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Show HN: Vibe coding a bookshelf with Claude Code

284 points by balajmarius 9mo ago

kingkongjaffa 9mo ago
This is lovely, claude code is a great tool for creating software for a user of 1. Personal software that runs locally (or on your own website in your case) and works exactly you want without it doing anything you don't want. One-off scripts and single page html/css/js apps that run locally are fantastically accessible now too. As someone who doesn't code for a living, but can write code, I would often go on hours/day long side quests writing these kind of apps for work and for my personal life. I know the structure and architecture but lack the fluency for speedy execution since I'm not writing code everyday. Claude code fills that speed gap and turned my days/hours long side quests into minutes for trivial stuff, and hours for genuinely powerful stuff at home and at work.
kgthegreat 9mo ago
I wrote about how I think about the separation of intent and execution here : https://bikeshedding.substack.com/p/the-agency-continuum https://bikeshedding.substack.com/p/the-agency-continuum
spicyusername 9mo ago
These are the perfect size projects vibe coding is currently good for. At some point you hit a project size that is too large or has too many interdependencies, and you have to be very careful about how you manage the context and should expect the llm to start generating too much code or subtle bugs. Once you hit that size, in my opinion, it's usually best to drop back to brainstorming mode, only use the llm to help you with the design, and either write the code yourself, or write the skeleton of the code yourself and have the llm fill it in. With too much code, llms just don't seem able yet to only add a few more lines of code, make use of existing code, or be clever and replace a few lines of code with a few more lines of code. They nearly always will add a bunch of new abstractions.
- solumunus 9mo ago
  > make use of existing code, or be clever and replace a few lines of code with a few more lines of code You can be explicit about these things.
  - auggierose 9mo ago
    Yes. It is called programming.
    - solumunus 9mo ago
      Using agents is programming. Programming is done with the mind, the tapping of keys isn’t inherent to the process.
      - batshit_beaver 9mo ago
        Unfortunately IDEs are not yet directly connected to our minds, so there's still that silly little step of encoding your ideas in a way that can be compiled into binary. Playing the broken telephone game with an LLM is not always the most efficient way of explaining things to a computer.
        solumunus 9mo ago
        Of course not. It’s a tool.
- cube2222 9mo ago
  I agree with you as far as project size for vibe-coding goes - as-in often not even looking at the generated code. But I have no issues with using Claude Code to write code in larger projects, including adapting to existing patterns, it’s just not vibe coding - I architect the modules, and I know more or less exactly what I want the end result to be. I review all code in detail to make sure it’s precisely what I want. You just have to write good instructions and manage the context well (give it sample code to reference, have agent.md files for guidance, etc.)
kgthegreat 9mo ago
While currently taste is what we are banking on the thing humans will continue doing but I don’t think that will last for long.
- neogodless 9mo ago
  It is easy to defer to the "taste" of the mathematically mixed up assessment of "all internet-recorded human taste" if you prefer. And many will choose that. But many others will choose to remain in charge of their own taste, as best they can, and request that the machines still produce output per their bidding.
  - MattRix 9mo ago
    Well no, you just need to tune the taste of the model to produce things that humans find appealing. This has already happened with the image generation models. I don’t see any reason it can’t happen with these code generation models too. The whole thing feels a bit like god-of-the-gaps situation, where we keep trying to squeeze humanity into whatever remaining little gaps the current generation of AI hasn’t mastered yet.
- micromacrofoot 9mo ago
  yeah there's nothing special about taste most of the time, very few people even have a decent sense of it anyway you can tell by how many people earnestly share AI generated images, many are completely tasteless but people don't care
  - wiseowise 9mo ago
    Author has a great taste, you can see it by just visiting their website.
    - micromacrofoot 9mo ago
      didn't say that they didn't! but taste isn't really going to stave off AI
vtemian 9mo ago
This nails what vibe coding actually is. The model handles execution, but intent and taste stay human. That’s where the real leverage is.
felixding 9mo ago
Neat. I also used to make a simple "bookshelf" web page each year for the books I read, but mine were fully static HTML and nowhere near as fancy as this. Side note: I once wrote about recreating Delicious Library: https://dingyu.me/blog/recreating-delicious-library-in-2025 https://dingyu.me/blog/recreating-delicious-library-in-2025
- dewey 9mo ago
  I was about to post something about Delicious Library. That's one of my earlier Mac user memories and it always gave me joy to import / organize my books in there even if there's no real reason to do it.
  - _august 9mo ago
    Same, I remember being in awe of how well-designed this app was.
- pixelmonkey 9mo ago
  Wow, this is cool. I had COMPLETELY forgotten about Delicious Library. That is such a nice look-and-feel for this sort of app.
stevesearer 9mo ago
Great project! Vibe coding has really helped me explore skills outside of my comfort zone which can then be applied in combination with other existing skills or interests in new ways. In the case of your project, I imagine that now that you can gather data such as books from an image of a bookshelf, you can do something similar in infinite other ways.
bhouston 9mo ago
Good job! I wonder if you could develop this as an add on to Hardcover.app - you could fetch people's books, images, and display the bookshelf. All the data seems to be there: https://hardcover.app/@BenHouston3D/books/read?order=owner_last_read_at&direction=desc&start=0&limit=40&view=shelf https://hardcover.app/@BenHouston3D/books/read?order=owner_l...
necromanc 9mo ago
[flagged]
stevesearer 9mo ago
Sometimes when I’m vibe coding I feel like Ender from Ender’s Game and even though I’m making a stupid web app, I’m actually somehow actually winning a battle across the universe.
- Shadowmist 9mo ago
  Nobody tell him
troupo 9mo ago
Speaking of SerpAPI: Why we’re taking legal action against SerpApi’s unlawful scraping https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329109 SerpAPI provides a very valuable programmatic access to search that Google are hell bent on never properly providing
mihaibalint 9mo ago
I Love the fact that the browser search functionality works in the bookshelf.
samwho 9mo ago
I love this, the end result looks so good. Something you don’t really mention in the post is why do this? Do you have an end goal or utility in mind for the book shelf? Is it literally just to track ownership? What do you do with that information?
- balajmarius 9mo ago
  Thanks! Honestly, there’s no big utility behind it. I didn’t build it to optimize anything or track data, it just felt good to make. I want my website to slowly become a collection of things I do and like, and this bookshelf is just one of those pieces.
  - AtreidesTyrant 9mo ago
    I like that it's fun, and that is what AI vibe coding should be.
stanrunge 9mo ago
Very very cool. It's surprisingly difficult to find applications for organizing reading material, and also to actually read them. My current "good enough" solution is just Apple Books, but I've been meaning to make a similar application for this :)
cube2222 9mo ago
That’s really cool, and a great use-case for vibe coding! I’ve been vibe-coding a personalized outliner app in Rust based on gpui and CRDTs (loro.dev) over the last couple days - something just for me, and in a big part just to explore the problem space - and so far it’s been very nice and fun. Especially exploring multiple approaches, because exploring an approach just means leaving the laptop working for an hour without my attendance and then seeing the result. Often I would have it write up a design doc with todos for a feature I wanted based on its exploration, and then just launch a bash for loop that launches Claude with “work on phase $i” (with some extra boilerplate instructions), which would have it occupied for a while.
m-hodges 9mo ago
> I decided that 90 percent accuracy was enough. So many systems are fault-tolerant, and it’s great to remember that in a world where LLMs introduce new faults. Kudos to OP for this mindset; more anti-AI posters would benefit from sitting with the idea from time to time.
- JKCalhoun 9mo ago
  Agree. We've all had occasional hilarious results when interacting with an LLM. If 90% of the interactions produce positive results… that's an improvement over my what I've come to expect plowing through Google search results.
- theshrike79 9mo ago
  Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. So many people's lives would be better if 90% of their daily tasks could be automated by LLMs, letting them spend more time doing the hard 10% properly.
asasidh 9mo ago
“Claude handled implementation. I handled taste.” This is the right mindset.
- _vqpz 9mo ago
  This is an LLM-ism.
- hu3 9mo ago
  Claude handled the blog post too from the looks of it.
nindalf 9mo ago
This is such a coincidence. I had the same idea a few days ago and also vibe coded a library using Claude. https://nindalf.com/books https://nindalf.com/books. The original version of this was meant to encourage me to read more, and I'm pleased to say it succeeded. I hit my goal for the year after a couple of lean years. I also like looking at my highlights and notes and this UI makes it easier to read them. My experience with Claude was mostly very good. Certainly the UI is far better than what I'd come up with myself. The backend is close to what I'd write myself. When I'm unhappy I'm able to explain the shortcomings and it's able to mostly fix itself. This sort of small-scale, self-contained project was made possible thanks to Claude. Other times it just couldn't. The validation for the start and end dates it decided was z.string().or(z.date()).optional().transform((val) => (val ? new Date(val) : undefined)). It looked way too complex. I asked if it could be simplified, Claude said no. I suggested z.date().optional(). Claude patiently explained this was impossible. I tried it anyway, it worked. Claude said "you're absolutely right!". But this behaviour was the exception rather than the rule.
- tharos47 9mo ago
  Do you have the code for your book library ? I wanted to do something similar to help me remember the books I read in a year too.
  - nindalf 9mo ago
    Which part? I have a python code base (https://github.com/nindalf/kindle-highlight-sync https://github.com/nindalf/kindle-highlight-sync) that scrapes read.amazon.com for my book highlights. It then exports the data into markdown files that are imported by my website.
- quinnjh 9mo ago
  ive been iterating on something very similar as well :D started in september and give it 30-60 mins here and there. i ended up with rows instead of a horizontal scroll. There definitely hve been a handful of times claude made terrible decisions and described them as brilliant, but with some very heavy guidance and worktrees its still (feels at least) quicker than if i wrote it out. cool to check out your version as well thanks for sharing.
Tiberium 9mo ago
> What I needed was not a better app, but a way to tolerate imperfection without the whole system falling apart. > Claude did not invent that idea. It executed it. > Claude handled implementation. I handled taste. This style of writing always gets me now :)
- AtreidesTyrant 9mo ago
  This style of writing isnt human. Its AI. ^^ These dramatic statements are almost always AI influenced, I seem to always see them in people's emails now as well. "we didnt reinvent the wheel. we are the wheel."
  - delichon 9mo ago
    We can learn useful rhetorical techniques from AI that can help us clearly communicate. We should separate those babies from the bathwater.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - F7F7F7 9mo ago
      Rhetorical techniques that are so easily identifiable as AI now.
    - estearum 9mo ago
      So far, any "useful rhetorical technique" one could've learned from AI has become a dead giveaway of AI slop (lazy writing and lazy thinking). Seriously: what tool do you want to use that's immediately available to the absolute lowest common denominator "writers" on the Internet? "It's not X, it's Y" literally makes my stomach churn from seeing so much of it on LinkedIn.
    - skydhash 9mo ago
      You can also just find a book on writing. I recommend "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. Dense and quite informative.
zittur 9mo ago
I really love how the bookshelf display looks. Most sites just use a standard grid for books, which can feel a bit cookie-cutter. The way you’ve mixed in stacked and bookend-style arrangements is a breath of fresh air, it really stands out.
ionicabizau 9mo ago
Wonderful project, Marius! :) I shared it with my brother who has a lot of books and tracks them in his own little app. Keep up the great work! So happy to see you around!
tahirk99 9mo ago
The size boundary point is real. Once projects get past a few thousand lines, you stop vibe coding and start managing intent and context again. At that stage the LLM becomes more of a fast junior than a magic wand.
k4rnaj1k 9mo ago
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xnx 9mo ago
Sounds like the author did thing the hard way when he probably could've uploaded a few seconds of video to Gemini and said "make a virtual bookshelf app" https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/111971103847972384 https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/111971103847972384
ear7h 9mo ago
> I own more books than I can read. > I started asking for things I did not need. For a community that prides itself on depth of conversation, ideas, etc. I'm surprised to so much praise for a post like this. I'll be the skeptic. What does it bring to you to vibe code your vibe shelf? To me, this project perfectly encapsulates the uselessness of AI, small projects like this are good learning or relearning experience and by outsourcing your thinking to AI you deprive yourself of any learning, ownership, or the self fulfillment that comes with it. Unless, of course, you think engaging in "tedious" activities with things you enjoy have zero value, and if getting lost in the weeds isn't the whole point. Perhaps in one of those books you didn't read, you missed a lesson about the journey being more important than the destination, but idk I'm more of a film person. The only piece of wisdom here is the final sentence: > Taste still does not [get cheaper]. Though, only in irony.
- NewsaHackO 9mo ago
  I don't think you fully understood the purpose of the project. He wanted an end product (the bookshelf app) that he had been putting off due to the time commitment. He did not say he wanted to learn about how to program in general, nor did he even say he liked programming. People care about results and the end product. If you like to program as a hobby, LLMs in no way stop you from doing this. At the end of the day, people with your viewpoint fall short of convincing people against using AI because you are being extremely condescending to the desires of regular people. Also, it is quite ironic that you attempted to make a point about him not reading all 500 books on his bookshelf, yet you don't seem to have read (or understood) the opening section of the post.
  - ear7h 9mo ago
    I'm not trying to _convince_ a stranger on the internet whether to use AI for their vibe shelf hobby project; I'm engaging with a project being presented by it's creator. Interesting that you think continuing to use AI is some enormous own against my presumed attempt at persuasion. Sounds like maybe you're the one needing validation for your viewpoint. It's clearly easy to achieve such validation given the evidence in this comment section so, I'm not sure why you're seeking it from me. As for the main concern in your comment, I did in fact read the blog post; see how I quoted multiple parts, verbatim ("word for word")?. I now understand this audience may not be entirely familiar with literature or reading beyond basic instructions from their preferred datacenter or advertising company, but generally the beginning of a piece of writing (the "introduction") serves as the premise while the end (the "conclusion") describes the abstract ideas a reader should take away from the entire piece. I'll even let you in on a little secret: the word "conclusion" is synonymous with "a judgement following logical steps". As I mentioned in my original comment there is also a middle section which can often be more important or meaningful (to both characters and readers) than the introduction or conclusion. Howver, in this piece of writing it amounted to "I didn't know how to do something so I asked AI and when it didn't do the right thing I asked it again" which isn't a very engaging story (there's a similar famous premise about an "oracle" that can respond to three "queries", however the entertainment relies on this limitation). Anyways, the badic premise seems to be well received already and lacking any interesting description of the process, I chose to engage with the conclusion. The question of taste. The author believes, or rather instructed an LLM to generate an article from the perspective in which someone belives, generative AI can enable the good taste of someone in prototype hell to come to fruition. But in my original comment I'm making the point that creating something of good taste is inextricably linked to engagement with the medium. But the author shows a willful lack of engagement, with their medium whether that be software or a book shelf. If you'd like to engage with my original comment in good faith, here are some questions: * do you really think this project constitutes good taste? for software? for book shelves? * can someone with an apathy for a craft as extreme the author have good taste? * might this even be considered bad taste given the technological sensibilities of this forum? (disdain for js bloat, foss, "elegant solutions")
pixelmonkey 9mo ago
Digitizing my physical bookshelf was one of the first fun “vibe coding” projects I did with ChatGPT4o in 2024. First, I took photographs of all my physical books simply by photographing the bookshelves such that the book spines were visible. Then passed the photographs with a prompt akin to, "These are photographs of bookshelves. Create a table of book title and book author based on the spines of the books in these photographed shelves." ChatGPT4’s vision model handled this no problem with pretty high accuracy. I then vibe-coded a Python program with ChatGPT4 to use the Google Books API (an API key for that is free) to generate a table, and then a CSV, of: book title, book author, and isbn13. Google Books API lets you look up an ISBN based on other metadata like title and author easily. Finally, I uploaded the enriched CSV into a free account of https://libib.com https://libib.com. This is a free SaaS that creates a digital bookshelf and it can import books en masse if you have their ISBNs. You can see the result of this here for my bookshelf: https://www.libib.com/u/freenode-fr33n0d3 https://www.libib.com/u/freenode-fr33n0d3 There are some nice titles in there for HN readers! My admin app for Libib (the one at https://libib.com https://libib.com) is more full-featured than the above public website showcases. It's basically software for running small lending libraries. But, in my case, the “lending library” is just my office’s physical bookshelf. I also added a Libib collection there that is a sync of my Goodreads history, since I read way more Kindle books than physical books these days. That was a similarly vibe-coded project. But easier since Goodreads can export your book collection, including isbn13, to a file. As for my actual physical bookshelf, it is more a collection of books I either prefer in print, or that are old, or out-of-print, or pre-digital & never-digitized. I liked the Libib software so much I end up donating to it every year. I originally discovered it because it is used for Recurse Center’s lending library in the Recurse Center space in Brooklyn, NY (https://recurse.com https://recurse.com). Also, Libib has a Android, iPhoneOS, and iPadOS apps -- these are very basic but they do allow you to add new books simply by scanning their ISBN barcode, which is quite handy when I pick up new items. I did enjoy reading the OP writeup, it’s a fun idea to vibe-code the actual digital bookshelf app, as well!
butlike 9mo ago
It's nice that the project probably helps cut down on accidentally re-buying already owned books. I would hope the project doesn't remove the joy of randomly rediscovering joyous books in your own collection from time to time.
wek 9mo ago
"The gap between intention and execution was small, but it was enough to keep the project permanently parked in the someday pile." Well said! This is my experience with agents, particularly Claude Code. It supplies sufficient activation energy to get me over the hump. It makes each next step easy enough that I take it.
monerozcash 9mo ago
It's a shame the blog post had to be written by AI too. If you're going to use AI to rewrite your text, you could at least ask it to keep the changes minimal.
spzb 9mo ago
I am yet to see a vibe coded success that isn't a small program that already exists in multiple forms in the training data. Let's see something ground-breaking. If AI coding is so great and is going to take us to 10x or 100x productivity let's see it generate a new, highly efficient compression algorithm or a state-of-art travelling salesman solution.
- Forgeties79 9mo ago
  And to add to this, for some reason people really bristle if you say that many LLM’s are just search with extra steps. This feels like an extension of that. It’s just reinventing the wheel over and over again based on a third party’s (admittedly often a solid approximation but still not exact) educated guess of what a wheel may be. It all seems like a rather circuitous way to accomplish things unless your goal isn’t to build a wheel but rather tinker and experiment with the concept of a wheel and learn something in the process. Totally valid, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what open AI et al are pitching lol
- SJMG 9mo ago
  https://thenewstack.io/how-deepminds-alphatensor-ai-devised-a-faster-matrix-multiplication/ https://thenewstack.io/how-deepminds-alphatensor-ai-devised-... Not either of the species of algorithms you've described, but still an advance.
  - spzb 9mo ago
    That's about as far removed from vibe coding as you can get. It's the result of an algorithm developed for a specific purpose by researchers at one of the most advanced machine learning companies.
    - fiyec30375 9mo ago
      Who really cares? The goalpost of "AI is useless because I can't vibe code novel discoveries" is a strawman. AI and vibe coding are transformational. So are AI-enhanced efforts to solve longstanding, difficult scientific problems. If cancer is cured with AI assistance, does it really matter if it was vibe-cured or state-of-the-art-lab-cured?
godber 9mo ago
“the cost of trying ideas had collapsed” This is a critical observation of the vibocene.
pranavm27 9mo ago
Love it, only issue on my mobile is the scroll surface overlaps. I would want that shelf to be perfect fitting on my screen before I start scrolling. Vibe coded a library last month for my website however its much simpler and has Antilibrary section for all the stuff I have not read.
TheChelsUK 9mo ago
Please add an rss feed to your website/writing
damnitbuilds 9mo ago
I am glad more people think book spines are important. I wish book archive sites like archive.org scanned and stored the book spines as well as the covers, but AFAICT none do.
yoz-y 9mo ago
At some point I also made a virtual bookshelf but for a different reason: I found that I often didn’t remember what I read about. So I started taking notes while reading and also making pixel art covers for the books I’ve written about. I feel that writing down ideas makes it easier to revisit them. https://yozy.net/books/ https://yozy.net/books/
- RickS 9mo ago
  I love that the OP made this app for themselves, enjoyed the result, and shared the journey, so that we could all have this convo. With that said, I feel that you've done what this "should have been" IMO. It doesn't have flashy spring motion scroll, but it does interactively capture what I'd care about, which is recording whether I've read the book, what I found relevant/important/memorable, and how it connects to other things I've read/thought about.
guluarte 9mo ago
one thing i use the models for is shopping, do my shopping list in a .txt, copy it and send it to gpt/claude and tell it to organize by shelves, get out of the store in less than 10 minutes lol
dawnerd 9mo ago
I’d love to see how much it cost though, particularly around the images.
walthamstow 9mo ago
> I started asking for things I did not need ... Knowing when to delete working code is not something an AI can decide for you. Very relatable!
nithinbekal 9mo ago
> Four hundred and sixty books is not a scale problem. Knowing when to delete working code is not something an AI can decide for you. This is such a key thing I remind myself when I build apps like this for myself. I have a similar app that has a page with 900-odd ratings, and another with 550 owned books. I decided that I won't bother with infinite scroll or complex search and filtering until my browser can no longer handle rendering that data. "Find in page" works well enough for me for now.
oleggromov 9mo ago
Good project, nice write-up. However, to me as a person with an anti-library as well, this kind of defies the purpose of having it in the first place. I can't say I browse my books too often but when I want to find something, I'd rather browse physical things on a shelf rather than some out-of-date UI with fetched thumbnails. Of course the organization happens in physical space too: this is why we have shelves, labels and such. Obviously no judgement or criticism for the author, just sharing thoughts.
aboardRat4 9mo ago
I found a printable book shelf poster generator (which is itself a fork). https://gitlab.com/Lockywolf/bookshelf https://gitlab.com/Lockywolf/bookshelf
phyzix5761 9mo ago
How do you search if a book is in there? They don't seem to be in any predictable order.
deleted 9mo ago
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kaizenb 9mo ago
"Execution keeps getting cheaper. Taste still does not." yes yes yes!
cdcarter 9mo ago
I vibe coded an app to track my movie watches, at https://moviesonthe.computer https://moviesonthe.computer. I really enjoy the ability to get started quickly with a known idea like “make a single user letterboxd clone” with a system prompt that explains my preferred tech stack. From there it’s relatively easy to start going in and being the tastemaker for the project. I think people being able to build their own bespoke apps is a huge super power. Unfortunately I don’t think the tools today do a good job of teaching you how to think if you aren’t already a software engineer. Sonnet rarely grasps for an abstraction.
- pixelmonkey 9mo ago
  That's cool. I've wanted to track my movie watch history for awhile but just couldn't find the right software to do it. I really dislike Letterboxd. I also agree with your point that having a software engineering (programming) background makes projects like these a bit easier to prompt for in a direct way.
shimman 9mo ago
Why wouldn't the author share code? Or did I miss it?
disconcision 9mo ago
I actually did something similar recently for my website* and it was actually a Claude failure case; helped a little but ultimately cost me more time than doing it entirely myself. For my version I wanted the actual book spine images; since there's no database for these, I took pictures of my shelves (milkcrates) and wanted clickable regions. I also wanted the spines to link to a reasonable webpage for the book, falling back to goodreads if nothing else was available. It was very surprising to me that claude wasn't very good at even the latter. It took several rounds of prompt refinement, including very detailed instructions, to get even 75% non-broken links, from ~30% on first attempt. It really liked to hallucinate goodreads URLs with the book title in them but an invalid ID (the title part of URLs is ignored by goodreads). The former was less surprising... It attempted a very rough manual strategy for generating superimposed SVG outlines on the books, which often started okay but by the right side of the the image often didn't even intersect the actual spines. I tried to verbally coax it into using a third party segmenter, but with no luck. We eventually found a binary search style iterative cropping strategy that worked well but was taking 6 minutes and nearly a couple dollars per spine so I killed that and just did the SVG outlines in figma myself. * https://andrewblinn.com https://andrewblinn.com scroll down to find the bookcase and drag down on it to zoom and unlock the books
deleted 9mo ago
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theturtletalks 9mo ago
Will people use SaaS in the future or roll their own? I’ve been working on opensource.builders, and what I keep seeing is that proprietary software has incentives that make personal software appealing. Commercial software is built for many different use cases and as it grows, it probably wants to capture more of the market. But with each new use case, new complexity is introduced. At some point, users are “programming,” but it’s just your config. With AI, why not program something that works exactly for your business? That’s why so many people are getting into vibe coding. They’ve gone through the nightmare of using software where they only need one feature, or tools that have slowly gotten enshittified, and they realize it might actually be easier to build something that fits them instead of wrestling with layers of complexity that exist for everyone else’s edge cases.
pokemyiout 9mo ago
I like the scroll animation! I've actually been working on something similar since I also had this pain (plus I'm too cheap to buy all the books I'm reading) To solve the issue related to having take the photos myself, I scrape from places like eBay to get the accurate spine images. Obviously this isn't 100% accurate, but like you I also decided 90% accuracy is good enough. https://www.tinyshelf.me/maler/fav https://www.tinyshelf.me/maler/fav
TheGoodBarn 9mo ago
An aside, I love the animation at the end of your website when you scroll at the bottom and the blue expands out. Awesome touch
keyle 9mo ago
I'm not sure anyone commented on this but the usability of what he vibe produced is absolutely terrible. It's amusing that the author might feel a sense of accomplishment and super powers when in fact this is a complete moo point in terms of real gain and a tool of entertainment (consumption) and not productivity as original intended. There is a silver line in there, for the people that care about software.
- apublicfrog 9mo ago
  > complete moo point Like a cows opinion - it doesn't matter? > this is...a tool of entertainment (consumption) and not productivity as original intended. And? I wrote BASIC as a kid, and everything I coded was for entertainment, not productivity. The usability for him appears high. If you're building a tool just for yourself (or or fun), why does it matter?
darkwater 9mo ago
I have recently vibe-coded an Android app, written in Kotlin, to scratch an itch and also as an experiment as an LLM skeptical [1]. It's a greenfield app that basically displays read-only data that's retrieved from a REST JSON API, so it's where Claude Code should shine the most and... yes, I'm actually positively impressed! I would have never been able to write that app myself, and at least surely not over a weekend (while cooking and doing other things with my family). I wanted to try a Show HN as well but I feared that the HN crowd would tear it and me down so... I didn't. [1] check my comments history
CerNai 9mo ago
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284 points by balajmarius 9mo ago

This is lovely, claude code is a great tool for creating software for a user of 1. Personal software that runs locally (or on your own website in your case) and works exactly you want without it doing anything you don't want. One-off scripts and single page html/css/js apps that run locally are fantastically accessible now too. As someone who doesn't code for a living, but can write code, I would often go on hours/day long side quests writing these kind of apps for work and for my personal life. I know the structure and architecture but lack the fluency for speedy execution since I'm not writing code everyday. Claude code fills that speed gap and turned my days/hours long side quests into minutes for trivial stuff, and hours for genuinely powerful stuff at home and at work.

kgthegreat 9mo ago

I wrote about how I think about the separation of intent and execution here : https://bikeshedding.substack.com/p/the-agency-continuum https://bikeshedding.substack.com/p/the-agency-continuum

spicyusername 9mo ago

These are the perfect size projects vibe coding is currently good for. At some point you hit a project size that is too large or has too many interdependencies, and you have to be very careful about how you manage the context and should expect the llm to start generating too much code or subtle bugs. Once you hit that size, in my opinion, it's usually best to drop back to brainstorming mode, only use the llm to help you with the design, and either write the code yourself, or write the skeleton of the code yourself and have the llm fill it in. With too much code, llms just don't seem able yet to only add a few more lines of code, make use of existing code, or be clever and replace a few lines of code with a few more lines of code. They nearly always will add a bunch of new abstractions.

solumunus 9mo ago
> make use of existing code, or be clever and replace a few lines of code with a few more lines of code You can be explicit about these things.
- auggierose 9mo ago
  Yes. It is called programming.
  - solumunus 9mo ago
    Using agents is programming. Programming is done with the mind, the tapping of keys isn’t inherent to the process.
    - batshit_beaver 9mo ago
      Unfortunately IDEs are not yet directly connected to our minds, so there's still that silly little step of encoding your ideas in a way that can be compiled into binary. Playing the broken telephone game with an LLM is not always the most efficient way of explaining things to a computer.
      - solumunus 9mo ago
        Of course not. It’s a tool.
cube2222 9mo ago
I agree with you as far as project size for vibe-coding goes - as-in often not even looking at the generated code. But I have no issues with using Claude Code to write code in larger projects, including adapting to existing patterns, it’s just not vibe coding - I architect the modules, and I know more or less exactly what I want the end result to be. I review all code in detail to make sure it’s precisely what I want. You just have to write good instructions and manage the context well (give it sample code to reference, have agent.md files for guidance, etc.)

kgthegreat 9mo ago

While currently taste is what we are banking on the thing humans will continue doing but I don’t think that will last for long.

neogodless 9mo ago
It is easy to defer to the "taste" of the mathematically mixed up assessment of "all internet-recorded human taste" if you prefer. And many will choose that. But many others will choose to remain in charge of their own taste, as best they can, and request that the machines still produce output per their bidding.
- MattRix 9mo ago
  Well no, you just need to tune the taste of the model to produce things that humans find appealing. This has already happened with the image generation models. I don’t see any reason it can’t happen with these code generation models too. The whole thing feels a bit like god-of-the-gaps situation, where we keep trying to squeeze humanity into whatever remaining little gaps the current generation of AI hasn’t mastered yet.
micromacrofoot 9mo ago
yeah there's nothing special about taste most of the time, very few people even have a decent sense of it anyway you can tell by how many people earnestly share AI generated images, many are completely tasteless but people don't care
- wiseowise 9mo ago
  Author has a great taste, you can see it by just visiting their website.
  - micromacrofoot 9mo ago
    didn't say that they didn't! but taste isn't really going to stave off AI

vtemian 9mo ago

This nails what vibe coding actually is. The model handles execution, but intent and taste stay human. That’s where the real leverage is.

felixding 9mo ago

Neat. I also used to make a simple "bookshelf" web page each year for the books I read, but mine were fully static HTML and nowhere near as fancy as this. Side note: I once wrote about recreating Delicious Library: https://dingyu.me/blog/recreating-delicious-library-in-2025 https://dingyu.me/blog/recreating-delicious-library-in-2025

dewey 9mo ago
I was about to post something about Delicious Library. That's one of my earlier Mac user memories and it always gave me joy to import / organize my books in there even if there's no real reason to do it.
- _august 9mo ago
  Same, I remember being in awe of how well-designed this app was.
pixelmonkey 9mo ago
Wow, this is cool. I had COMPLETELY forgotten about Delicious Library. That is such a nice look-and-feel for this sort of app.

stevesearer 9mo ago

Great project! Vibe coding has really helped me explore skills outside of my comfort zone which can then be applied in combination with other existing skills or interests in new ways. In the case of your project, I imagine that now that you can gather data such as books from an image of a bookshelf, you can do something similar in infinite other ways.

bhouston 9mo ago

Good job! I wonder if you could develop this as an add on to Hardcover.app - you could fetch people's books, images, and display the bookshelf. All the data seems to be there: https://hardcover.app/@BenHouston3D/books/read?order=owner_last_read_at&direction=desc&start=0&limit=40&view=shelf https://hardcover.app/@BenHouston3D/books/read?order=owner_l...

necromanc 9mo ago

[flagged]

stevesearer 9mo ago

Sometimes when I’m vibe coding I feel like Ender from Ender’s Game and even though I’m making a stupid web app, I’m actually somehow actually winning a battle across the universe.

Shadowmist 9mo ago
Nobody tell him

troupo 9mo ago

Speaking of SerpAPI: Why we’re taking legal action against SerpApi’s unlawful scraping https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329109 SerpAPI provides a very valuable programmatic access to search that Google are hell bent on never properly providing

mihaibalint 9mo ago

I Love the fact that the browser search functionality works in the bookshelf.

samwho 9mo ago

I love this, the end result looks so good. Something you don’t really mention in the post is why do this? Do you have an end goal or utility in mind for the book shelf? Is it literally just to track ownership? What do you do with that information?

balajmarius 9mo ago
Thanks! Honestly, there’s no big utility behind it. I didn’t build it to optimize anything or track data, it just felt good to make. I want my website to slowly become a collection of things I do and like, and this bookshelf is just one of those pieces.
- AtreidesTyrant 9mo ago
  I like that it's fun, and that is what AI vibe coding should be.

stanrunge 9mo ago

Very very cool. It's surprisingly difficult to find applications for organizing reading material, and also to actually read them. My current "good enough" solution is just Apple Books, but I've been meaning to make a similar application for this :)

cube2222 9mo ago

That’s really cool, and a great use-case for vibe coding! I’ve been vibe-coding a personalized outliner app in Rust based on gpui and CRDTs (loro.dev) over the last couple days - something just for me, and in a big part just to explore the problem space - and so far it’s been very nice and fun. Especially exploring multiple approaches, because exploring an approach just means leaving the laptop working for an hour without my attendance and then seeing the result. Often I would have it write up a design doc with todos for a feature I wanted based on its exploration, and then just launch a bash for loop that launches Claude with “work on phase $i” (with some extra boilerplate instructions), which would have it occupied for a while.

m-hodges 9mo ago

> I decided that 90 percent accuracy was enough. So many systems are fault-tolerant, and it’s great to remember that in a world where LLMs introduce new faults. Kudos to OP for this mindset; more anti-AI posters would benefit from sitting with the idea from time to time.

JKCalhoun 9mo ago
Agree. We've all had occasional hilarious results when interacting with an LLM. If 90% of the interactions produce positive results… that's an improvement over my what I've come to expect plowing through Google search results.
theshrike79 9mo ago
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. So many people's lives would be better if 90% of their daily tasks could be automated by LLMs, letting them spend more time doing the hard 10% properly.

asasidh 9mo ago

“Claude handled implementation. I handled taste.” This is the right mindset.

_vqpz 9mo ago
This is an LLM-ism.
hu3 9mo ago
Claude handled the blog post too from the looks of it.

nindalf 9mo ago

This is such a coincidence. I had the same idea a few days ago and also vibe coded a library using Claude. https://nindalf.com/books https://nindalf.com/books. The original version of this was meant to encourage me to read more, and I'm pleased to say it succeeded. I hit my goal for the year after a couple of lean years. I also like looking at my highlights and notes and this UI makes it easier to read them. My experience with Claude was mostly very good. Certainly the UI is far better than what I'd come up with myself. The backend is close to what I'd write myself. When I'm unhappy I'm able to explain the shortcomings and it's able to mostly fix itself. This sort of small-scale, self-contained project was made possible thanks to Claude. Other times it just couldn't. The validation for the start and end dates it decided was z.string().or(z.date()).optional().transform((val) => (val ? new Date(val) : undefined)). It looked way too complex. I asked if it could be simplified, Claude said no. I suggested z.date().optional(). Claude patiently explained this was impossible. I tried it anyway, it worked. Claude said "you're absolutely right!". But this behaviour was the exception rather than the rule.

tharos47 9mo ago
Do you have the code for your book library ? I wanted to do something similar to help me remember the books I read in a year too.
- nindalf 9mo ago
  Which part? I have a python code base (https://github.com/nindalf/kindle-highlight-sync https://github.com/nindalf/kindle-highlight-sync) that scrapes read.amazon.com for my book highlights. It then exports the data into markdown files that are imported by my website.
quinnjh 9mo ago
ive been iterating on something very similar as well :D started in september and give it 30-60 mins here and there. i ended up with rows instead of a horizontal scroll. There definitely hve been a handful of times claude made terrible decisions and described them as brilliant, but with some very heavy guidance and worktrees its still (feels at least) quicker than if i wrote it out. cool to check out your version as well thanks for sharing.

Tiberium 9mo ago

> What I needed was not a better app, but a way to tolerate imperfection without the whole system falling apart. > Claude did not invent that idea. It executed it. > Claude handled implementation. I handled taste. This style of writing always gets me now :)

AtreidesTyrant 9mo ago
This style of writing isnt human. Its AI. ^^ These dramatic statements are almost always AI influenced, I seem to always see them in people's emails now as well. "we didnt reinvent the wheel. we are the wheel."
- delichon 9mo ago
  We can learn useful rhetorical techniques from AI that can help us clearly communicate. We should separate those babies from the bathwater.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - F7F7F7 9mo ago
    Rhetorical techniques that are so easily identifiable as AI now.
  - estearum 9mo ago
    So far, any "useful rhetorical technique" one could've learned from AI has become a dead giveaway of AI slop (lazy writing and lazy thinking). Seriously: what tool do you want to use that's immediately available to the absolute lowest common denominator "writers" on the Internet? "It's not X, it's Y" literally makes my stomach churn from seeing so much of it on LinkedIn.
  - skydhash 9mo ago
    You can also just find a book on writing. I recommend "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. Dense and quite informative.

zittur 9mo ago

I really love how the bookshelf display looks. Most sites just use a standard grid for books, which can feel a bit cookie-cutter. The way you’ve mixed in stacked and bookend-style arrangements is a breath of fresh air, it really stands out.

ionicabizau 9mo ago

Wonderful project, Marius! :) I shared it with my brother who has a lot of books and tracks them in his own little app. Keep up the great work! So happy to see you around!

tahirk99 9mo ago

The size boundary point is real. Once projects get past a few thousand lines, you stop vibe coding and start managing intent and context again. At that stage the LLM becomes more of a fast junior than a magic wand.

k4rnaj1k 9mo ago

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xnx 9mo ago

Sounds like the author did thing the hard way when he probably could've uploaded a few seconds of video to Gemini and said "make a virtual bookshelf app" https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/111971103847972384 https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/111971103847972384

ear7h 9mo ago

> I own more books than I can read. > I started asking for things I did not need. For a community that prides itself on depth of conversation, ideas, etc. I'm surprised to so much praise for a post like this. I'll be the skeptic. What does it bring to you to vibe code your vibe shelf? To me, this project perfectly encapsulates the uselessness of AI, small projects like this are good learning or relearning experience and by outsourcing your thinking to AI you deprive yourself of any learning, ownership, or the self fulfillment that comes with it. Unless, of course, you think engaging in "tedious" activities with things you enjoy have zero value, and if getting lost in the weeds isn't the whole point. Perhaps in one of those books you didn't read, you missed a lesson about the journey being more important than the destination, but idk I'm more of a film person. The only piece of wisdom here is the final sentence: > Taste still does not [get cheaper]. Though, only in irony.

NewsaHackO 9mo ago
I don't think you fully understood the purpose of the project. He wanted an end product (the bookshelf app) that he had been putting off due to the time commitment. He did not say he wanted to learn about how to program in general, nor did he even say he liked programming. People care about results and the end product. If you like to program as a hobby, LLMs in no way stop you from doing this. At the end of the day, people with your viewpoint fall short of convincing people against using AI because you are being extremely condescending to the desires of regular people. Also, it is quite ironic that you attempted to make a point about him not reading all 500 books on his bookshelf, yet you don't seem to have read (or understood) the opening section of the post.
- ear7h 9mo ago
  I'm not trying to _convince_ a stranger on the internet whether to use AI for their vibe shelf hobby project; I'm engaging with a project being presented by it's creator. Interesting that you think continuing to use AI is some enormous own against my presumed attempt at persuasion. Sounds like maybe you're the one needing validation for your viewpoint. It's clearly easy to achieve such validation given the evidence in this comment section so, I'm not sure why you're seeking it from me. As for the main concern in your comment, I did in fact read the blog post; see how I quoted multiple parts, verbatim ("word for word")?. I now understand this audience may not be entirely familiar with literature or reading beyond basic instructions from their preferred datacenter or advertising company, but generally the beginning of a piece of writing (the "introduction") serves as the premise while the end (the "conclusion") describes the abstract ideas a reader should take away from the entire piece. I'll even let you in on a little secret: the word "conclusion" is synonymous with "a judgement following logical steps". As I mentioned in my original comment there is also a middle section which can often be more important or meaningful (to both characters and readers) than the introduction or conclusion. Howver, in this piece of writing it amounted to "I didn't know how to do something so I asked AI and when it didn't do the right thing I asked it again" which isn't a very engaging story (there's a similar famous premise about an "oracle" that can respond to three "queries", however the entertainment relies on this limitation). Anyways, the badic premise seems to be well received already and lacking any interesting description of the process, I chose to engage with the conclusion. The question of taste. The author believes, or rather instructed an LLM to generate an article from the perspective in which someone belives, generative AI can enable the good taste of someone in prototype hell to come to fruition. But in my original comment I'm making the point that creating something of good taste is inextricably linked to engagement with the medium. But the author shows a willful lack of engagement, with their medium whether that be software or a book shelf. If you'd like to engage with my original comment in good faith, here are some questions: * do you really think this project constitutes good taste? for software? for book shelves? * can someone with an apathy for a craft as extreme the author have good taste? * might this even be considered bad taste given the technological sensibilities of this forum? (disdain for js bloat, foss, "elegant solutions")

pixelmonkey 9mo ago

Digitizing my physical bookshelf was one of the first fun “vibe coding” projects I did with ChatGPT4o in 2024. First, I took photographs of all my physical books simply by photographing the bookshelves such that the book spines were visible. Then passed the photographs with a prompt akin to, "These are photographs of bookshelves. Create a table of book title and book author based on the spines of the books in these photographed shelves." ChatGPT4’s vision model handled this no problem with pretty high accuracy. I then vibe-coded a Python program with ChatGPT4 to use the Google Books API (an API key for that is free) to generate a table, and then a CSV, of: book title, book author, and isbn13. Google Books API lets you look up an ISBN based on other metadata like title and author easily. Finally, I uploaded the enriched CSV into a free account of https://libib.com https://libib.com. This is a free SaaS that creates a digital bookshelf and it can import books en masse if you have their ISBNs. You can see the result of this here for my bookshelf: https://www.libib.com/u/freenode-fr33n0d3 https://www.libib.com/u/freenode-fr33n0d3 There are some nice titles in there for HN readers! My admin app for Libib (the one at https://libib.com https://libib.com) is more full-featured than the above public website showcases. It's basically software for running small lending libraries. But, in my case, the “lending library” is just my office’s physical bookshelf. I also added a Libib collection there that is a sync of my Goodreads history, since I read way more Kindle books than physical books these days. That was a similarly vibe-coded project. But easier since Goodreads can export your book collection, including isbn13, to a file. As for my actual physical bookshelf, it is more a collection of books I either prefer in print, or that are old, or out-of-print, or pre-digital & never-digitized. I liked the Libib software so much I end up donating to it every year. I originally discovered it because it is used for Recurse Center’s lending library in the Recurse Center space in Brooklyn, NY (https://recurse.com https://recurse.com). Also, Libib has a Android, iPhoneOS, and iPadOS apps -- these are very basic but they do allow you to add new books simply by scanning their ISBN barcode, which is quite handy when I pick up new items. I did enjoy reading the OP writeup, it’s a fun idea to vibe-code the actual digital bookshelf app, as well!

butlike 9mo ago

It's nice that the project probably helps cut down on accidentally re-buying already owned books. I would hope the project doesn't remove the joy of randomly rediscovering joyous books in your own collection from time to time.

wek 9mo ago

"The gap between intention and execution was small, but it was enough to keep the project permanently parked in the someday pile." Well said! This is my experience with agents, particularly Claude Code. It supplies sufficient activation energy to get me over the hump. It makes each next step easy enough that I take it.

monerozcash 9mo ago

It's a shame the blog post had to be written by AI too. If you're going to use AI to rewrite your text, you could at least ask it to keep the changes minimal.

spzb 9mo ago

I am yet to see a vibe coded success that isn't a small program that already exists in multiple forms in the training data. Let's see something ground-breaking. If AI coding is so great and is going to take us to 10x or 100x productivity let's see it generate a new, highly efficient compression algorithm or a state-of-art travelling salesman solution.

Forgeties79 9mo ago
And to add to this, for some reason people really bristle if you say that many LLM’s are just search with extra steps. This feels like an extension of that. It’s just reinventing the wheel over and over again based on a third party’s (admittedly often a solid approximation but still not exact) educated guess of what a wheel may be. It all seems like a rather circuitous way to accomplish things unless your goal isn’t to build a wheel but rather tinker and experiment with the concept of a wheel and learn something in the process. Totally valid, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what open AI et al are pitching lol
SJMG 9mo ago
https://thenewstack.io/how-deepminds-alphatensor-ai-devised-a-faster-matrix-multiplication/ https://thenewstack.io/how-deepminds-alphatensor-ai-devised-... Not either of the species of algorithms you've described, but still an advance.
- spzb 9mo ago
  That's about as far removed from vibe coding as you can get. It's the result of an algorithm developed for a specific purpose by researchers at one of the most advanced machine learning companies.
  - fiyec30375 9mo ago
    Who really cares? The goalpost of "AI is useless because I can't vibe code novel discoveries" is a strawman. AI and vibe coding are transformational. So are AI-enhanced efforts to solve longstanding, difficult scientific problems. If cancer is cured with AI assistance, does it really matter if it was vibe-cured or state-of-the-art-lab-cured?

godber 9mo ago

“the cost of trying ideas had collapsed” This is a critical observation of the vibocene.

pranavm27 9mo ago

Love it, only issue on my mobile is the scroll surface overlaps. I would want that shelf to be perfect fitting on my screen before I start scrolling. Vibe coded a library last month for my website however its much simpler and has Antilibrary section for all the stuff I have not read.

TheChelsUK 9mo ago

Please add an rss feed to your website/writing

damnitbuilds 9mo ago

I am glad more people think book spines are important. I wish book archive sites like archive.org scanned and stored the book spines as well as the covers, but AFAICT none do.

yoz-y 9mo ago

At some point I also made a virtual bookshelf but for a different reason: I found that I often didn’t remember what I read about. So I started taking notes while reading and also making pixel art covers for the books I’ve written about. I feel that writing down ideas makes it easier to revisit them. https://yozy.net/books/ https://yozy.net/books/

RickS 9mo ago
I love that the OP made this app for themselves, enjoyed the result, and shared the journey, so that we could all have this convo. With that said, I feel that you've done what this "should have been" IMO. It doesn't have flashy spring motion scroll, but it does interactively capture what I'd care about, which is recording whether I've read the book, what I found relevant/important/memorable, and how it connects to other things I've read/thought about.

guluarte 9mo ago

one thing i use the models for is shopping, do my shopping list in a .txt, copy it and send it to gpt/claude and tell it to organize by shelves, get out of the store in less than 10 minutes lol

dawnerd 9mo ago

I’d love to see how much it cost though, particularly around the images.

walthamstow 9mo ago

> I started asking for things I did not need ... Knowing when to delete working code is not something an AI can decide for you. Very relatable!

nithinbekal 9mo ago

> Four hundred and sixty books is not a scale problem. Knowing when to delete working code is not something an AI can decide for you. This is such a key thing I remind myself when I build apps like this for myself. I have a similar app that has a page with 900-odd ratings, and another with 550 owned books. I decided that I won't bother with infinite scroll or complex search and filtering until my browser can no longer handle rendering that data. "Find in page" works well enough for me for now.

oleggromov 9mo ago

Good project, nice write-up. However, to me as a person with an anti-library as well, this kind of defies the purpose of having it in the first place. I can't say I browse my books too often but when I want to find something, I'd rather browse physical things on a shelf rather than some out-of-date UI with fetched thumbnails. Of course the organization happens in physical space too: this is why we have shelves, labels and such. Obviously no judgement or criticism for the author, just sharing thoughts.

aboardRat4 9mo ago

I found a printable book shelf poster generator (which is itself a fork). https://gitlab.com/Lockywolf/bookshelf https://gitlab.com/Lockywolf/bookshelf

phyzix5761 9mo ago

How do you search if a book is in there? They don't seem to be in any predictable order.

deleted 9mo ago

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kaizenb 9mo ago

"Execution keeps getting cheaper. Taste still does not." yes yes yes!

cdcarter 9mo ago

I vibe coded an app to track my movie watches, at https://moviesonthe.computer https://moviesonthe.computer. I really enjoy the ability to get started quickly with a known idea like “make a single user letterboxd clone” with a system prompt that explains my preferred tech stack. From there it’s relatively easy to start going in and being the tastemaker for the project. I think people being able to build their own bespoke apps is a huge super power. Unfortunately I don’t think the tools today do a good job of teaching you how to think if you aren’t already a software engineer. Sonnet rarely grasps for an abstraction.

pixelmonkey 9mo ago
That's cool. I've wanted to track my movie watch history for awhile but just couldn't find the right software to do it. I really dislike Letterboxd. I also agree with your point that having a software engineering (programming) background makes projects like these a bit easier to prompt for in a direct way.

shimman 9mo ago

Why wouldn't the author share code? Or did I miss it?

disconcision 9mo ago

I actually did something similar recently for my website* and it was actually a Claude failure case; helped a little but ultimately cost me more time than doing it entirely myself. For my version I wanted the actual book spine images; since there's no database for these, I took pictures of my shelves (milkcrates) and wanted clickable regions. I also wanted the spines to link to a reasonable webpage for the book, falling back to goodreads if nothing else was available. It was very surprising to me that claude wasn't very good at even the latter. It took several rounds of prompt refinement, including very detailed instructions, to get even 75% non-broken links, from ~30% on first attempt. It really liked to hallucinate goodreads URLs with the book title in them but an invalid ID (the title part of URLs is ignored by goodreads). The former was less surprising... It attempted a very rough manual strategy for generating superimposed SVG outlines on the books, which often started okay but by the right side of the the image often didn't even intersect the actual spines. I tried to verbally coax it into using a third party segmenter, but with no luck. We eventually found a binary search style iterative cropping strategy that worked well but was taking 6 minutes and nearly a couple dollars per spine so I killed that and just did the SVG outlines in figma myself. * https://andrewblinn.com https://andrewblinn.com scroll down to find the bookcase and drag down on it to zoom and unlock the books

deleted 9mo ago

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theturtletalks 9mo ago

Will people use SaaS in the future or roll their own? I’ve been working on opensource.builders, and what I keep seeing is that proprietary software has incentives that make personal software appealing. Commercial software is built for many different use cases and as it grows, it probably wants to capture more of the market. But with each new use case, new complexity is introduced. At some point, users are “programming,” but it’s just your config. With AI, why not program something that works exactly for your business? That’s why so many people are getting into vibe coding. They’ve gone through the nightmare of using software where they only need one feature, or tools that have slowly gotten enshittified, and they realize it might actually be easier to build something that fits them instead of wrestling with layers of complexity that exist for everyone else’s edge cases.

pokemyiout 9mo ago

I like the scroll animation! I've actually been working on something similar since I also had this pain (plus I'm too cheap to buy all the books I'm reading) To solve the issue related to having take the photos myself, I scrape from places like eBay to get the accurate spine images. Obviously this isn't 100% accurate, but like you I also decided 90% accuracy is good enough. https://www.tinyshelf.me/maler/fav https://www.tinyshelf.me/maler/fav

TheGoodBarn 9mo ago

An aside, I love the animation at the end of your website when you scroll at the bottom and the blue expands out. Awesome touch

keyle 9mo ago

I'm not sure anyone commented on this but the usability of what he vibe produced is absolutely terrible. It's amusing that the author might feel a sense of accomplishment and super powers when in fact this is a complete moo point in terms of real gain and a tool of entertainment (consumption) and not productivity as original intended. There is a silver line in there, for the people that care about software.

apublicfrog 9mo ago
> complete moo point Like a cows opinion - it doesn't matter? > this is...a tool of entertainment (consumption) and not productivity as original intended. And? I wrote BASIC as a kid, and everything I coded was for entertainment, not productivity. The usability for him appears high. If you're building a tool just for yourself (or or fun), why does it matter?

darkwater 9mo ago

I have recently vibe-coded an Android app, written in Kotlin, to scratch an itch and also as an experiment as an LLM skeptical [1]. It's a greenfield app that basically displays read-only data that's retrieved from a REST JSON API, so it's where Claude Code should shine the most and... yes, I'm actually positively impressed! I would have never been able to write that app myself, and at least surely not over a weekend (while cooking and doing other things with my family). I wanted to try a Show HN as well but I feared that the HN crowd would tear it and me down so... I didn't. [1] check my comments history

CerNai 9mo ago

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