Self-updating screenshots • Hacker News Board

Re: Self-updating screenshots

#41

Post by neobrain » Mon, Apr 27, 2026, 7:59 AM UTC

CyberShadow wrote: post #8

Same, I've added a .#screenshots derivation. High up-front effort but almost zero maintenance afterwards. Bonus: since you're generating screenshots programmatically anyway, you can generate a pair of each with your app's light/dark theme, and swap them in/out depending on prefers-color-scheme: dark. elements work in GitHub READMEs, too: https://github.com/CyberShadow/CyDo#readme

+1 for this approach. For a mobile app, I made Nix spawn an ephemeral Android emulator instance for generating up-to-date screenshots, requiring no prior setup and leaving no lingering data around after running. Setting it up wasn't that high-effort in my case either; coming up with the idea was the hard part, the Nix code was one-shot by your favorite LLM.

Granted manually updating the screenshots isn't the most laborious task in the world, but the "upload-apk + take-screenshot + transfer-back-to-PC + edit" process is usually barely annoying enough that you end up almost never doing it otherwise (similar to the OP's experience in the closing paragraph).

Re: Self-updating screenshots

#42

Post by sublinear » Mon, Apr 27, 2026, 8:16 AM UTC

Why wouldn't you want to version the screenshots along with the text? That's a feature, not a bug.

At best, this seems to require an unpublished draft state for all automatic screenshot updates until explicitly approved so that mistakes don't leak out to everyone else.

At worst, this is an unrealistic level of discipline to keep things in sync that is far greater than just updating the docs normally with the next major version release.

My alternative suggestion would be to make sure your test suite takes screenshots with every build. They're already perfectly organized and in the context of what you're documenting.

Re: Self-updating screenshots

#43

Post by borplk » Mon, Apr 27, 2026, 8:21 AM UTC

Site appears to be down intermittently with a Django error

If author sees this: Turn off Django debug mode

Re: Self-updating screenshots

#44

Post by ryanjshaw » Mon, Apr 27, 2026, 8:33 AM UTC

_fzslm wrote: post #16

furyofantares wrote: post #6

Very cool. For the small casual games I've been vibe coding, I always start from a place where the application has a CLI where it can run headless, rendering to offscreen texture, with a a screenshot command as well as performance instrumentation. It takes no time to include all this, and gives the agent a way to automate the ui and inspect important things. It also lets me trivially have the agent update screenshots…

Would you mind sharing a link to some of these casual games? I ask cuz I'm also interested in how vibe coding can make game development easier. We had such a vibrant indie game scene when Adobe flash was about and since then nothing's really touched that level of ease of development. I think vibe coding is the first tool that actually exceeds it.

Search for #vibejam on X, there’s a contest running right now with lots of people sharing their dev experiences.

Re: Self-updating screenshots

#45

Post by npodbielski » Mon, Apr 27, 2026, 9:08 AM UTC

I do not know why but looking at the title I was sure that this involves something like webserver that updates static file it serves by some external webhook.

Re: Self-updating screenshots

#46

Post by Diti » Mon, Apr 27, 2026, 9:32 AM UTC

dhruv3006 wrote: post #29

This is very cool - I think I will try having this in https://voiden.md/ .

“Crafted with care”, but the website has all the telltale signs of LLM slop.

Re: Self-updating screenshots

#47

Post by ekjhgkejhgk » Mon, Apr 27, 2026, 9:39 AM UTC

> Your users might not notice, but you know, and it gnaws at you.

The users WILL DEFINITELY notice if the screenshots don't match what they have in front of their eyes.

Re: Self-updating screenshots

#48

Post by Xmd5a » Mon, Apr 27, 2026, 9:49 AM UTC

cluckindan wrote: post #24

Xmd5a wrote: post #23

> Then you change the UI slightly – tweak a colour, move a button, update some copy – and suddenly every screenshot that includes that element is stale. You know they’re stale. Your users might not notice, but you know, and it gnaws at you. F Related: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47890799

Read the article you’re linking to, it is not relevant here.

Of course it is, he managed to avoid this pitfall, I "press F to pay respect"

Re: Self-updating screenshots

#49

Post by crefiz » Mon, Apr 27, 2026, 10:27 AM UTC

ryanjshaw wrote: post #44

_fzslm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind sharing a link to some of these casual games? I ask cuz I'm also interested in how vibe coding can make game development easier. We had such a vibrant indie game scene when Adobe flash was about and since then nothing's really touched that level of ease of development. I think vibe coding is the first tool that actually exceeds it.

Search for #vibejam on X, there’s a contest running right now with lots of people sharing their dev experiences.

Since you cannot seem to be able to share the url: https://x.com/search?q=%23vibejam&src=typed_query

And for those of you: https://XCancel.com/search?q=%23vibejam&src=typed_query

Re: Self-updating screenshots

#50

Post by amiga386 » Mon, Apr 27, 2026, 10:35 AM UTC

If the author is reading this, please note your code blocks don't scroll (and in fact overflow the white text onto the white background) on mobile layouts. You need an "overflow-x: scroll" or such.