What I like is how most such vibed tools - self-aware how ubiquitous they are - don't try to capture audience or offer paid services. Everything is suddenly available without logins, share via a simple url, self-hosting is expected. While AI diminishes the power, influence and recognition of creators, I find it overall a great democratizing force in software.
> keeping it up-to-date with its dependencies etc.
not if the software is functional today, and doesn't require interacting with third party systems (like this tinylittleoffice suite).
By the time the underlying infrastructure (like browser compatibility, or self-hosting OS becoming obsolete) fails, you're likely no longer using it anyway.
The "documents" seem exportable in text format, and in any case, potentially salvageable with another vibe-coded tool if such need arise.
Therefore, the original author is no required to maintain it.
>If it ever gets a serious user base, might easily sell ads or whatever else.
It would need to offer some pretty valuable features, otherwise I'd just vibecode the same app but without ads lol. What's funny is that I have already vibecoded a similar app for my own usage. It's a bit more complex (integrates with a backend I own), but this is something even a free LLM could easily generate.
>Also, it still costs money to host it, the creator won't eat the cost if it gets up to a serious amount of usage
This is a static app. It's free to host in a number of places. Odds are this is just a GitHub Page. I'd be willing to be the creator's only bill is the domain name.
That word is so misused in this context, it is now bereft of meaning. “Democratisation” does not mean that a person without a skill can now achieve a result. A local pastry shop which makes cakes to order does not “democratise” baking. LLMs do not “democratise” software, anyone with access to a computer could already build and host any of these tools.
“Democratisation” is the word shady actors want to put in our heads to make us not think of the bad parts. Like how countries with “democratic” and “people's republic” in the name are the least democratic. If you have to keep repeating how democratising you are, you aren’t at all.
Technically anyone could write a full book or transcribe them before the printing press came around, but it certainly was a democratizing force for publishing when it was invented. The democratization is in the scale and leverage available to the average person.
> We teach the population at the cheapest possible rate; and the aim all the democratization (if we may use the word) of literature proposes to itself in this country, is to store the minds of the many, of the anonymous multitude, with a large portion of valuable, because practically useful, facts. [Meliora, vol. ii, no. 6, 1860]
I’m not sure you understand that quote, or how it (doesn’t) relate to the point.
For one, it even has a parenthetical saying “if we may use the word” meaning the word isn’t being used in it’s proper sense, that’s the whole point of that expression. For another, the quote itself is referring to teaching, as in imparting a skill, and a central point of my comment is that having a skill and having a result done for you are not the same thing. Finally, if you have to go back two centuries to find an example… The countries that I mentioned didn’t even have those names yet, it is clear (if you engage in good faith) that the point regards the modern world and is not a criticism of societies since the dawn of men.
My disagreement is about the usage of the word, not about whether marketers or politicians have used it for other purposes. Sure, using “democratize” to mean “make broadly accessible” has bleached its political force, but that sense has been attested since the late 1700s to the present. Prescriptively, you can argue it shouldn’t be used that way. Descriptively, it has been, for a long time.
> Sure, using “democratize” to mean “make broadly accessible” has bleached its political force
Making and distributing software was already “broadly accessible”. The people who could build and host software before (those with access to computing device) are the same who can do it now.
It's because the creators can't vouch for the work at all and it probably has whack issues. It could be a literal crime to charge for this kind of stuff.
Literal crime seems a bit exaggerated, no? It seems more like the epitome of “move fast, break things”. Folks are moving so fast now that they don’t even bother to try to recoup value for the effort they may have invested anymore.
If that’s a crime, there are a lot of companies that made a lot of money breaking that law.
Your take is worth responding to. See my reply to the similar question. The gist is, move fast and violating patent law is not the same as breaking things. Also it can be illegal to sell products that are broken when there are claims of them... Not being broken. Depends on the situation.
Unfortunately "literal" has come to mean "metaphorical" and descriptivists bully everyone into accepting this (ironically its own form of prescriptivism).
It's a rip off of an office suite, the code for said office suite may or may not have came from derivatives of unpermissive licenses, or from patented work(msft has a portfolio of patents for their office products), depending on what the prompts/developer thinks it does and what it actually does could be false advertising or fraud, the list goes on and on. Also gdpr, pcidss. It's a lot safer to make things free when they can't be vouched for and someone's actual ass or reputation is on the line.
I feel like some people confront their internal dissonance on AI by constructing a fantasy past that never, ever existed.
Zero programmers have ever "vouched" for their work. Everything has bugs and faults and rough edges. Everyone is building stuff that in the end is overwhelmingly code that they didn't write and have never looked at (I mean...do you think that Python script you wrote is "your" code? 99.999% of the runtime is in code you have never looked at).
The "literal crime" just puts the hysterics of this to the next level.
People don't charge for this stuff because in the supply/demand equation, there is basically infinite supply to create fun little things in just a few prompts. Infinite supply means that the ability to charge disappears. This isn't super hard to understand.
And FWIW, infinite supply applies to more and more of the market. I mean, I'm sure people have seen the guy who cloned Photoshop via vibe coding. Again the dissonance there is amazing where people need to believe it's terrible, but as someone who used Photoshop for decades...it's astonishingly good given everything, and iterating rapidly. Similarly, charging to build websites and the like...well, a lot of the market has seen the pricing floor disappear.
30+ years of professional software development, at all scales of projects and teams.
Yeah, your silly rhetoric is just a laugh. And to be clear, I was responding generally for HN, not for you. I was just having a laugh at your "literal crime!" nonsense (which you've doubled down on -- newsflash, HN, it's a crime to have bugs in your code! All of you to the slammer!).
And to be clear, it's easy upvotes to do the "I'm a purist that hand crafts every instruction, and I generally have no idea how anything works so I believe this nonsense, and AI is terrible and only bad people use it" bit on HN, as there are other unemployed sorts like you who think they can contrive a reality if they just say it enough. It's honestly pathetic business at this point.
I'm impressed youve made products for 30 years without ever having been responsible for the work, or having any awareness of the laws and regulations surrounding software/products and monetization thereof. Given how you have extensive experience "working" like this I could see how you would be confused by what I said. Thanks for explaining.
If folks like this kind of thing, I discovered https://bento.page/ from a HN post and have been using it off and on for the past few months. It has a much larger featureset but is specifically focused on presentations (for now!). Unlike this project, the editor and content embed themselves in an html file, so you aren't dependent on the host site existing to serve the editor.
Maybe I'm a 2026 luddite but I can't bring myself to read about let alone try using products whose landing page is such a cookie cutter AI design. At least put some effort in to sand off the horrible unnecessary gloss and choose different fonts, colour schemes and layouts from every other project.
I am gradually becoming resigned to the fact that I'll have to get over this prejudice, though I'm not sure how I will.
I agree with you, but it is so funny that three years ago, a website that look like this would probably make the front page for its excellent design alone. Now, it gives off similar energy to a wix website.
Landing pages are always a proxy for quality. Quality in implementation, quality in domain knowledge, in communication…
At a time when building such a page was hard, it communicated quality in implementation. Now it fakes that, and that is deceptive and therefore met with negative reviews reaction.
Counterexample: highly skilled low level engineers would end up with a crappy front page most of the time, but still the compiler/system/kernel whatever could be high quality.
You are right, then again: I think three years ago someone would have commented about the gloss in the background as well (saying that it’s unhelpful, distracting and resource intensive).
We had few submissions and links in comments this week to some very "young" projects and their home pages looked like pressed from the same machine.
But if it works for people who just want to share their software and avoid working around the packaging and presentation, then I guess "it is what it is".
Not only the design but the text. Like it says so much and so little at the same time and constantly repeats the same cliches like "the file is the app" or "the api is the x". Unmemorable, unfocused and boring is what it comes across. I know devs don't care about marketing copy but it does make a difference on how you're presenting your app to first time potential users.
it's a fair criticism though. learning and eventually relying on new tools is an investment. it helps to know the developer is invested too, not just moonlighting.
Interesting, though on initial scan I could not easily determine who made it, why, what's the future for it, any terms or licenses, etc. With complex html and downloads, I have no idea what else may be sneaking in and/or phoning home :-/
same, i've been using it extensively and it's very convenient having the ability to let Codex/ClaudeCode generate a whole deck, and then do the last edits myself in the browser.
As a kid in the late 1980s, my dad got me a PC (an Olivetti IBM clone to be precise).
I distinctly remember that there were separate apps for spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3 [0]), charts (Harvard Graphics [1]) and word processing (Chi Writer [2]).
And now we just have a basic office suite for free in one website.
Why not just get your agent to write LaTeX? Use the beamer template and get a much more professional, customisable, git-commitable and transferable presentation.
I'm intrigued about the "Trip Planner" being a top-level app. Only tried it in a very surface level way, but the recent trips I've planned (Ottawa for 6 people, Cancun for ~20) have ended up as an ugly mishmash of spreadsheets + google maps saved locations list + random chatgpt sessions.
It feels like there's an unmet need there for managing something more flexible than a minute by minute itinerary, maybe like a list of must-do and want-do activities and dining options, with the system able to figure out what is open when and has other constraints like the weather, costs, what activities pair well together, which group members some things are more or less suited to, what the contact details are for things like a private tour, etc etc.
Definitely there is a need, as you say, but the Internet lacks a cross-site (DB-like) transaction capability. Hotel bookings and flight leg bookings are interdependent, and you will want to lock them in (transaction "COMMIT") once the complete path has been validated as available; if, in contrast, one flight leg or one hotel night are unavailable, the whole plan path may have to be cancelled.
Such a tool would be enormously helpful even for individuals traveling (e.g. business people or scientists visiting customers or trade fairs), which is important as this massively increases market size/potential user base scale.
I have a cheap VPS. I somewhat know what I'm doing, but now I just get Grok Bot to babysit it for me and nothing's gone wrong yet. According to Grok Bot, anyway.
> you're doing something very wrong, or more likely don't know what you're doing.
That is probably it. Nothing to do with the ecosystem or convenience (an esoteric concept known as valuing your time, which is rarely appreciated here*). The only thing missing is "RTFM".
It’s really not much harder than reading the docs on Workers or whatever proprietary platform you’re using. And LLMs are quite good at configuring servers. Took me maybe 5 minutes of my time the last time I set up a Rocky server, and it’s still chugging along with no effort from me for 6 months.
Something like that is nice if it's got long-term support, works all in a single downloadable file (i. e. in a similar manner as TiddlyWiki), has good documentation, and isn't vibe-coded/written. As a nice part in a browser-based swiss army knife. Otherwise, no thanks.
It worked well on my machine, git clone, install, start dev server... also it seems the worker is up and running again. I guess public sharing will only work to some extend when running the dev server for testing.
Open street map servers aren't really meant to be used in end user applications. They are primarily to support the editing of the map data. Usage like this should be with a provider like Mapbox, or your own supplied tiles.
I've recently found out that this is not quite true - while the primary purpose of their tile servers is mapping and editing applications, they do allow third party apps to use the servers as long as they follow usage policies: https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/
Yeah, the concept and execution are really impressive but lack of any import is a real blocker I think. Especially in case of spreadsheets - quite often they are not started from scratch, but require previous data or data from other sources etc.
This is vibecoded in three days.
The chances that this is usable now or be around in a year are tiny.
It looks good on the surface and I like to be proven wrong in a year.
It's a File as a Software. Will it matter if it's wrong in a year? You're also witnessing people trying new things. File as a Software? I guess that was an eventuality since agents write, execute, and forget bits of code just for specific applications. Maybe AI is to code as Guttenberg was to the Bible? It just became available to the masses.
My recent strategy to design presentations has been to record meetings, summarize them and dump it all in onn agent. It can create something that is pretty much perfect very quickly. It's all about context and giving to agents as much of it. Of course you need to prompt them a lot to focus on specific areas you want, but the extra raw context really does help.
It's a shame the self-hosting route is mostly based on Cloudfare's cloud services and there's no documented way to set it up locally using Docker-compose and sqlite (or Postgres) for storage. Great tool, though!
can I do a PR for live collaboration? to be transparent, I'm going to use my own project puter.js for webrtc, but the project is open-source (https://github.com/HeyPuter/puter)
I’m waiting until somebody vibe code a proper desktop apps to provide more diversity than MS vs Open Office. just like I see options blossomed in the “Creative Suite” field.
But maybe I’m just one of those who don’t like web office apps and/or google docs related workflows.
I was musing on something like this. There is non zero chance that some US administration disables GSuite / Office365 for all of us living in shithole countries.
If I ask 10 of the best developers on the planet to build me something and describe it in great detail, they will all build wildly different things unless I actually point them at the exact thing. And even then, the intent might be identical and the surface might be identical, but everything else in between will be different. Oh, and quality will still vary even in this best base scenario.
That's going to be even worse with LLMs. We would need the exact LLM model and its overall configuration (for open weights), the exact prompts and then the luck of the draw.
We should still encourage open prompts, but it's not a panacea.
You would rather trust a package installer and/or binary executable that might inject malware like a keyboard logger, bitcoin miner, back orifice, etc?
I would prefer using sources and making that mandatory.
But I prefer trusted binaries over "private" web app in open internet. And even locally - html and all layers of http stack is inferior to pixels. Or vectors.
The only bug I found is that the presentation previews in dark mode have the text as black on a dark background, when it should be white (matching the canvas text).
not if the software is functional today, and doesn't require interacting with third party systems (like this tinylittleoffice suite).
By the time the underlying infrastructure (like browser compatibility, or self-hosting OS becoming obsolete) fails, you're likely no longer using it anyway.
The "documents" seem exportable in text format, and in any case, potentially salvageable with another vibe-coded tool if such need arise.
Therefore, the original author is no required to maintain it.
Also, it still costs money to host it, the creator won't eat the cost if it gets up to a serious amount of usage
It would need to offer some pretty valuable features, otherwise I'd just vibecode the same app but without ads lol. What's funny is that I have already vibecoded a similar app for my own usage. It's a bit more complex (integrates with a backend I own), but this is something even a free LLM could easily generate.
>Also, it still costs money to host it, the creator won't eat the cost if it gets up to a serious amount of usage
This is a static app. It's free to host in a number of places. Odds are this is just a GitHub Page. I'd be willing to be the creator's only bill is the domain name.
That word is so misused in this context, it is now bereft of meaning. “Democratisation” does not mean that a person without a skill can now achieve a result. A local pastry shop which makes cakes to order does not “democratise” baking. LLMs do not “democratise” software, anyone with access to a computer could already build and host any of these tools.
“Democratisation” is the word shady actors want to put in our heads to make us not think of the bad parts. Like how countries with “democratic” and “people's republic” in the name are the least democratic. If you have to keep repeating how democratising you are, you aren’t at all.
> We teach the population at the cheapest possible rate; and the aim all the democratization (if we may use the word) of literature proposes to itself in this country, is to store the minds of the many, of the anonymous multitude, with a large portion of valuable, because practically useful, facts. [Meliora, vol. ii, no. 6, 1860]
For one, it even has a parenthetical saying “if we may use the word” meaning the word isn’t being used in it’s proper sense, that’s the whole point of that expression. For another, the quote itself is referring to teaching, as in imparting a skill, and a central point of my comment is that having a skill and having a result done for you are not the same thing. Finally, if you have to go back two centuries to find an example… The countries that I mentioned didn’t even have those names yet, it is clear (if you engage in good faith) that the point regards the modern world and is not a criticism of societies since the dawn of men.
So is mine.
> Sure, using “democratize” to mean “make broadly accessible” has bleached its political force
Making and distributing software was already “broadly accessible”. The people who could build and host software before (those with access to computing device) are the same who can do it now.
If that’s a crime, there are a lot of companies that made a lot of money breaking that law.
How so?
Zero programmers have ever "vouched" for their work. Everything has bugs and faults and rough edges. Everyone is building stuff that in the end is overwhelmingly code that they didn't write and have never looked at (I mean...do you think that Python script you wrote is "your" code? 99.999% of the runtime is in code you have never looked at).
The "literal crime" just puts the hysterics of this to the next level.
People don't charge for this stuff because in the supply/demand equation, there is basically infinite supply to create fun little things in just a few prompts. Infinite supply means that the ability to charge disappears. This isn't super hard to understand.
And FWIW, infinite supply applies to more and more of the market. I mean, I'm sure people have seen the guy who cloned Photoshop via vibe coding. Again the dissonance there is amazing where people need to believe it's terrible, but as someone who used Photoshop for decades...it's astonishingly good given everything, and iterating rapidly. Similarly, charging to build websites and the like...well, a lot of the market has seen the pricing floor disappear.
Yeah, your silly rhetoric is just a laugh. And to be clear, I was responding generally for HN, not for you. I was just having a laugh at your "literal crime!" nonsense (which you've doubled down on -- newsflash, HN, it's a crime to have bugs in your code! All of you to the slammer!).
And to be clear, it's easy upvotes to do the "I'm a purist that hand crafts every instruction, and I generally have no idea how anything works so I believe this nonsense, and AI is terrible and only bad people use it" bit on HN, as there are other unemployed sorts like you who think they can contrive a reality if they just say it enough. It's honestly pathetic business at this point.
Do you maintain an account on HN just to troll? I see it's fresh, likely replacing a banned account, so it seems yes.
Thanks for your nonsense and a laugh to start the day.
Maybe I'm a 2026 luddite but I can't bring myself to read about let alone try using products whose landing page is such a cookie cutter AI design. At least put some effort in to sand off the horrible unnecessary gloss and choose different fonts, colour schemes and layouts from every other project.
I am gradually becoming resigned to the fact that I'll have to get over this prejudice, though I'm not sure how I will.
It makes me kinda tense up - I've become almost allergic to it. Kinda interesting really.
At a time when building such a page was hard, it communicated quality in implementation. Now it fakes that, and that is deceptive and therefore met with negative reviews reaction.
I find it completely logical.
Always is a very strong claim.
Counterexample: highly skilled low level engineers would end up with a crappy front page most of the time, but still the compiler/system/kernel whatever could be high quality.
It could be the case that marketing is high quality, but the actual project low (tho, of course, this doesn't have to be the case).
And vice versa with low quality (looking) landing page.
1. https://www.cosmos.so/alfirous/websites/landing
But if it works for people who just want to share their software and avoid working around the packaging and presentation, then I guess "it is what it is".
I distinctly remember that there were separate apps for spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3 [0]), charts (Harvard Graphics [1]) and word processing (Chi Writer [2]).
And now we just have a basic office suite for free in one website.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Graphics
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChiWriter
Here's a deck I had it generate about how the URL format works: https://bit.ly/4yRBc1v
https://tools.simonwillison.net/latex
https://postimg.cc/0r4jrF59
That last slide with a QR code that purports to embed the entire document/deck is intriguing.
I presume there are practical limits to the file size here?
And images inside slides must be impossible to fit it right away?
The entire 'document' is encoded in the URL and so there a quick limit to document size
Text documents max out at about 2,000 characters or so
It feels like there's an unmet need there for managing something more flexible than a minute by minute itinerary, maybe like a list of must-do and want-do activities and dining options, with the system able to figure out what is open when and has other constraints like the weather, costs, what activities pair well together, which group members some things are more or less suited to, what the contact details are for things like a private tour, etc etc.
Such a tool would be enormously helpful even for individuals traveling (e.g. business people or scientists visiting customers or trade fairs), which is important as this massively increases market size/potential user base scale.
I wonder how this would fare on a cheap VPS. Probably better, is my guess.
A single Linode VPS is $5 and includes a terabyte of transfer. Probably wouldn't fall over under slashdotting if you served static pages.
Counting or not counting the time spent on babysitting the distro and all its shenanigans, including but not limited to systemd?
That is probably it. Nothing to do with the ecosystem or convenience (an esoteric concept known as valuing your time, which is rarely appreciated here*). The only thing missing is "RTFM".
(*) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Random selection of one of the many, many pieces of text in the user interface for whatever this is. What does that mean? Does that mean anything?
Most people will be able to host it locally and test it this way.
This recently came across my radar as Home Assistant has migrated to the vector tiles hosted directly by OSMF for all deployments: https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/pull/53816
For my own needs I usually just go for https://openfreemap.org/ though, I like the default style, and it feels maybe a little faster.
https://aboard.com/introducing-tinylittleoffice-com/
It seems they had the idea originally 6 years ago and did versions of it, but
> We moved on, and sadly, those sites fell off the web, and the old links all broke.
[0] https://tiddlywiki.com
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki
Edit: realized it looks like the data is stored in the url, which is a neat approach but I guess its not really that close.
Permalinks are needed to share documents, which would be something like a link shortener, with the target updating as the document is updated.
But maybe I’m just one of those who don’t like web office apps and/or google docs related workflows.
If I ask 10 of the best developers on the planet to build me something and describe it in great detail, they will all build wildly different things unless I actually point them at the exact thing. And even then, the intent might be identical and the surface might be identical, but everything else in between will be different. Oh, and quality will still vary even in this best base scenario.
That's going to be even worse with LLMs. We would need the exact LLM model and its overall configuration (for open weights), the exact prompts and then the luck of the draw.
We should still encourage open prompts, but it's not a panacea.
what does this even mean?
But I prefer trusted binaries over "private" web app in open internet. And even locally - html and all layers of http stack is inferior to pixels. Or vectors.
The only bug I found is that the presentation previews in dark mode have the text as black on a dark background, when it should be white (matching the canvas text).
It's a great idea, but this limits the size of the serialized document to 2048 kiB for Chrome, and 64 kiB for Firefox.
Why someone spends time on making this, and why someone would want to spend time using this?
Much more advanced software is available for free for all platforms. Why not just go and install LibreOffice?
and the functionality has been available already for decades. solved problems, kiddos
How is it easy to share megabytes encoded in a link?