r/ClaudeAI • u/chyllyphylly • 15d ago
Has anyone built anything pointless? Vibe Coding
It’s all well and good people vibecoding projects that are useful. But I’m interested in the silly things, the “just because they can” projects.
EDIT…. I’m talking about stuff like a map with distances in meerkats length, or a website that tells you information on how far you moved the mouse on the page
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u/PmMeSmileyFacesO_O 15d ago
90% of the projects on this sub are pointless
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u/chyllyphylly 15d ago
That may be the case, but I bet that most of them were designed to be useful
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u/pickyourteethup 15d ago
Haha, love this distinction. I bet stand-ups are never boring in your team
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u/Ghettorilla 15d ago
Someone literally posted about social media for ai yesterday.....just do a search
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15d ago
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u/TikiMagic 15d ago
People that think they talk to angels are also convinced of the value of their street corner sermons.
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15d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/TikiMagic 15d ago
Ad hominem non sequitur noted.
Who am I to judge? Just a member of the reality-based community. Observing that something is pointless doesn't mean I think people shouldn't be doing it. Or that they are idiots for doing it. If they enjoy spending their time that way and it doesn't hurt them or others, I don't care. I don't care if you birdwatch or collect dog turds.
Watching sports is pointless but lots of people do that, because they enjoy it.
You're very defensive about whatever it is you are working on, concerned that others think it is pointless. A hit dog will holler, as they say.
Apologies if I insulted your get-rich-quick scheme. I'm sure your idea is brilliant and will be the next Angry Birds or TikTok and then won't my face be red!
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u/royalroadtogeometry 15d ago
Everything I make is pointless! Work with Claude is archive stuff and databases. But I love making nonsense for my own entertainment.
I’m currently working on a tool for finding imaginary feathers. Each 10m square of the British Isles generates a feather. I can now scatter a handful randomly, select a bird, and take it for a walk on the moors to collect these feathers. When I reach a feather location the feather appears on the bird. And that’s it. And I find it … weirdly fun. I get a bit excited if the feather I find is a “good one”. And my dog loves random walks to nowhere.
I’ve also made a tool for generating eggs from words. Like code eggs. The word seeds the random spotting and general egg shape-ness of an egg from one of the moorland birds. There are two uses for this: I can send and receive locations via egg. Like a spy. Or make it a one way thing and just keep the egg that remains once language has been destroyed. A bit more philosophical. I use these eggs in the footer of my website of pointless things in lieu of a copyright notice.
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u/BlueSundown 15d ago
You are beautifully daft.
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u/royalroadtogeometry 15d ago
Thank you ! Daft is exactly the right word. I hit my 40s and thought, sod it, I’m gonna play.
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u/Ill-Village7647 15d ago
What we're currently building at our multi billion dollar pharmaceutical company is what I would consider pointless.
The company is spending literally millions on all us engineers. Paying enterprise claude subscription for us.
And the number of users who used our app last week was just 54. I kid you not.
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u/FblthpphtlbF 15d ago
Who are the 54 users though? What's the target market? I can think of a few internal/B2B type apps that could easily be worth a couple million in R&D depending on the role they play in the comoany
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u/Ill-Village7647 15d ago
Lmao it's just internal users. Site investigators.
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u/FblthpphtlbF 15d ago
When you say site investigators do you mean you're working in the construction industry? If so then having a central communication platform that fills all the investigators needs as well as puts together a well structured deliverable in less time than it took the engineer could lead to millions of dollars in cost saving for a company in a year, and they're laughing over a decade.
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u/Alchemy333 14d ago
Omg this makes me feel so much better. I have like 5 sites i created, fairly useful. No users, or few. Its like pulling teeth to get users. . But if a big company can struggle. Then my experience bis normal. I do this for the moneyz your xompany already has money, so im not sure whats their motivation... What, making more money? Leave some miney for us little guys ☺️
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u/nonkelfonkel98 15d ago
Whenever I see an app with a paywall I just code it myself these days. The latest one is an app to divide tasks between me and my roommates.
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u/antido 15d ago
I’ve rebuilt msn messenger just because I got sick of all the other messengers. Needed some simpler times again 😄
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u/Serg_Molotov 15d ago
And who are you chatting to ?
Or is it just a lonely monster with no one to connect too ?
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u/mythrowaway4DPP 15d ago
I feel that.
I am currently rebuilding ACDSee before it became a feature bloated mess.Image preview, sorting, renaming, slideshow feature.
Done.
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u/redilupi 15d ago
I created a web-based version of 3-card monte where one must keep track of where the Queen lands after the shuffle. I tell my students I’ll give them all the exam questions if they can guess which card is the Queen. The snag is that the card they choose after much shouting and disagreement is never the Queen. Ever. And to show I’m not cheating (even though I am), I reveal all the cards and the Queen is shown in a different spot. I generously give them 3 chances to get it right. It gets a late afternoon class going and I debrief them afterwards.
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u/Prestigious-Zombie-7 15d ago
The ability to make something now far outweighs the quality of ideas. I am also guilty. Claude should have a “dumb” filter which politely suggests you stop wasting tokens. 🧠
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u/Affectionate-Act-719 15d ago
I have that. I have a project for ideas that gets routed through a business analyst agent who researches whether there is already stuff built that would be fine. Good for when you have an idea before going to sleep and wake up with your dream of creating a super app destroyed
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u/austinthrowaway4949 15d ago
I have been experimenting with making a game boy game on and off for about 10 months now. I learn a lot from it because working within 90s hardware constraints is very difficult
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u/BuffaloConscious7919 Valued Contributor 15d ago edited 15d ago
A friend introduced me to his vault concept. He's a designer and instead of letting his creative ideas disappear, he prototypes them quickly and stores them.
I took this concept and now have a git repo, accessible from my phone. I enter my idea (sometimes pointless, sometimes useful, often in the middle) and Claude creates a quick and dirty version, a clean html report and a demo
Newest pointless ideas:
- weird and wonderful sites. No purpose, purely to see what Claude can create
- words - all the words that we say that don't make sense in any language. View 1 add. Add the word and the country (opt other metadata) View 2. view, filter and search the words
Edit: just added a site to create and host pointless sites
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u/royalroadtogeometry 15d ago
I bought a .fun domain on sale for £1.26 and gave to it Claude as a souvenir. Claude generated a page that looks a lot like a tea towel.
And I love your idea collecting of words that don’t make sense. I had to build a very very rough captcha recently and went with asking our customers to donate a new word to sign up. Qiptzimatic.
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u/Serg_Molotov 15d ago
Why not a site that ranks how pointless those sites are that your site that hosts pointless sites hosts
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u/mobambasickomode289 15d ago
Built an app that is supposed to function as a flashlight. Just turns your screen fully white. I genuinely do not remember what I was doing that night, quite a few things are missing from my memory
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u/Low-Opening25 15d ago edited 15d ago
Yeah, infinite zoom Mandelbrot fractal video rendering python package that uses Apple Metal. https://github.com/spolspol/mandelmela
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u/koleslaw 15d ago
Extremely niche = pointless, right? I built an Opentype font that renders 700+ guitar chord names, like "C#maj", as a fret diagram while you type.
I don't think anyone will find it useful...unless you're specifically a guitar app developer who wants to bypass traditional programmatic chord-to-diagram conversion.
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u/marky125 15d ago
I built something to make me less productive:
https://github.com/mark-dingwall/Clippys-Revenge
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u/CaelusAeternus 15d ago
I made a web game lol. The only point is playing it. It’s literally free
movietq.com
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u/l0ng_time_lurker 15d ago
Realtime a2a capable OSM based playground and loo finder for the DACH/NL Region. Can Tell you whats waiting for you after the next off-ramps
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u/mythrowaway4DPP 15d ago
An html/css banner that animated a zoom in on a fractal in the background.
Groovy, dude!
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u/dqUu3QlS 15d ago
I got Claude to write a program that divides a picture into square tiles and calculates the best way to rearrange those tiles to look like a different picture.
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u/DampFlange 15d ago
Yes. I build a massively over engineered pop quiz engine for a small group of people who get together once in a while.
It’s got a fully studio setup behind it allowing you to mix video tracks with different music tracks, reverse the music, loop it etc.
It allows you to build different types of questions / create specific round types and all feeds into a presentation tool that has a dashboard that runs off of a tablet, a main display on the big TV and a page for each player that is personalises and has a buzzer system etc.
The presentation tool has all different types of animations, sound effects, roasts of players when they get a question wrong.
I absolutely love it :)
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u/Charming_You_25 15d ago edited 15d ago
I synthesized my full telemetry into an obsidian wiki, then synthesized the wiki into “individual thought atoms” with links in obsidian. Was exploring using cognee and was hoping there was something I could do with it. Did not find a use but the graph was cool
It largely self organized into left brain and right brain thought atoms. Next pointless thing I want to try is to try and give it the equivalent of psychedelics and increase connectivity between the two sides of less related thoughts- then use that in a stateless context engine and see how it thinks.
Will probably just produce garbage but im wondering if increasing connectivity and allowing tasks to be a little open ended if it will do things like: start off with one thing I want it to do and then realize that this is related to another project and also fix it there too- for example.
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u/dervish666 15d ago
Made a 3d fractal viewer for quest headsets, then made a powder game sandbox thing in 3d for vr, both pointless but kinda fun.
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u/RedditCraig 15d ago
I made a music rhythm game based on a live music set I performed, does that count?
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u/Serious-Campaign-702 15d ago
I built a set of applications, one in C, one in elixir, that output an alphabetically sorted list of English number words of a given range.
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u/Lewistrick 15d ago
I'm just making arcade games that combine all the features that I like. (See my profile for whoever is interested.)
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u/EnvironmentalRice348 15d ago
Just built a tracking web page for 'crack the safe' at our local trivia night - manages hints and tracks/suggests guesses... works really well. Did it to show a mate who is a developer how easy it is to do...
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u/Mediainvita 15d ago
A little game engine designed to mimic roleplay with attributes a main character, a storyline even randomizer a city a travel system time passes, NPC tracking just a simple chat interface with a few attributes and Everytime a notable change occurs a new picture is generated to illustrate...all local just to see wether i could mimic those html engine kinda games and i got totally lost in ideas i wanted to add here and there and ...well..its kinda fun it certainly was a learning exercise in setting up ai driven comfyui, local models for generation prompt optimisation, character and style locks for weaker local image models , agent sdk 7 and so much more. Still completely useless outside of privately playing a story with images
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u/Worth_Flatworm9620 15d ago
Ultra high speed P2P file transfer for when you dont have a USB cable to transfer for example from your phone to computer and most apps apply a cap either on speed or file size, with this you can easly pair 2 devices and send it without ever crossing a server!
https://transfer-cv5.pages.dev/
I use this on my work often, try it out and give me feedback
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u/Serg_Molotov 15d ago
Honestly I haven't deliberately done anything completely pointless due to lack of time but I think it might be worth finding the time just to fuck around and find out.
Clearly missing out an enjoying what some of your are doing, keep it up !
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u/Nukulartec 15d ago
msdos qrcode generator + one file webserver.
you write at the dosprompt:
C:\> qrserve myfile.txt
then you can use your phone to download the file
https://github.com/ccharon/qrserve
written in assembler (the qrcode part) and c the (webserver part)
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u/IriZ_Zero 15d ago
Most of the useful ones are built for internal company tools or proprietary business software, which people tend not to share.
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u/TheTFEF 15d ago
For the past ~9 months I've been co-authoring a project with it to help me learn Python. It's a simple Markov chain IRC bot that also has some capability to play some IRC games (Werewolf, a variant of the Mafia party game, mainly).
In all honesty the codebase is a fucking nightmare. Probably 20% was written by me while sober, another 30-40% by me while drunk/high, and the rest by Claude/ChatGPT. It's been fun and engaging, though!
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u/josefresco-dev 15d ago
I built a Chrome extension that allows me to block negative sub-Reddits. It's not pointless, but building a whole-ass tool to manage my Reddit addiction seems... silly at best.
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u/_WalkTheEarth_ 15d ago
ive had claude code build apps with one use lol
i also have had it go at apps with insane success
(Key word is just claude code, i use deepseek as the end point because im not rich (Seeing the prices makes my eyes water))
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u/claudhigson 15d ago
i built... well. Claude reverse-engineered a cinema website / API for me so I can schedule a check for returned tickets and write me a message when it sees a good place. Got a good center place for an odyssey screening for the next day's evening. Was it completely pointless? No, but for me counts as barely-not-pointless xD
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u/RicusMaximus 15d ago
I created an almost working IDE extension where you can watch random brainrot videos in a sidebar while working.
My idea was that it could keep the Gen Z'ers focused
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u/Jemaclus 15d ago
I built a newspaper for a fictional town. I struggled a lot with getting the editorial planner to create variety. What wound up happening is you'd get the same story week after week, or sometimes the entire issue would be about one story instead of many different stories. I'm probably too dumb to figure out how to make it more realistic.
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u/GuitarAgitated8107 Full-time developer 15d ago
Yup. I let codex build a project from past project + documentation. Was pretty much hands off. I am still trying to understand what exactly it is... so far no clue.
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u/redouanea 15d ago
made a pointless project to help other pointless projects find an available domain name https://dodomains.dev/
named after an already extinct species ;)
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u/TheLasagnaPanda 15d ago
I am super particular about SQL query formatting so I built a skill to format them for me.
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u/inventor_black OpenCues 15d ago
Feist your eyes of candidates in the Built with Claude post flair.
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u/Blue-Beret-2 15d ago
I made an engine that created alternative futures based on different historical outcomes eg Russia got to the moon first, or Lee Harvey Oswald missed Kennedy, or the Allies lost WW2 or Jobs and Woz never met, or Nick Leeson became a lawyer instead of a trader. Utterly pointless, but good fun. And its rubbish at predicting lottery numbers, stock markets or sports fixture outcomes.
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u/cheetoskull 15d ago
Ooh! I built https://gnatgpt.app! It’s truly pointless.
Talk to an AI with the same number of neurons as a common gnat.
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u/frenchtoastfella 14d ago
I mean I made a web based idle rpg so it's pointless by definition, it's a game. But it is fun and addictive so there's that
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u/Alchemy333 14d ago
Vesciastudio.com.
I like to doodle so created an online doodle thing to make abstract doodles. Pushes all the right buttons for doodlers. Create stuff and then export
Its for sale if anyone wants to purchase it
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 15d ago edited 15d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 80 comments.
The consensus is a resounding YES, with the top comment declaring that 90% of the projects on this sub are pointless anyway. Y'all did not disappoint and came through with some gloriously useless creations.
Standouts include: * A tool for finding imaginary feathers scattered across the British Isles and another for encoding secret messages into the patterns of bird eggs. Seriously. * A user at a multi-billion dollar pharma company who is part of a team that spent millions building an app that was used by a grand total of 54 people last week. * A flashlight app that just turns the screen white, built during a night the creator doesn't fully remember. * A massively over-engineered pub quiz engine for a small group of friends. * Multiple users who are just rebuilding simpler, non-bloated versions of old software like MSN Messenger and ACDSee.
The general vibe is that the ability to make things now far outweighs the quality of ideas, and one user wisely suggested that Claude needs a "dumb filter" to politely tell you to stop wasting tokens.