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Show HN: Vibe coding a bookshelf with Claude Code

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Re: Show HN: Vibe coding a bookshelf with Claude Code

#161

Post by disconcision »

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 scroll down to find the bookcase and drag down on it to zoom and unlock the books

Re: Show HN: Vibe coding a bookshelf with Claude Code

#162

Post by RickS »

yoz-y wrote: post #87

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/

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.

Re: Show HN: Vibe coding a bookshelf with Claude Code

#163

Post by pigpop »

belter wrote: post #114
spzb wrote: post #56

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.

Every two months, I run a very simple experiment to decide whether I should stop shorting NVDA....Think of it as my personal Pelican on a Bike test. :-) Here is how it works: I take the latest state of the art model, usually one of the two or three currently being hyped....and ask it to create a short document that teaches Java, Python, or Rust, in 30 to 60 min, complete with code examples. Then I ask the same model…

I'm sorry but I don't quite believe you because I've done exactly this for learning much more complicated topics. For fun I've been learning about video game programming in the Odin programming language using a Claude project where I have Opus 4.5 write tutorials, including working code examples that are designed to be integrated with each other into a larger project. We've covered maze generation, Delaunay triangulation, MSTs, state machines, rendering via Raylib and RayGUI, and tweening for animations. All of those worked quite well with only very minor corrections which Opus was also very helpful for diagnosing and fixing. I also had it produce a full tutorial on implementing a relational database in Odin but I haven't had time to work my way through all of it yet. This is all with a somewhat niche language like Odin that I wouldn't expect there to be a lot of training data for so you'll excuse my incredulity that you couldn't get usable introductory code for much more commonly used languages like Java and Python.

I'm wondering if your test includes allowing the models to run their code in order to validate it and then fix it using the error output? Would you be willing to share the prompts and maybe some examples of the errors?

I haven't had many problems working in Claude Code even with full on "vibe coding". One notable recent exception was in writing integration tests for a p2p app that uses WebRTC, XTerm.js, and Yjs where it ran into some difficulty creating a testing framework that involved a headless client and a local MQTT broker where we had to fork a few child processes to test communication between them. Opus got bogged down working on its own so I stepped in and got things set up correctly (while chatting with Opus through the web interface instead of CC). The problem seemed to be due to overfilling the context since the test suite files were too long so I could have probably avoided the manual work by just having Opus break those up first.

Re: Show HN: Vibe coding a bookshelf with Claude Code

#164

Post by pixelmonkey »

cdcarter wrote: post #147

I vibe coded an app to track my movie watches, at 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 po…

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.

Re: Show HN: Vibe coding a bookshelf with Claude Code

#165

Post by pigpop »

tzs wrote: post #145
pigpop wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can apply software architecture methods that are designed to help humans with exactly the same type of problems. Once your codebase exceeds a certain size, it becomes counter-productive to have code that is dependent on the implementation of other modules (tight coupling). In Claude Code terms this means your current architecture is forcing the model to read too many lines of code into its context which is deg…

Is vibe architecting a thing too, or is architecting to make your vibe coder work better something that the human needs to know?

Haha, actually yes. You can prompt them to be their own architect but I do find it works better when you help. You could probably get pretty far by prompting them to review their own code and suggest refactoring plans. That's essentially what Plan Mode is for in Claude Code.

Re: Show HN: Vibe coding a bookshelf with Claude Code

#166

Post by 7moritz7 »

AtreidesTyrant wrote: post #31
Tiberium wrote: post #30

> 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 :)

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."

Neurodivergent people tend to write like this too, there was a study about it.

Re: Show HN: Vibe coding a bookshelf with Claude Code

#168

Post by quinnjh »

nindalf wrote: post #28

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 . 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 mos…

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.

Re: Show HN: Vibe coding a bookshelf with Claude Code

#169

Post by bdcravens »

spzb wrote: post #56

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.

10x productivity can also mean allowing a single staff member to do the boring work of 10 humans.

Re: Show HN: Vibe coding a bookshelf with Claude Code

#170

Post by theturtletalks »

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.

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