More of my notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/25/ai-powered-apps-with-c...
I'm amused that Anthropic turned "we added a window.claude.complete() function to Artifacts" into what looks like a major new product launch, but I can't say it's bad marketing for them to do that!
I always enjoy examples of prompt artists thinking they can beg their way of the LLM's janky behaviour.
> Critical UI Requirements
> Therefore, you SHOULD ALWAYS test your completion requests first in the analysis tool before building an artifact.
> To reiterate: ALWAYS TEST AND DEBUG YOUR PROMPTS AND ORCHESTRATION LOGIC IN THE ANALYSIS TOOL BEFORE BUILDING AN ARTIFACT THAT USES window.claude.complete.
Maybe if I repeat myself a third time it'll finally work since critical, ALL CAPS and "reiterating" didn't cut the mustard.
I really want this AI hype to work for me so I can enjoy all the benefits but I can only be told 'you need to write better prompts' so many times when I can't see how that's the answer to these problems.
For example, Grok will interpret "BE RIGHT" as an imperative command to inject White Supremacist Ideology and Holocaust Denial into dialogs about quantum physics and children's bedtime stories.
I would think someone working for Anthropic would be quite aware of this too.
Either fix the prompt until it behaves consistently, or add conventional logic to ensure desired orchestration.
https://news.mit.edu/2024/large-language-models-dont-behave-...
> ALWAYS include ALL messages from the beginning of the conversation up to the current point.
That doesn't seem very scalable.
Claude tipped me off about the name of that section as part of its thinking process in answer to my first question.
But with AI that model is just totally broken because the running cost is so high.
If I have half a million people come play my silly AI game that I have no wish to monetise - I am gonna be POOR very fast.
Log in with [insert ai vendor here] is something I’ve been hoping would happen for a while.
But the article says:
When someone uses your Claude-powered app:
They authenticate with their existing Claude account
Their API usage counts against their subscription, not yours
You pay nothing for their usage
No one needs to manage API keys
Could even have users select the payment %age or have it set by the contract tier between the app creator and the user (10% for simple user, 20% for pro access with other features, 40% enterprise,...).
I can see this also bringing strongly tiered AI's, there will be commodity/free AI's a and expensive ones for rich people/power users.
Similarly, the Coral Protocol aims to be an open and decentralized infrastructure for "The Internet of Agents," with "built-in economic transactions" at its core. This means agents can be compensated for their contributions via on-chain micropayments
Oh, damn, no, that sounds like an expense-tracking nightmare. Budgeting becomes the principal executive input.
I swear 100 years from now someone will be inventing faster then light travel, and there will be some tech scammers posting on HN on "how much better it would be on chain". Or how "the engine could be better if it used a decentralized crypto protocol."
The allure of being in the ground floor of a new scam just must be that great.
Considering provide your own API key is banned by a number of larger players (Reddit, Google Maps) to stop large numbers of users cashing in on the free/cheap low usage tiers I'd expect AI vendors would enforce the same rules soon once all this free VC hype funding dries up.
Firebase recently launch some experimental on-device APIs. https://firebase.blog/posts/2025/06/hybrid-inference-firebas...
Also I reckon the cost of running a text chatbot is basically peanuts now (that is, for a giant tech company with piles of hard cash to burn to keep the server farm warm)
No persistent storage and other limitations make it just a toy for now but we can imagine how people will just create their own Todo apps, gym logging apps and whatever other simple thing.
no external API access currently but when that's available or app users can communicate with other app users, some virality is possible for people who make the best tiny apps.
The only downside was not being able to access the apps from other devices, so I ended up creating a tool to make them online accessible and sync the data, while using the same localStorage API. It's actually pretty neat.
After a while it became clunky doing things with separate scripts, so I ended up creating - htmlsync.io. It's still pre-alpha, but registrations for the free tier are open.
weather, todo list, shopping list, research tasks, email someone, summarize email, get latest customized news, RSS feed summary, track health stats, etc.
Build a thing that does a complex thing elegantly (Some Deep Research Task) that is non trivial for others to setup, but many people want it.
Charge a direct access in a traditional sense [$5 per project] -- but then have the Customer link their API to the execution cost - so they basically are paying for:
"Go here and pay HN $5 to output this TASK, charge my API to get_it_done" This could be a seriously powerful tool for the Digital Consulting Services industry.
(I mean that is what its model for)
So this begs the question, will Anthropic be building in a payments mechanism for such to happen?
I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point, we'll see nVidia starting an "AI AppStore" and charging Anthropic 30%.
With that said, I'm sure there are a lot of power users who are loving the lower barrier to creation
Downloading the app may be one click...but then create an account. Attach a CC. Follow a tutorial. Figure out the app even more.
With LLM apps, there is none of that. You created the app so you pretty much know a priori how to use it. If you are unsure the model knows and you can just ask. If you want it to do something different, the model can just change it for you.
The modern software paradigm is building software that covers as massive of a solution space as possible, so as many users as possible have a problem that is covered by that space. You end up having to make lots of compromises and unintuitive steps to cover all the bases.
LLM apps cover your problem space pretty much perfectly, without anything more.
Reminds me of Lotus Notes back in the day. It could do anything and had great potential, but there were only 3 developers who had access. In a company of 50k employees.
What stops you from wiring it up to your endpoints that handle that?
Instead, I think this is going to open a new paradigm with an immense long-tail of hyper-niche fit-for-purpose business applications. There's so much small-scale work that happens in corporations that isn't common enough to be worth building a product to solve. But it's still a big time-saving to the departments/users if they can improve the process with a vibe-coded app!
This is exactly the wall that modern software is up against. This is the reason why software devs feel LLMs suck and don't live up to the hype.
Software is written to offer a massive solution space, so that every problem a user can have is covered in some form or another. This is why so many software applications are these enormous hulking codesbases, and it follows that LLMs really suffer with massive hulking code bases.
But end users don't need that full solutions space, they only need a small sliver that covers their small problem space
LLMs aren't going to replace developers. They are going to reduce the demand for software. They may sound like the same thing, but there is a subtle difference.
The frontend, however, is a completely different story.
It reminds me of a saying from one of my ex-colleagues "Frontend development is like building a house of cards. If it falls, nobody gets hurt. On the other hand, backend development is like building a house out of wine glasses."
AI and frontends are a natural fit, there is way more tolerance for brittleness 'move fast break things' on the frontend as the consequences of bugs are far less severe.
Any UI client, though, needs to look authentic or people will hate it. Maybe generic stuff like dashboards or internal tools is fine, but any premium product needs to have good looking front, and that is really tricky.
With a mass market product leader you’re sacrificing a bit of customization for long-term stability.
Whole enterprises run everything in the cloud. 1000s of vms. From active directory, dns, virtual desktops until “lift and shift” legacy apps. And also a lot of networking to make the company networkwork with aws…
And that is only the technical aspect of it.
Migrations take years.
As a developer, you probably want to access to the right models for your app rather than being locked in.
Why buy into saas tooling if you can just slap something together - that you fully own - with something like this?
B2C SaaS will have more challenge the easier it gets to create things, but consumers have always been fickle anyway.
I'd say B2B SaaS is mostly safe, partially because they want the support and don't want to have to maintain it.
Today we have open-source versions of a lot of SaaS products, but the proprietary ones are still in business, mostly for that reason IME.
They wouldn't create a Xero replacement (although ironically I did vibecode a business order/finance tracking app for my own side hustle, fuck paying $30/mo when I just need the basics), they would vibecode any of the litany of small industry specific software packages they use.
all systems require support and upkeep... nobody wants to do it.
- Thing should work reliably (and you want someone else to be responsible for fixing it if it doesn't)
- Security
- Most SaaS is sufficiently complex that an LLM cannot implement it
Could imagine a single universal app builder just charging a platform fee for support, or some business model along those lines. (Again, in the limit, I'm not sure that support would be too necessary)
What if the outage is specifically that AI_agent cant reach [thing]?
We already saw some examples of this in Anthropic's safety papers - the AI will reach out to the human to get help with that - essentially using a human as an API/tool.
this is delivering what no-code promised us.
I tried wiring something up and immediately hit a gap where I need to be able to call a tool. I think the state management aspect of this is going to be crucial; while you can obviously call a remote MCP server, and they mention this as planned (and that would be the right way to make a full product with persistence work), for Artifact-based development I wonder if you could wrap the API calls in client-side tool calling plumbing and run an MCP server there, so that a single client-side JS Artifact can do both the UI and handle MCP interactions from the API (Claude sandwich, between two slices of browser JS).
Weeks ago, I woke up, started to work on a project, and was going to have Claude generate some tests for me. And… I was auto-banned. No explanation. They auto-refunded my subscription fee and gave me a link to Google form where I could appeal. Apparently that goes into a disappearing queue somewhere. They have zero customer service. It’s a black hole. Completely inexplicable actions on their part.
Have jokingly been thinking: "If you can't do, teach."
You can't just pour A1 on education and expect something magical to happen. But, I do think there's some potential for tutors/teachers on the fly to create some interactive learning tools to go along with whatever they are topic they are exploring with someone in the moment.
Just recently: "Make me an interactive artifact for teaching 2s complement where it shows the sign and unsigned version side by side you can click on the binary digits to toggle them between 1 and 0". A few tweaks to layout while I'm also explaining on pen and paper. Then I brought it out and it certainly helped things click
And I was thinking that these kind of mini lessons could be shared and forked and tweaked. Now you have a language model available by default...
I iterated on the interactive 2's complement teaching tool on a bit and integrated "Claude-in-claude" aka "Claudeception"
Here's the result: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/782698c8-654d-4c37-96eb-6...
It even gives dynamic question suggestions based on your current conversation!
I even try to optimize by getting the suggestions alongside the current response. But if this fails, we use two calls to the LLM: the conversation completion happens first, then the suggestions happen in a 2nd call.
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/14d10437-5e78-42d6-af57-8...
Still hoping someone builds the App Store for custom GPTs where we don't have to worry about payment and user infrastructure. Happy giving up a percentage for that butnot30percentguys.
I wouldn't feel comfortable comparing that to the 30% i-wonder-who takes for providing a store to download packages that then run on the edge.
(And fwiw, all of them should be able to take any percentage they want. It's only an issue if there is no other option)
Seems like AI-assisted coding space is splitting in 2:
1) tools and services that aim mostly at prototyping and are close to no-code; most useful for users like PMs or very early stage entrepreneurs who just need to have something to show/share
2) professional tools that target “serious” developers who are already working on bigger/more complex code bases
Interesting that Claude is going after both. 1) with this new feature, and 2) with pretty much all their other services
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/3cebb65f-a869-4dd8-9a89-6...
This could be a phenomenal growth loop for Anthropic.
We were saturated with low effort wrappers like this years ago, I don't see how this is a game changer. Akinator worked better than this in 2008.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44380745
Basically the bot shows the human the right UI at the right time as they work.
i.e., toggle a "Commercial" switch and users are charged API cost plus 10-30% with the creator getting a third of that?
Also, the switch would disable "See, fork, and customize any artifact"
It might apply to your own rate limit...
If I create something, others can can use with their account, what’s my value?
So for an API call that costs $0.50, the end user is charged $1; and from that AI API earns $0.50, the webapp creator earns $0.40 and the host earns $0.10.
I'm trying this out with https://codeplusequalsai.com right now but it's not clear to me yet that it will take off!
But clearly, the value to you should be that you could earn $ based on the token usage from end-users.
What's your target audience? developers?
I’ll work on positioning and update the copy to keep in sync with my vision …
And yeah, my target audience is developers, specifically those with not a lot of time but with a lot of ideas.
Gosh thanks again, that’s super excellent feedback.
I was too lazy to build a whole frontend like Lovable.
Also I'm expecting some revenue share if I'm bringing users to spend money with Anthropic API.
Looking for people to try it out. You just need to create an account on saasufy.com (with GitHub) then paste (or attach) the README.md file from our GitHub https://github.com/Saasufy/saasufy-components/blob/main/READ... inside Claude, telling it what your Saasufy service URL is (shown on saasufy.com dashboard after deployment) then deploy directly from Claude.
This is a good approach. Developers can interact with Claude directly while BaaS platforms like Saasufy can host the backend and data in a secure way. This is ideal because the frontend can tolerate some hallucinations/brittleness, but the backend cannot. This approach could finally support production-ready apps, not just prototypes.