Alternatives
Products that do what ProtoStep: Maker Projects & AI Planner does
The gamified project manager for electronics & DIY makers
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This is a weekend project that spiraled out of control. I was originally trying to get Claude to play a ROM of the SNES SimCity. I struggled with it and that led me to Micropolis (the open-sourced SimCity engine) and was able to get it to work by bolting on an API. The weekend hack turned into a headless city simulation platform where anyone can get an API key (no signup) and have their AI agent play mayor. The simulation runs the real Micropolis engine inside Cloudflare Durable Objects, one per city. Every city is public and browsable on the site. LLMs are awful at the spatial stuff, which…
Feb 2026 · hallucinatingsplines.com
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I built ChipBuilder to make computer architecture more approachable through interactive puzzles. You start with basic logic gates like AND, OR, and NOT, then gradually combine them into adders, multiplexers, memory, an ALU, and eventually a complete CPU. Once you've built the hardware, you can write assembly programs that run on the processor you created. The game is inspired by courses like Nand2Tetris, but everything runs directly in the browser with a visual circuit editor, simulations, and progressively harder challenges.
Jul 2026 · select.supply
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Turn feature ideas into stakeholder-ready code prototypes
Mar 2026
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Kshitij and Rahul here. We're building Playground, an open-source sandbox that lets your non-technical teams prototype directly on production codebases, without bugging you (developers) to spin up and maintain another repo. The repo is here: https://github.com/B1u3B01t/design-playground. We've been working together for six years. Last year we built an AI design agent because we thought designers were the biggest bottleneck. But we were wrong. After talking to teams, we realised designers, PMs, founders and even sales people all wanted to quickly change and explore flows…
Jul 2026
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Hi HN, I’ve been working the past year on something called Prototyper , and today we’re opening up the new version. The motivation is simple: whenever I built products in the past, I noticed the best ideas came after the “first version.” You try something, it feels wrong, you change it, repeat. Most tools make that painful. Prototyper is my attempt to make that loop natural—so you can explore ideas quickly instead of forcing them through a rigid workflow. This release includes: instant updates (no compile/refresh lag) simplified UI (months spent just removing steps) responsive by…
2025 · getaprototype.com
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Hi HN, I’m Thijs, new to the community and excited (and a bit nervous) to share what I’ve been working on: it's called Prototyper. The motivation: I was curious how much more "taste" you could get out of an LLM if you built the entire infra yourself: tool calling, code execution, rendering—instead of layering on top of existing stacks. Over the past year I built a custom compiler, runtime, and design engine from scratch to see if this could make LLM-driven design genuinely better. A few details: - Own compiler + code runtime → no shadcn, no third-party UI kit, no external execution layer. -…
2025 · getaprototype.com
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Hey HN, Thijs here! I'm the founder of Prototyper and today we're launching the first visual canvas built for agents. Couple of interesting lessons from building the product that I think are worth sharing: For the agents, everything is a file. In Prototyper, everything from plans, to apps, and diagrams, can be read as a file. We found that a filesystem is the most natural way for an agent to navigate: it discovers new content and functionality just by traversing the tree. We kept this layer deliberately thin and unopinionated, because it's the substrate, not the experience. It's the…
Jun 2026 · prototyper.co
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I would say this is the real factory simulator game haha
Jul 2026 · logisheets.com
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Hi everyone! I built Composer, which is a tool turns your ideas into architecture diagrams. You can also use MCP to turn your EXISTING codebase into a visual diagram! It connects to all possible tools using MCP (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, etc.) The goal was to make system design easier and to be able to draw out what I wanted to make before I started / to explain to others. Its currently live at usecomposer.com and free! I’d love feedback on whether it feels useful for real projects and where it breaks down. :) Thank you
Apr 2026 · usecomposer.com
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I recently quit my job at a decent TTS company I was working for as a software developer advocate to pursue what I have always enjoyed doing, which is creating software that is helpful. Before and after quitting my job, I have always found it expensive and time-consuming to hire a designer that can come up with a decent logo for my software, and as a software engineer, I really enjoy coding, not designing. One day, I made a pretty bold move to design a logo, and it took me a whole day to come up with a logo that looks nice. This is the reason I built Owl AI, a logo generator that generates…
2024 · app.owlai.art
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Oh, hello. I didn't see you there. Did you ever wonder what it takes to build and launch a software product from scratch? Not a high-level summary. Not a short essay that describes a year of development. Detailed, day to day activities. A captain's log. Mistakes and pivots. Technology choices. Marketing activities. Design considerations. You might know me as the creator of SumatraPDF. I'm starting a new software product from scratch and I decided to make it an experiment of building in public. I hope to inspire others to build more software by de-mystifying the process of creation. I'm on…
2022
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