Where the Good Stuff Lives

There’s a lot of talk about AI slop. In the past two weeks I’ve had three separate calls about fixing it. You know the look: the over-gradiented, Inter-font, colored-bracket sameness.

So let’s spin it positive. What about AI interesting? What about AI weird? Projects that only came to life because of the processing power of AI and LLMs. These won’t make it onto your SaaS page, but they might make you smile. Who among us couldn’t use that.

What would you make if nobody was watching?

A whole category of people is answering it right now, in public, and nobody asked them to.

Sean Goedecke built an encyclopedia with 290,000 pages in it. You can’t search it. You can’t type a URL and jump to an article. You can only click a link inside a page you’re already reading, and every page you land on was written the instant you asked for it.

Then he made it harder to find on purpose. Crawlers were indexing the thing faster than humans could read it, and every crawled page was a model call he paid for, so he turned the outgoing links into divs that scrapers can’t follow. He built something enormous and then quietly pulled it further from the road.

He didn’t build it to make a statement. He built it because he wanted to see it exist.

That’s the shape of nearly all of it. Not a movement, not a trend. One curious person at a time.

Val Town, “Talk of the Town.” A monthly roundup by Pete Millspaugh of what people deployed that month, each described by what it does for a person. The register is the whole reason it works. “Steve had to fax the IRS, so he vibe coded agentfax.val.run.” The build method is an aside in a sentence about a man and his fax problem.

Naive Weekly. Kristoffer Tjalve, weekly, and the only curator I found who reliably surfaces makers instead of directories. This is where I found Radio Venus.

itch.io’s AI Disclosure field. Not a page, a database column. itch makes creators disclose AI involvement in structured metadata, so there’s a machine-readable index of AI-assisted work sitting in public that nobody browses this way. Filter it and you’re reading the disclosures of people with no interest in advertising.

Show HN. Ignore anything with AI in the title, for the reason above. Read the hundred-point playful band.

Cursor’s Vibe Jam. Pieter Levels ran it with one hard rule: at least 90% of the code written by AI, and the game instantly playable with no login. Submissions closed on 1 May, so it’s an archive rather than an open door, but the constraint produced a genuinely strange body of work.

Eve Bouffard’s wallpaper. Start here. It looks like a personal site sitting on a Le Brun ceiling painting, and then you notice the panel on the right, and the panel is the point. Pick your masterpiece from a wall of thumbnails; the site pulls the palette out of whatever you chose and retunes itself around it. Vertical framing, blur, darken, grayscale. A background shader you can flip between Paper and Water. A dice for when you can’t decide. It’s a portfolio that hands you the keys to its own chrome, which is a generous thing to do.

The making of it is the part worth sitting with. In her words: she made a Slack channel called eve-thoughts, recorded her stream of consciousness into it for seven days straight, then asked a model to build the website out of everything it knew about her. She did this at a coffee roastery in San Francisco on a Friday morning in June. She’s Head of Design at Y Combinator, so this isn’t someone with spare time. The last pull request shipped three hours before I opened it.

And none of that is announced. No badge, no “built with,” no case study about the workflow. The method is a paragraph in a friendly note that opens “Hi friend :)” and sits below a line about growing up in Montreal. Her stated philosophy, further down: “The best design is often not the thing that looks the best. The best design is the thing that best achieves a given goal.”

Infinite Craft. Drag two elements together, get a third. Water and Fire make Steam, and it never stops, because when you combine a pair nobody has ever tried, a model invents the result and writes it back so everyone after you gets the same answer. The “First Discovery” badge only means something because the thing genuinely didn’t exist before you asked.

EndlessWiki. Goedecke’s encyclopedia, above.

VOIDRACK. A modular synthesizer that runs in a browser tab. One hand-shaped HTML file, no bundler, no dependencies. Its maker ships these things every few days.

TALK TO TRN5-F0RMR. Beeps, boops and warbles assembled by a grammar into something that sounds like your favourite droid. You can download what it makes.

Radio Venus. Your birth chart as a radio station.

portrait-robot. Roni Kaufman calls it “a Dadaist parody of generative AI.” Composite faces built from 180 source images, cut along machine-detected facial landmarks. The joke is that producing AI-looking output with no generative model in it required real machine learning to pull off.

None of these solve anything. That’s sort of the point. Nobody wrote a PRD for any of them.

It all has a short shelf life. The Vibe Jam is already an archive, Naive Weekly has a newer issue, and Eve ships to her site faster than anyone can write it down. The good stuff is hard to find, and it’s probably not on a list, including this one.

One person, named, on the artifact. Every single thing on that list has a human attached. Every aggregator that led me there had none.

The thing itself is the argument. No deck, no waitlist, no demo video. You click and it runs. Nobody’s asking you to imagine what it could become. These are toys, not tools: built to find out what’s magic, not to close a deal.

AI is a material, not a headline. Neal Agarwal’s site describes itself, in full, as “Games and stuff by Neal.” Forty projects on the homepage, one of them powered by a language model, and the word AI appears nowhere. The clearest version sits on itch.io, where a maker’s compliance field reads AI Assisted, Code while the tagline, the body copy and the tags say nothing of the kind. The compliance form says AI. The marketing never does.

They’re built to be used, not to be seen. These things aren’t positioned. They were made, put somewhere, and left running, which is why finding them feels like the early web again. Before the search box flattened everything, you stumbled onto a strange page, or a friend sent you a URL with no explanation, or you hit StumbleUpon’s random button and landed somewhere you’d never have known to look for. That feeling didn’t die when search won. It went underground, and the way back to it is the way it always was: wandering, and word of mouth.

There’s a version of all this that reads as a complaint: the good work is buried, someone should fix the discovery layer. That’s not the story. The discovery layer was always going to be arbitraged. The barrier collapsed anyway, and that’s the part that matters.

One of my favourites is a game called Your AI Slop Bores Me, which got somewhere around fifty million views in its first week. You either submit a prompt or answer someone else’s while pretending to be a machine. There’s no AI in it at all. Every response comes from a person doing an impression of one. One idea, one weekend, and it beat the entire category it was making fun of.

Nobody was watching any of this get made. Goedecke wasn’t building an audience, he was paying an inference bill and keeping the crawlers out. The synth maker shipped ten instruments in a fortnight to a page with no traffic. The drawing app was for one kid. Eve Bouffard talked into a Slack channel for a week with an audience of exactly herself, and a website came out the other side.

Which is the answer to the question at the top, and it’s less romantic than the keynote version. Nobody watching isn’t a condition you arrange, it’s the default, and it’s what every person here was working in. What’s left, once the old barriers fall away, is a Saturday you probably would have spent at Target or worrying about worrying. The people above spent theirs on an encyclopedia you can’t search, a synth in a browser tab, and a birth chart that plays music, and I’ve thought about all three more than anything I was pitched this quarter.

That’s the whole argument for the weird stuff. It has no business case and it stays with you anyway.

So consider this me sending you the link with no explanation. That was my weird, the whole strange list of it. Now do the next person the favor someone once did for you: what’s yours? Send it over. I’m collecting.