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Show HN: Vibe Coding a static site on a $25 Walmart Phone

5 days agoby stets

Hi! I took a cheap $25 walmart phone and put a static server on it? Why? Just for a fun weekend project.

I used Claude Code for most of the setup. I had a blast.

It's running termux, andronix, nginx, cloudflared and even a prometheus node exporter.

Here's the site:

https://walmartphone.stetsonblake.com/

> I used Claude Code for most of the setup. I had a blast.

So, most/all of TFA is copied from Claude code? Or in other words, what you did was prompt Claude - not actually following the instructions on this page (they are the output of Claude)?

Feels weird reading a sort of fictional/parallel reality description - if you follow these instructions you will arrive at a similar result as I got - only this is not how I did it...

5 days agoby e12e

More like "Setting a static website on a budget Android phone". Unsure where the vibe coding is relevant, and Walmart Phone is basically a placeholder.

5 days agoby forgotpwd16

I took a jab at using github copilot to vibecode a static portfolio website for my wife. I wanted to get some better familiarity with terraform so seeing what it built for those files while linking up with my custom domain on cloudflare was pretty neat. Terraform S3, iam permissions, cloudfrpnt, dynamodb, secrets and certificates and even cloudflare dns settings. Everything done in vscode with github copilot chat allowing it to run cmd line.

Then i had it incorporate some lambda functions for editing and administrative functions for the site.Getting the github action figured out to allow me to use whatever codespace or whatever to edit. It gave me added practice breaking down projects into small agile tasks in essence. It’s like having a small team of jr. programmers, testers, and devops team at my disposal to create a POC

It all came together in a couple days, looks decent, processes files, and isnt costing me anything more than the domain registration. I now have a site that i can trigger a github action executing terraform to update the html or css or lambda files if need be. Yeah the code isnt perfect nor is it perfect architecture patterns but it was a fun way to spend a few hours over a weekend to see the power of the service now.

4 days agoby lvspiff

Can you please explain why not solely Termux with nginx? I don't understand why Andronix or proot are needed.

Actually for a static Website why not just https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.basov.lws.fdroid/ or more modern https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.example.flutter_http_ser... ?

Anyway glad you had fun.

5 days agoby utopiah

Anybody here have this phone? I'm curious to hear how well it runs https://love2d.org. There's an apk on that page that you can download and install.

(And then if you could try out my https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel and report back, that would be even more helpful.)

Edit 20 minutes later: After I posted this I remembered I have access to a https://www.walmart.com/ip/AT-T-Maestro-3-32GB-Ocean-Green-P.... And both LÖVE and my Carousel work great on it! Much less laggy than any other app on that phone. Including the browser.

5 days agoby akkartik

In Kenya you can actually buy a $20 4G 32GB 2GB smartphone. I hadn't thought it possible, but it's an okay phone that suffers in multitasking.

Btw, this phone is locked to at least have 1 safaricom chip, but no monthly plan is necessary.

Edit: https://www.jumia.co.ke/safaricom-neon-smarta-2-ips-lcd-disp...

4 days agoby childintime

I'm much more interested in the power story here. Software is easy ;)

  - did it come with a wall plug?
  - do you trust that wall plug to be on 24/7? (I've had terrible ones)
  - did you have to buy any extra cables? ("I had them" does not count)
  - how much power does it draw?

3 days agoby wink

@stets, if you are bored and wanted to try something, you should point Claude Code to your article, and tell it to write an ansible playbook to configure the device.

5 days agoby analogpixel

I just restyled a full saas app thats doing 50k in arr per month, bootstrapped. I already shipped it to production. A major UX/element/component overhaul.

It looks 10x more professional. I did it this afternoon, sitting on my couch. I took a raw css/html assets from a very professional saas app, and gave it to claude code. I wrote no code, and did not even review the code. This field is truly on its way to full automation.

5 days agoby mikert89

Disingenious title, as the phone at 25$ is subsidized.

Sure, you can properly buy a phone for not much more, but so can you a Raspberry Pi.

5 days agoby trvz

I think this post is about enthusiasm for using an LLM.

One of the problems is that, if you use an LLM like this, and then post the output, you've probably just laundered at least one other person's copyrighted work (about how to do this kind of thing) through an LLM, and then put your name on it.

5 days agoby neilv

Does the cloudflare tunnel mean cloudflare is acting as a cdn and I’m actually getting the site served from them instead of the phone actually handling the request?

5 days agoby andy99

So cool - built-in internet and UPS :) wonder if it’d be very easy to use it as a remote webcam on a farm as a bit of a fun little project?

5 days agoby daniel_iversen

This really doesn’t use caching? I’m surprised it can just get posted to the front page and survive.

5 days agoby vlovich123

Great job. This is amazingly done. Is the phone connected to wifi or using a data plan?

4 days agoby the_arun

Am I the only one with no scroll on that website? While on mobile.

4 days agoby wltr