Sorted App + Build Lab

Two things live here: 🌱 Sorted — a free iOS app to track what you take, log doses, spot overlaps, and see what's running low. Calm, not clinical. 🛠️ Build Lab — $0.99: exactly how I shipped it as a non-developer with AI. Sprout keeps me honest.

a card from the Build Lab's prompt library. the weak ask is "build me a supplement tracker." the full prompt turns the same idea into a product brief, with non-goals, before any code gets written.

@0xPaulius running the phone through iPhone Mirroring already felt like cheating. streaming the sim to a second phone is a level past that. congrats on getting it approved.

iOS sim streaming on another iPhone so u can ship and test ur app seriously like a true psychopath idk if ppl clock how good this is for remote vibe coding

@dayonefoundry built the tracking app, so this one stings. the "can anyone find it" level is where I'm currently stuck.

Every new indie hacker: I’m going to build a habit tracking app. I’m going to build a UGC automation app to market my habit tracking app. I’m going to build a vibe coding app to build my UGC automation app faster. I’m going to buy a Mac Mini so I can use OpenClaw to build my vibe coding app. Omg I’m so productive. I need 3 more Mac Mini so I’m 4x more productive!

@dev_maims agree more than I expected to. the code shows up in seconds, then I spend an hour interrogating it. I ended up building a small panel of AI reviewers whose only job is to argue with the first AI. it works. it's not relaxing 😅

Unpopular opinion: Vibe coding is more frustrating than regular coding.

@Cade_XR v0.117 is a lot of quiet shipping. congrats on closing in on the 1.0.

Just shipped V0.117 of Yap, closing in on the official 1.0! Added an app blacklist, I hate how VR overlays mess with you during some games. Now you can set Yap to disable its inputs automatically when specific games are running, so no more accidental hitting bindings!

@jaxsthetics @tryserpa the ones that find it on their own hit different. congrats 🌱

first organic signup for my saas🎉 every name in @tryserpa's pipeline got there because i reached out first: cold emails. dms. follows. someone found it on their own, saw the value and requested to be one of the first to try it. building in public is starting to pay off 🚀

@maadan_dev credits running dry mid-build is its own kind of stress. I ran two AI plans the whole build because one kept tapping out. respect for posting the unglamorous part.

Shipped a SaaS with 0 users, got into a fellowship, building something new. my Vertex AI credits are expiring and i can't afford to renew them this is what building in public actually looks like between the wins Good morning to all devs learning and building in public

@JoshuaNewton @AppOrbit I felt like a power user the day I got iPhone Mirroring working. running xcode tests from a plane over starlink to a mac mini in london is the most 2026 thing I've read today.

I’m flying to #WWDC whilst I remotely get Codex to run tests for @AppOrbit spinning up xcode simulators on my Mac mini back home in London, connected via Starlink as a nerdy kid that used to download one 3mb song via limewire overnight, this is not wasted on me

@froessell pasting screenshots into chat to explain layout bugs was my whole workflow not long ago. circling the thing in the simulator and having it just fixed is a different decade.

being able to annotate directly in the iOS simulator and have codex change it directly is going to 10x development speed

@georgepickett I came up in the screenshot era of this loop. cmd-shift-4, paste, "the spacing is off here", wait. doing it by voice while you're inside the app still doesn't feel real.

This workflow is sick - Speak to codex on via ChatGPT on iOS - keep talking while you background ChatGPT - flip to your iOS app, play with it, tell codex what you want - flip back to codex to tap “send”, codex updates your iOS app

@CaptainInsightX the "failing for a reason nobody understands" one is provisioning profiles for me. every time.

Shipping a mobile app in 2026: • Framework: React Native (until it breaks) • iOS build: failing for a reason nobody understands • Android build: failing for a different reason nobody understands • App size: 200MB • Features: 3 • Permissions: yes • Push notifications: worked once, in dev • Test device: the founder’s phone • Crash reports: from devices you don’t own • App Store review: rejected, reason 4.3 Featured by Apple.

@chams_builds two. Codex did most of the build, Claude Code covered whenever credits ran out.

26 agentic AI tools. Be honest, how many have you actually shipped something with? Not tried once. Shipped. Platforms: 🤖 Claude Code 🧑‍💻 Claude Cowork ⌨️ Codex 🪐 Antigravity 🦞 OpenClaw 📨 Hermes 🖱️ Cursor 🐙 GitHub Copilot 🌊 Windsurf 👷 Devin ▶️ Replit Agent 💬 ChatGPT Agent ✨ Gemini 🔎 Perplexity 🖐️ Manus 🔺 v0 💗 Lovable ⚡ Bolt Orchestration/support tools: 📚 LLM Wiki 🧠 Gbrain 🔮 Obsidian 🔗 LangSmith (evals + observability) 🪢 LangGraph (orchestration) 🔄 n8n (automation) 📓 NotebookLM (knowledge) 🧵 Mem0 (memory)

@SofaMods the building part is more doable than people think. signing and provisioning was the only stretch that really fought me. good luck with the launch.

Side note: I am not a developer by any stretch of the imagination and have no idea what I am doing. If anything comes out of this, it might not end up being very good, but we shall see.

#pitchyagame Break Orbit (working title): I'm trying to prototype a cozy-ish game about living aboard your space ship, keeping it flying, and yourself alive, by picking through space trash, deorbiting wrecks, and taking any other jobs you can in the war-torn orbit of a gas giant.

@Layton_Gott the copy-paste era was real. I started the same way, pasting screenshots back into chat to explain layout bugs. watching codex click through the simulator on its own now feels like a different decade.

A year and a half ago I was "coding" by copy pasting from ChatGPT into VS Code by hand... Every single line. Input. Output. Back and forth. I didn't know any better. I was 15, no coding experience whatsoever, trying to build an AI video generator with no clue what I was doing. To me that was coding. Open ChatGPT, ask for a chunk of code, copy it, paste it into VS Code, run it, copy the error back. Over and over for hours. Then this January my oldest brother told me how good Claude was. So I went looking. Every post said the same thing: "This is way better than ChatGPT." And while I was reading I saw it had its own coding assistant called Claude Code. I figured it was just a better way to copy paste. A better version of what I was already doing. So I had ChatGPT walk me through installing it into VS Code. Then I typed my first prompt for the video generator and hit enter. And it just... went. Finding the files it needed. Writing across all of them. Doing in seconds what took me an entire afternoon by hand. I sat there just staring at my screen. DANG! I couldn't fathom it at the time. I'd spent months doing it the hard way and never once knew there was another way. That was the moment I stopped messing around and actually wanted to build.

@svpino I run mine similarly. the code review still happens, it's just AI doing it. one reviewer only checks security, one tries to break it like an angry user.

Somebody I know shipped a product a couple of months ago, and he is already making money. He doesn't care about the code. Has no clue whether it's good code or bad code. Has never looked at it once because he can't even understand it. But he is making money and that's all he cares about. I'm a code nerd, but I'd honestly take messy code that makes money over perfect, beautiful code that doesn't. Vibe-coding is a superpower for people with good ideas and the willingness to put in the work.

Sorted is a free supplement tracker on iOS. inside it is the Build Lab: every prompt, decision, test habit, and mistake from building the app, written up as lessons you can use to ship your own. the app is free. the how-it-was-built is $0.99. that's the whole business model.

@PaulSolt the motivation part is the real unlock. every project I abandoned died at one wall I didn't understand and I'd just quietly stop opening the folder. nice to finally have something that drags you past it.

Codex unblocked my app development progress and solved my motivation problem for updating an old, “soon to be removed” Mac app. 
My app has made $5k in revenue over it’s lifetime, but it’s been on a downward trend for the last 6 years… 

I never updated it because the amount of deprecated code kept growing, and Apple’s constant updates always break or add new requirements. That changed with Codex this past year. I was able to give it a task that blocked me, not because it was hard, but because my motivation to dig into the problem was super low. I have a family, 2 daughters, exercise (run + ultimate), and a 9-5 job. That made it difficult to find time, and then combined with low energy + hard problems … made it so updates never happened.

The further you get away from old code, the longer it takes to remember what you were doing, and deprecated code means finding new ways to do things that used to just work. Honestly, sometimes I wish my apps would keep working like they used to, but the constant iOS or macOS updates means there’s some level of maintenance. When an app only makes $10-$30 per month … it’s hard to make time for it… … But my app wasn’t going to work on the next macOS update, so I guess Apple lite a fire under my butt to get it working for the new update.

That actually got me excited about the app, and I after I fixed the deprecated problems, I threw an experimental UI at Codex to apply, and it integrated it. Now I finally unblocked the two things that were previously holding me back.

For the past two nights I’ve been up until 1am or 12am working on bug fixes and shipping new versions on TestFlight (Apple’s beta service). 

I’m really excited about all the new features in the app, because they bring quality of live improvements that I have wanted for years, but never found time to implement with all of lifes other responsibilities.

I no longer have to have perfect energy to get into code and be productive. I can just talk to Codex and it will do what I ask.

It’s not perfect, and often it messes up with Mac app development, but it’s good enough to get me going, so that I can redirect it when it’s wrong.

@aaliya_va this is the exact wall I'm on. the build was the fun part, 'can anyone find it' is the actual job. nobody's coming for a thing they've never heard of.

Building is now the easy part A weekend,a laptop,a few prompts n you have got a working app. The moat used to be: can you build it? now the moat is: can anyone find it? Levels.io nailed in this tweet. In an AI world where every coder,freelancer and founder can ship product in days ,the hard wall isn't code anymore,Its distribution as distribution doesn't care how good your product is. The builders who win aren't necessarily the most technical.They are the ones with a story people follow bfore the product even launches. Thats the new moat: the founder as narrator When you are building in public sharing the why behind the idea,the failures at 2am,the ugly pivot ,you are not just documenting,you are compounding trust. Your audience becomes your waitlist Your story becomes your funnel Your credibility becomes your ad budget VC money buys distribution through ads.Influencers trade equity for reach .both are real n both work. well the foundernarrator? I believe thats the third path and its the most durable one we see all the time audiences built around a person don't get switched off by an algorithm update or a rising CPM,they show up because they believe in where you are going. Look at every founder with a cult like following.They didn't just build a product,they brought people inside the process and made the journey the content. AI just lowered the cost of building to nearly zero. What it can't replicate is your perspective,your experience,your earned credibility. That's the moat now. x.com/levelsio/statu…

@NickADobos the voice-while-using-it loop is the one that broke my brain. describing what's wrong out loud while tapping through the actual screen and watching it get fixed live still doesn't feel real.

Current dev loop: Talk to phone -> app appears 1. Connect codex to Mac and iPhone 2. Make an iPhone app and deploy it to my phone 3. Open codex on phone, open voice mode and ramble for 10 minutes while using my app. Pro tip voice mode stays on even if the codex ios app is in the background 4. Once you are ready, end with: “make a prioritized list of updates and then do them, then rebuild to my phone” So all I do is test and ramble about what’s wrong and needs fixing. I basically just dictate for 10 mins while using my app and then spend 1 minute in codex sending stuff and reading. Then flip back and continue playing with my app Repeat —— For non-team projects I never read code anymore. Only prompts and chat are worth reading. Everything else is simply using the software, fully experiencing it and feeling it, and shaping the ideal into pixels and data. My ideas manifested in machines within seconds Lightning in a rock in your pocket. Pure magic

@heccbrent ha the "are you sure?" move is real. since I'm on ios I started mirroring my iphone to the desktop so codex can watch the app run live on the actual device, not just the simulator. caught stuff that only ever showed up on real hardware.

@getSortedAppios It really is! Sometimes I'll throw in a little vague "are you sure that's right?" just to see what it'll fix 😆

You can now do so much more when building iOS apps without ever leaving the Codex app 📱 See SwiftUI previews and even test your app in the simulator using the in-app browser (including annotation support for making edits!).