Current project: https://sxp.studio/apps/subjectivezero

If you’re open to the idea of composing code blocks and ideas, plus some generative UI exploration, feel free to join!

My name is Clem, I've been a solo indie dev for a couple years now, exploring frontier tech like XR and agentic workflows in the context of creative / interactive work.

I've been building creation tools for a while and some common design challenge is to figure out the right level of abstraction for your tool. You can always make it super advanced and complex with low level concepts (shader composition, actual code etc.) but then you get something with a high complexity / learning curve. On the other hand, if you make your tool too high level, it might be easier to use at first, but people will most likely hit a wall eventually and start fighting with your tool to get their edge case done (you see that on mobile a lot actually).

With this prototype (called SubjectiveZero), I'd like to imagine that we can kind of move the "slider" on the abstraction layer, meaning that you can actually start with prompts that describe the goal, and you can go as high level (stay with abstract prompts) or low level as you'd like (more specific prompts, or even edit the generated code directly)! The agent orchestration actually understand your context and work along side with you to figure out what could be the best node graph structure for your project (that and some fun little procedural UI done at the node level).

If i had to pitch it in 30 seconds, I'd say "Think TouchDesigner and friends but with agent orchestration".

When you use it, it will generate real native code (Swift/Metal for now) that you can actually hot reload and iterate on either manually or through agents. It's still an early prototype and macOS only for now, but I'd love to get genuine feedback that could help me drive where this project should go next (or not).

Lastly, I'm absolutely open and upfront on the fact that I used agentic coding for this, but as people say: "kept on a short leash". The architecture and specs were relatively well thought out and I personally prefer to be in the loop and review all the code being written to make sure it's going in the right direction.

Oh and it's open source :-)

Hope you like it! https://sxp.studio/apps/subz

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48861217

Points: 25

# Comments: 4

- https://sxp.studio/apps/subz

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48735817

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Little plug since we’re in the topic of dumb phones etc, I have a completely free and non-creepy iPhone app launcher for folks who are into that:

- https://sxp.studio/apps/applist

(The app catalog is also open source)

Then… I wanted to apply this to (beginner level) language learning. And yep you have to be disciplined to go through the cards daily, but it works.

My app is 100% free so my trick was to have users write what they need, the app generates a prompt to give to any AI provider, which in turn gives you back a JSON that will be converted into a deck.

Nothing truly ground breaking, but again it works for beginner level concepts :-)

My first project was an “old school” node editor done almost entirely with agentic coding. I slapped an MCP on it to see if the agents could make cool stuff and it was mostly hit or miss, but nothing too mind blowing. Blog post about it: https://sxp.studio/blog/subjective-building-a-native-vfx-edi...

My second take on this is to channel coding agents into “prompt nodes” coupled with some agent orchestration. This helps define clear data flows and API contracts for each node + overall graph. This strategy works better since we’re constraining the problem space and overall getting better results when combined (and it also plays nice with context window limitations). The current demo is a bit slow and basic but it’s looking promising! https://sxp.studio/apps/subjectivezero

I wrote a blog post about my process: https://sxp.studio/blog/subjective-building-a-native-vfx-edi...

...and you can download the app here if you're curious (the app is free!): https://subjectivedesigner.com

Next project is going to be a pivot of that project into something related to creative coding and agentic :-)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48056960

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

As a solo indie-dev, writing free software (as in you don't need to pay anything) is fine, but I usually do not make the project (entirely) open source due to the added churn & maintenance.

In my experience, setting expectations early in my apps ("I'm a solo indie dev", "this is a free app", "you can reach out to me through email but don't expect super quick responses") helped reduce entitled users and - quite the opposite - people were super happy to get replies from me solving their problems.

[0] Blog post about it: https://sxp.studio/blog/spite-apps-the-latte-larrys-of-apps