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Show HN: Vibe Coding a static site on a $25 Walmart Phone
Hi! I took a cheap $25 walmart phone and put a static server on it? Why? Just for a fun weekend project.
I used Claude Code for most of the setup. I had a blast.
It's running termux, andronix, nginx, cloudflared and even a prometheus node exporter.
Here's the site:
https://walmartphone.stetsonblake.com/ https://walmartphone.stetsonblake.com/
- utopiah 9mo agoCan you please explain why not solely Termux with nginx? I don't understand why Andronix or proot are needed. Actually for a static Website why not just https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.basov.lws.fdroid/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.basov.lws.fdroid/ or more modern https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.example.flutter_http_server/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.example.flutter_http_ser... ? Anyway glad you had fun.
- stets 9mo agoTermux alone seems really quirky to me. Andronix fakes "having root" as I understand and I was able to get more of the services I wanted running on it. https://github.com/termux/proot-distro https://github.com/termux/proot-distro looks really interesting too and I intend to test it in the future!
- M95D 9mo ago> Can you please explain why [...] I can't read the site - it won't load - but there's one obvious answer to your question: "No. AI did it."
- stets 9mo agoI think your comment is meant to imply I don't know what I'm doing.
- lytedev 9mo agoThat seems to me to be one of the least generous interpretations, no? It could also imply that, for whatever reason, the LLM opted for those tools. Therefore there isn't necessarily "reason" in the asked sense.
- shibapuppie 9mo agoI mean, you said it.
- 101008 9mo agoDo you? If someone asks you to change anything in the configuration, do you think you can do it without the help of AI? That's the difference between knowing and understanding. I may read a Math proof and understanding. That doesn't mean I can replicate it or adapting to other proofs (and that's basically the Advanced Calculus tests I used to take when I was in college). I think that's what happened to you. Someone/something (Claude) provide you with instructions you copy and pasted. You underestood them. That's different from knowing.
- M95D 9mo agoNo, it meant to imply you don't know why AI did it. Don't fret - nobody does.
- eleventyseven 9mo ago> Can you please explain No, because they didn't program this or make these decisions, an LLM did.
- stets 9mo agoI had a vision for a fun project, made decisions, tried to understand why to make certain decisions or what was working or not. I didn't write the front page index.html and I don't want to. Sure, I prompted it how I wanted to look, though. tl;dr I had fun and learned stuff.
- hugs 9mo agoignore the haters. this is cool. (and i've been vibe coding with claude code and termux for months. it's good stuff.) i would highly recommend you add guidance on automated data backups, though. my pixel phone went "black screen of death" on me and one of my projects is trapped in there until i can replace the screen.
- stets 9mo agoThx! That's a good next step for sure. Rn git is my backup
- forgotpwd16 9mo agoBecause it's cooler setting it up on your own than having an app do it for you. (Could even skip Termux really.) And most importantly, this sets up a full Linux environment, which can be used from hosting a simple site to programming (even the site itself; don't know if that's what author did here or site was copied from their main system) and more.
- stets 9mo agoThe site was all "written" + configured on the device itself :-)
- trvz 9mo agoDisingenious title, as the phone at 25$ is subsidized. Sure, you can properly buy a phone for not much more, but so can you a Raspberry Pi.
- stets 9mo agoEh, nitpicking I think. It really was $25 and anyone in driving distance of a Walmart can pay 25 real USD and grab one. For sure they are losing money on the hardware in hopes that you subscribe to the plan.
- inversepolymath 9mo agoI decided to buy one, but for the price of two Walmart delivered them to my door in just a few hours.
- stets 9mo agoHell yeah
- throawayonthe 9mo agowhat do you mean by subsidized? do you have to buy a phone plan with it? i tried to add it to cart, and while it says it's locked to Straight Talk, it's not making me pay for a plan (though i'm not in the us so i'm not gonna actually order it to check)
- stets 9mo agoYou do not need to buy a phone plan with it (although they hope you will).
- numpad0 9mo agoNowhere in the world can you make a smartphone at $25 each, even with a bit of slave labor. Either the LTV of a phone is like few k dollars for them, or someone argues it is, or they want network effect, whatever. But $25 is too cheap of a price to make sense.
- andy99 9mo agoDoes the cloudflare tunnel mean cloudflare is acting as a cdn and I’m actually getting the site served from them instead of the phone actually handling the request?
- mikert89 9mo agoI just restyled a full saas app thats doing 50k in arr per month, bootstrapped. I already shipped it to production. A major UX/element/component overhaul. It looks 10x more professional. I did it this afternoon, sitting on my couch. I took a raw css/html assets from a very professional saas app, and gave it to claude code. I wrote no code, and did not even review the code. This field is truly on its way to full automation.
- stets 9mo agoThat's awesome! Totally agree.
- cpursley 9mo agoWhat do you mean by "I took a raw css/html assets from a very professional saas app"?
- F7F7F7 9mo agoI’ll fill in the part between OPs story and “then they all clapped” that he left out. He’s likely talking about “Save As”ing or scraping the DOM for rendered HTML/CSS and feeding that to an LLM to convert to actual in app wired up components.
- 9mo ago
- forgotpwd16 9mo agoMore like "Setting a static website on a budget Android phone". Unsure where the vibe coding is relevant, and Walmart Phone is basically a placeholder.
- stets 9mo agoClaude Code made the simple little home page and did much of the configuration of the system inside andronix. The phone is available at Walmart for $25.
- MangoToupe 9mo agoClause code is a saas no? None of the work happens on the local device. It's not like they got deepseek working on a smartphone... impressive as that might be
- stets 9mo agoLLM inference is remote, yes, but tool calls happen locally on the device. So CC knows it has access to modify files, perform bash commands, etc.
- MangoToupe 9mo agoOk, so why not dial this in through a dildo?
- stets 9mo agoThat'd be cool too, wanna hack on it together?
- MangoToupe 9mo ago[flagged]
- forgotpwd16 9mo ago
- e12e 9mo ago> I used Claude Code for most of the setup. I had a blast. So, most/all of TFA is copied from Claude code? Or in other words, what you did was prompt Claude - not actually following the instructions on this page (they are the output of Claude)? Feels weird reading a sort of fictional/parallel reality description - if you follow these instructions you will arrive at a similar result as I got - only this is not how I did it...
- stets 9mo agoI opened Obsidian, wrote down the steps that I performed + pieces claude did. Most of what I did was little troubleshooting bits or hooking things together. That + every little quirk or weird thing I ran into (eg: phantom process killer, which I actually did setup via adb) that I felt was worth mentioning and might help. Then I told Claude to organize the document better, read it over myself, asked for edits or things to add, etc.
- stavros 9mo agoMy god, the amount of hate this site has for LLMs, it's unbearable. Good for you for having a project and seeing it through, all the lazy "It UsEd An LlM So It DoeSn'T CoUnT" gatekeeping doesn't belong here and I wish all those uncurious comments were flagged.
- e12e 9mo agoI thought the content was interesting, but didn't really match the headline - I didn't learn how I could vibe code a website on a phone - I learned how I could "traditionally" deploy an existing site on a phone (ie: no help on using LLM, no information on how to create a static website).
- stets 9mo agoThat's good input actually. I should have added details on my usage of Claude Code.
- 9mo ago
- daniel_iversen 9mo agoSo cool - built-in internet and UPS :) wonder if it’d be very easy to use it as a remote webcam on a farm as a bit of a fun little project?
- stets 9mo agoDefinitely, but with just standard playstore apps. You really can't get much hardware access from Andronix/Termux AFAIK so GPS, camera, etc don't work.
- hebelehubele 9mo agoI always read that if you keep a phone plugged in for long periods of time, its battery will eventually fail and expand into a spicy pillow, which often deforms the frame, or worse, causes fires. The solution seems to be removing the battery and keeping it running on the charger.
- neilv 9mo agoI think this post is about enthusiasm for using an LLM. One of the problems is that, if you use an LLM like this, and then post the output, you've probably just laundered at least one other person's copyrighted work (about how to do this kind of thing) through an LLM, and then put your name on it.
- stets 9mo agoWhat? The how-to is the concerning part and not the code?
- vlovich123 9mo agoThis really doesn’t use caching? I’m surprised it can just get posted to the front page and survive.
- hu3 9mo agophones these days are quite powerful That $25 phone has 8 cores and 4GB of RAM. https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_moto_g_(2025)-13624.php https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_moto_g_(2025)-13624.php
- stets 9mo agoThe only downtime has been due to phantom process killer (I think) still killing Andronix. I can't figure out why. Traffic was "only" 522 uniques today, easyyy for such a small site behind Nginx
- akkartik 9mo agoAnybody here have this phone? I'm curious to hear how well it runs https://love2d.org https://love2d.org. There's an apk on that page that you can download and install. (And then if you could try out my https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel and report back, that would be even more helpful.) Edit 20 minutes later: After I posted this I remembered I have access to a https://www.walmart.com/ip/AT-T-Maestro-3-32GB-Ocean-Green-Prepaid-Smartphone/301296769 https://www.walmart.com/ip/AT-T-Maestro-3-32GB-Ocean-Green-P.... And both LÖVE and my Carousel work great on it! Much less laggy than any other app on that phone. Including the browser.
- analogpixel 9mo ago@stets, if you are bored and wanted to try something, you should point Claude Code to your article, and tell it to write an ansible playbook to configure the device.
- stets 9mo agoThis is an awesome idea!
- lvspiff 9mo agoI took a jab at using github copilot to vibecode a static portfolio website for my wife. I wanted to get some better familiarity with terraform so seeing what it built for those files while linking up with my custom domain on cloudflare was pretty neat. Terraform S3, iam permissions, cloudfrpnt, dynamodb, secrets and certificates and even cloudflare dns settings. Everything done in vscode with github copilot chat allowing it to run cmd line. Then i had it incorporate some lambda functions for editing and administrative functions for the site.Getting the github action figured out to allow me to use whatever codespace or whatever to edit. It gave me added practice breaking down projects into small agile tasks in essence. It’s like having a small team of jr. programmers, testers, and devops team at my disposal to create a POC It all came together in a couple days, looks decent, processes files, and isnt costing me anything more than the domain registration. I now have a site that i can trigger a github action executing terraform to update the html or css or lambda files if need be. Yeah the code isnt perfect nor is it perfect architecture patterns but it was a fun way to spend a few hours over a weekend to see the power of the service now.
- the_arun 9mo agoGreat job. This is amazingly done. Is the phone connected to wifi or using a data plan?
- stets 9mo agoThx, Wifi! Was down for a bit yesterday but back up. No downtime due to volume of traffic
- childintime 9mo agoIn Kenya you can actually buy a $20 4G 32GB 2GB smartphone. I hadn't thought it possible, but it's an okay phone that suffers in multitasking. Btw, this phone is locked to at least have 1 safaricom chip, but no monthly plan is necessary. Edit: https://www.jumia.co.ke/safaricom-neon-smarta-2-ips-lcd-display5-32gb-rom-2gb-ram-dual-sim-3300mahblack-322133686.html https://www.jumia.co.ke/safaricom-neon-smarta-2-ips-lcd-disp...
- wltr 9mo agoAm I the only one with no scroll on that website? While on mobile.
- wink 9mo agoI'm much more interested in the power story here. Software is easy ;) - did it come with a wall plug? - do you trust that wall plug to be on 24/7? (I've had terrible ones) - did you have to buy any extra cables? ("I had them" does not count) - how much power does it draw?
- stets 9mo ago- I think it just came with a cable, USB-C. no plug. - I do have a battery, but I hear most people pull them and just plug in with none. - No, came with USB-C - Haven't checked! Maybe I will