Dev tools · September 18, 2025
One prompt generates an app with its own database
Hey HN, manyminiapps is the world first massively multiplayer online mini app builder (MMOMA) *Here’s what it does:* You load the page. You write 1 prompt and you get a mini app back in under 2 minutes. There’s no sign up, and you can see what everyone’s creating in real-time! Each mini app comes with it’s own database and backend, so you can build shareable apps that save data. *What’s different* There are a lot of app builders that promise you’ll build production software for others. But we think true production software can take a long time to get right. Even if you don’t need to program…
In plain words
Manyminiapps is an app builder that generates working mini applications from a single text prompt in under two minutes, with no sign-up required. Each app includes its own database and backend, allowing users to create and share data-saving applications. The platform displays all creations in real-time and is designed for people building personal software rather than complex production systems. It targets developers and non-programmers looking for quick, functional app prototypes.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey HN, manyminiapps is the world first massively multiplayer online mini app builder (MMOMA) *Here’s what it does:* You load the page. You write 1 prompt and you get a mini app back in under 2 minutes. There’s no sign up, and you can see what everyone’s creating in real-time! Each mini app comes with it’s own database and backend, so you can build shareable apps that save data. *What’s different* There are a lot of app builders that promise you’ll build production software for others. But we think true production software can take a long time to get right. Even if you don’t need to program there’s a lot of work involved. What if we turned the promise around? Instead of “you vibe code software companies”, it’s “you build fun software for yourself”. If you cut the problem right, LLMs as they are today can already deliver personal software. manyminiapps is meant to be an experiment to demonstrate this. You may wonder: do you really need personal software? We’re not 100% sure, but it’s definitely an interesting question. Using manyminiapps so far has been surprising! We thought our friends would just try to build the common todo app, but instead we found them building wedding planners, chord progression helpers, inspiration lists, and retro games. *How it works* Instead of spinning up VMs or separate instances per app, we built a multi-tenant graph database on top of 1 large Postgres instance. All databases live under 1 table, on an EAV table (entity, attribute, value). This makes it so creating an “app” is as light as creating a new row. If you have heard of EAV tables before, you may know that most Postgres experts will tell you not to use them. Postgres needs to know statistics in order to make efficient query plans. But when you use EAV tables, Postgres can no longer get good statistics. This is usually a bad idea. But we thought it was worth solving to get a multi-tenant relational database. To solve this problem we started saving our own statistics in a custom table. We use count-min sketches to keep stats about each app’s columns. When a user writes a query, we figure out the indexes to use and get pg_hint_plan to tell Postgres what to do. *What we’ve learned so far* We’ve tried both GPT 5, Claude Opus, and Claude Sonnet for LLM providers. GPT 5 followed the instructions the best amongst the models. Even if you told it a completely nonsensical prompt (like “absda”, it would follow the system prompt and make an app for you. But GPT 5 was also the “most lazy”. The apps that came out tended to feel too simple, with little UI detail. Both Claude Opus and Sonnet were less good at following instructions. Even when we told them to return just the code, they wanted to returned markdown blocks. But, after parsing through those blocks, the resulting apps felt much better. To our surprise, we didn’t notice a difference in quality from Opus and Sonnet. Both models did well, with perhaps Sonnet following instructions more closely. To get good results we iterated on prompts. We initially tried giving point-by-point instructions, but found that a prompt with a full example tended to do better. Here’s what we landed on: https://gist.github.com/stopachka/a6b07e1e6daeb85fa7c9555d8f... Let us know what you think, and hope you have fun : )
More dev tools this month
the category →
Open-source GTM skills for technical founders
Dev tools · 29d ago · gtmcofounder.com
OpenTrailPaper is open-source bike computer firmware for the LilyGO T5S3 4.7" E-Paper PRO. It supports offline maps, GPX routes, FIT recording and Bluetooth sensors.
Dev tools · 1d ago · opentrailpaper.com
Launched alongside, September 2025
the whole month →
- AS
Commerce · Sep 2025 · anycrap.shop
- TE
I made a built-from scratch Wayland Compositor to display any GUI app* in the terminal! I think there is a lot of unexplored potential in custom Wayland compositors, a lot of really cool things you can embed existing applications into! So, I started with embedding apps into the terminal because that is the easiest input/output (output is just utf-8 and I use the great `chafa` library for that, and I just read from stdin for the input). If you have any other ideas for cool Wayland compositors, let me know. I purposedly wrote 80% the app in Typescript to appeal to the most developers and…
Dev tools · Sep 2025 · github.com
- IR
Years ago I stumbled across a basic version of this concept and it stuck with me. I knew if I was ever going to take on such a project, it would need to be flawless, but without coding experience it was just another idea that would never happen. By the end of 2024, as AI coding tools exploded everywhere, I finally had a way to make it real. I started from zero knowledge and spent months collaborating with AI agents as a learning experience. Every pixel and every function went through me. The AI translated what I asked for into code, but every decision was human. I didn't use existing OS…
AI · Sep 2025 · mitchivin.com
