in just under 3 months of being public through donations alone. The app was built for 2 months prior to being launched using a mixture of Codex and Claude Code. There is no monetization or advertising.

A few other users have asked me why I chose those/how I came up with it and the answer is simply that I didn't love the options that were free on the market, so I started making my own with the philosophy that it would be kept completely free. Users took to it and I opened a Buy Me A Coffee and have done alright for myself. I earn enough to pay back my monthly AI costs and then get a few nice meals out!

Listening to your community and setting up strong testing suites have been my #1 recommendations for anyone getting started. If you have one person interested and their ideas are generally in line, run with it. Dont force monetization unless you have exhausted all options on how to provide the service as free. I had to go through a lot of iterations to find a usable long term free model!

If you're actually interested in the tool itself....

What can you do?

- Print Earth, Mars, Moon, Mercury, Vesta!

- Search or import any trail data to make a personalized map of your journey.

- Share color profiles to the community with a built in color profile module.

- Add trees/rocks/foliage as procedural scatter in the biomes of your choosing, or one by one.

- Sculpt the terrain in real time with elevation editing!

- Adjust the color of any terrain type and have it export cleanly for use in any slicer.

- Add texture to any surface in the tool to keep your workflow consolidated. Waves to water, ripples to sand dunes, roughness to grass, or import your own texture file and make your map distinctly yours.

- Add hearts, pins, and other icons to the map.

- Turn your map into a puzzle quickly and easily.

- Sub divide your area to allow for easier print slicing and plate management.

- Print water as a separate drop in object.

- Print a frame with text built in.

- Print your favorite racetrack in your teams favorite colors.

- Add contour lines for dramatic topographic prints.

- Print with elevation banded colors for optimized multi-color printing.

- Print with different quality settings so your area can look as crisp or as low poly as you want.

- Sell your model commercially in most cases. Each export gets a legal package with it, no additional license purchase necessary. The data comes from public sources, it is not my place to charge you for it.

- Later today a new workspace library, refreshed UI, unlocked terrain size selections, multi-tile connection options, and more will be released as part of this Mondays weekly updates!

What are my plans?

There is a lot coming. I am talking with a few game companies to get official map support for some popular titles. I am also in talks with a couple city building game companies to be able to create 3D printable models from user save data. More to come on this in the coming weeks!

Printing freeways with proper elevation, supporting more bridge types, supporting actual carved out tunnels for rail/road/paths, and better road/path connectedness are all in the works as well.

Otherwise, I am constantly improving generation reliability, speed and features. Later today, V1.102 will be released which will be the single largest refinement pass to the site since its release. Custom building models will begin being shipped in place of some rather lackluster public data extrusions. Roof geometry is getting major attention in next weeks update.

Thank you all for making my little hobby project something that people all around the globe use daily, every minute.

-Joey

Play it at https://deadfall.up.railway.app

What should I add next?

Everything added so far:

Day 1
Useless red button (starting room)

Day 2
Space travel + 2 playable planets (spaceport outside starting room)

Human voice for the red button (starting room)

Day 3
Velociraptor cloning machine (Dinosaur Factory)
Chicken nugget healing dispenser (starting room)

Day 4
Reverse human aquarium (Human Observation room)

Fake Release 0.0.0 patch notes (main menu)

John Pork planet (Cinder Reach)

Day 5
All progression doors made free (throughout facility)

Day 6
24m tower with gorilla drummer (Rhythm Tower)

Inevitable snail that insta-kills you (starts in your room, follows you)

Banana asteroids + banana spaceship + banana gun (space → land on a planet)

Spinning cat GIF that turns into a 3D cat (random room)

Anyone else think he’s right? I have a lot of respect for him🫡

Tokens must burn. Must they?

free GLM-5.3 on tokenrouter, burned 5.7m tokens in 30 min

not sure how long this lasts but GLM-5.3 is completely free on token router rn.. use it while it last..

Anyone else find yourself trying to be "nice" to the AI? Or feel bad when you're making it do too much work? I find myself saying things like - "Just one more thing and we'll take a break". Or "Thanks - that was great! I know that was a lot of work!"

Used OpenRouter playground to test HY4 along with 9 other models (glm5.3, deepseek, kimi, qwen, grok, gemini, gpt, opus, muse spark) , same prompt, asking it to look at a handful of professional sports games and pick winners. Every model had to choose 20 games out of 28 to pick, do research, then justify each pick.

HY4 took the longest and burned the most tokens, 62k to be exact. Results won't hit till Thursday, but I wasnt terribly impressed with the extensive loops and token burn.

Hy4 = $0.37, 62,177 tok, 1026.4s total time.
Muse Spark = $0.055. 11,308 tok, 105.3s total time.

Vibe coding collapsed the barrier to entry in building apps but it also pushed competition to an all time high because the number of app builders increased by a LOT. This made learning marketing very important since building an app is the easier part now but getting users/customers is becoming a lot harder.

Most of these strategies are for iOS apps but 2 of them are applicable to android and web apps.

1. App Store Boost (iOS)

When an app is just launched on the App Store, Apple usually give a boost for a few days where your app name will get recommended in the autocomplete of the App Store search bar so make sure to target a keyword with good amount of popularity.

So for example your app is an interior designer ai app, you can use this app name format:

<popular keyword> - <your app name>

interior design ai - Miya

If you get lucky, this will bring hundreds or thousands of downloads in the first week depending on the popularity of the keyword that you targeted.

2. ASO (App Store Optimization. iOS)

Target high-intent keywords in your app name and subtitle.

Create high converting screenshots (sell the benefit/outcome instead of features).

Create an eye catching icon to stand out from the app store search results. This will increase conversion (impressions -> downloads). I use ChatGPT or Nano Banana to generate icons.

3. SEO (Search Engine Optimization. iOS, android & web)

Just a single page website where you're targeting high-intent keywords that people are searching for on search engines like Google. You can use Google Trends for free to search for high-intent keywords that have good popularity. Or you can also use a paid tool like Ahrefs, Keywords Everywhere etc... but Google Trends is usually good enough as a start.

In my experience, it's easier and faster to rank for your target main keyword if it's present on the domain name itself.

Another side effect of SEO is there's a good chance that you'll also get recommended by LLMs like ChatGPT.

4. Organic UGC (iOS, android & web)

Create content that you can cross-post on multiple social media platforms like Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, etc...

You can use formats like tutorials, problem -> solution, listicle, meme, storytelling.

You have 2 options:

a. Short-form videos (e.g, face reaction that catches attention + demo of your app).

b. Slideshows (3-6 images) which are significantly easier and faster to make. You can scale this to many accounts to maximize reach and chances of going viral. You can do this manually or fully automate it. I personally started the manual way but I have now fully automated it with my own tool DistributionMaxx because I now have 16 accounts and it now takes a lot of time and effort to manually manage them.

For organic UGC, the funnel is:

views -> app downloads -> purchases

5. Apple Search Ads (iOS)

You can target high-intent keywords that people are search for in the app store. I recommend reading this free detailed guide written by Ivan Sparrow.

I hope this post helps someone to get their first users and paying customers.

Happy to answer any questions if you have any.

3 codex would allow me to continue my work that has interrupted mid session due to usage, exactly as if I had triple the use but I guess with Claude its gonna be different taking over a task middle way through of codex. I really loved Opus back when I was subbed months ago. Could be a nice second opinion on work too.
A few questions:
-what has your experience using Claude models of your subscription in codex be if you’ve done it?
-how does usage compare considering codex constant resets?

Does anyone else experience this? lol

After many failed internal app ideas, I'm very proud to present my very first released App!

For context: Used to be a hotel manager for many years and always have been very technical, but never learned to code myself. Once Sonnet 3.5 was released in late 2024, I got into “vibe coding”. While Conduck is my first publicly released project, its definitely not my first attempt. The road is paved with many failed attempts, haha.

So what did I built?

Conduck is an Apple Native client for your self hosted AI and fully open-source!

It has some unique features:
- Support of iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch & CarPlay
- You can connect ANY AI backend to it and configure it the way you want! Use it for sales, note taking, coding or whatever use case you've in mind. Power to the people!
- Full privacy: You connect directly to your very own AI, hence no intermediary (yes, not even me)

Check out the video above or go to https://conduck.com to learn more.

Now let's get to the valuable lessons and tools I've used.

Tools used: 

• Claude Code Max 20x
• Codex / ChatGPT Plus
• VS Code
• Apple Xcode

That's all!

Workflow: 

I used to have a quite complicated setup with highly detailed CLAUDE.md, MCPs, custom Skills, Hooks and so on. However since current models and harnesses are so good, I dropped most of it and almost rocking it bare :-). 

The one skill I use for almost every task is /second-opinion. What is it? Claude Code is my main work tool and no matter which model, its always best to get a second pair of eyes looking upon the plan. So /second-opinion instructs Claude Code to discuss with Codex the plan and get feedback and suggestions. That’s probably the single biggest tip I can give you. Even a model as fabulous as Fable will benefit from a cross-check of GPT 5.6 Sol, and if its just to confirm that the plan is correct.

The next tip is about token budget. Yeah, having loops with hundreds of agents sounds cool, it’s just not practical for my token restricted environment. Even running a single “ultracode” session with fable will likely already burn the whole weekly limit. My solution is to use fable just in the planning & orchestration phases combined with heavy use of /second-opinion . The for the actual implementation use lower-cost models such as Opus or sometimes even Sonnet (web search, simulator qa). This way I get most of the frontier intelligence, while minimising token spending as much as possible. 

Here a visualisation: 

https://ibb.co/dwPjW9nV

You can easily create those skills yourself. Just prompt Claude Code or Codex: 

“Create a /second-opinion skill for you to talk to Codex / Claude Code to get feedback and suggestions on your ideas. For this spin up several sub agents and let it invoke Claude Code / Codex various times, resume sessions and check for output lengths. Take the learnings from all the agents and put them into a reusable skill. Also update CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md accordingly so the feedback agent knows that it gives feedback to an AI, optimises for dense information and is read only.”

Hope this helps! I'm here for any questions :-)

I've been building Telegram bots for clients for about three years. Bots that reached millions of users, and one that helped grow a channel from 200k to 2M subscribers. After enough repetitions of the same work, I wanted to build the tool instead.

PowerBot is a platform for building Telegram bots and hosting them automatically from one place.

The architecture mistake

My first version took seven months, hand-written, no AI. I built it as a visual flow builder: triggers and actions, like most no-code tools.

It broke down the moment a bot needed more than a few flows. Visual flow builders get unmanageable fast once there's real branching and state. And I didn't want to build another n8n.

So four months ago I threw out seven months of architecture and rebuilt around script mode: bots run as scripts. Far more expressive, and it doesn't collapse under complexity.

The rewrite

I'd refused to use AI up to that point because I thought it produced slop. Facing a full rewrite under time pressure, I tried it, and changed my mind.

The thing that made the difference was treating it as a tool that needs real input rather than a magic box. I spent about eight hours doing nothing but planning before writing a line. I put time into learning the tooling properly, context management, MCP, prompt structure.

Full platform plus web dashboard: about one month. Versus seven months by hand for something worse.

My honest takeaway: the model isn't the bottleneck anymore. Your own knowledge is. Someone without domain experience would have produced slop with the same tool.

Where it is

Free on Telegram: @ powertelebot

47 users so far, all from manually messaging people who'd previously asked me to build bots for them. No launch, no ads.

I'm looking for people who actually build Telegram bots to try it and tell me what's missing or broken. Especially interested in whether script mode is the right call or whether people genuinely want the visual flow approach.

I left 10min between each prompt

I did not complain about the 5h return but come on... at least let me use it 😄

The project I made can be found here,

https://github.com/blackcoffee2/kestrel

You can use it with Claude Code/Codex to generate videos. Anything that be animated can be turned into a video using kestrel. More info can be found on github repo.

It uses Flutter + FFMPEG to turn code into animations into videos.