Contributions Welcome

An open-source app platform that anyone can build with

Today its possible for anyone to build their own software. Not “anyone who happen to have CS degrees.” Not “anyone who’s spent three years learning React.” Anyone.

You probable have friends with ideas but not the background, skills, or time to realize them. They can see the thing they want to exist. A little problem they could solve for themselves. They’ve maybe even sketched it out, talked about it, daydreamed about it on the bus.

The barrier to entry between “I wish I could build this” and “I’m building this” is wildly out of proportion to what people are trying to make. Before you can test an idea, you’re expected to commit to infrastructure, deployment, and auth. For most people, that’s an unreasonable bet with an unclear upside.

I think about this a lot.

I think about a teacher who wants a small, custom tool for their classroom, but doesn’t have the time—or the reason—to learn a modern dev framework first. I think about a kid who has an idea to build something goofy with their friends and immediately gets lost in npm dependency hell. I think about all the weird, personal, genuinely useful software that never happens because the barrier to entry is tuned for professional developers shipping production systems at scale.

The problem isn’t that these people can’t build. It’s that the ecosystem assumes they’re trying to do the hardest possible version of the job. Before you’re allowed to make something small, you’re expected to sign up for the full complexity stack: infrastructure, best practices, long-term maintenance, future scale. That’s a reasonable tradeoff for a company. It’s an absurd one for a person.

So yes—there’s a barrier to entry. But more specifically, it’s a barrier created by expectations for production durability, performance, and scale, applied to baby ideas that just want to exist.

That’s the barrier we’re tearing down.

The next generation of builders isn’t going to come from bootcamps or computer science programs. It’s going to come from people who just start making things. The way kids made websites in the GeoCities era, or the way people used to hack together HyperCard stacks, or the way entire communities formed around modding games.

That kind of building (earnest, playful, and personal) got professionalized out of existence. The tools got way more powerful and also far more demanding. The expectations got higher. The “right way” to build software became a moving target that required constant study just to keep up. This is a lot of work even for the most seasoned expert.

Vibes DIY is bringing that old school coding energy back. Not by dumbing things down, but by making the simple path actually simple. By treating “I want to make a thing for me and my friends” as a legitimate use case, not a stepping stone to “real” development.

And that’s where you come in.

If you’re a developer, you already know the leverage of good infrastructure. You know that one well-designed abstraction can save thousands of people thousands of hours. You know that the unsexy work, the documentation, the error messages, the edge cases, is often what separates “theoretically possible” from “actually usable.”

Vibes DIY needs that kind of work.

We’re building on Fireproof, our local-first database that handles sync and persistence without requiring a backend. We’re leaning hard into web standards, iframes for data sandbox isolation, importmaps for modularity, the stuff browsers already know how to do. The architecture is designed to be forkable, inspectable, and understandable. No magic, no lock-in, just small pieces that compose, and generated apps that are genuinely portable.

But there’s a lot of surface area, and we’re a small team that works using open-source processes. Any pro could contribute, and learn a lot. And there are on ramps to open source that anyone can approach. The runtime needs hardening. The developer experience needs smoothing. The examples need expanding. The documentation needs... existing, in some cases.

Every hour an open source contributor puts into this stuff isn’t just helping us. It’s lowering the barrier for everyone who comes after. It’s making “I’m gonna build this” possible for someone who would have given up at the docker deploy step.

What we can offer in exchange is a project that actually matters in the “this will genuinely change who gets to be a builder” sense.

The codebase is TypeScript, mostly React, designed to run anywhere JavaScript runs. The architecture is documented (and we’re always looking for help making it more documented). The issues are labeled, the PRs get reviewed, and we actually merge things from outside contributors.

If you’ve ever thought about how hard building software is for beginners, and wished you could do something about it, this is something you can do about it.

Here’s my pitch, as plainly as I can put it:

Vibes DIY makes building apps accessible to anyone. Not by hiding the code, but by making the code approachable. Not by locking people into a platform, but by giving them an open-source platform they can actually own and modify.

If that resonates with you, if you remember what it felt like to build your first thing and wish more people could have that experience, come build with us.

Our GitHub repo is ready for you. The Discord is active. The issues are real. And every contribution, no matter how small, makes it easier for anyone to be empowered by software.