Hand-built tools and simulators: craft as a counterweight to AI

A cluster of small, careful projects did well. Pele renders Mermaid diagrams as themeable SVG, and the first question was whether it escapes the need for a headless browser. Esp32sim runs ESP32 firmware in the browser, and a commenter immediately pointed to Wokwi, which has done it for years. There is also a Commodore 64 hardware simulator where you can break chips and pins, a regex visualized as a 3D marble run, an interactive linear programming page, and Furifont, a font that shows furigana using ligatures. Open MicroManipulator, a sub-micrometer DIY platform, drew similar praise.

The pattern: people reward projects with visible craft and an obvious reason to exist. One C64 commenter said the more they use AI at work, the more they miss hand coding and fully owning it. Another said LLMs make this kind of development approachable. Both views sit together.

The caution is competition. Esp32sim's first reply was "how is this different from Wokwi?" Browser simulation is crowded, and novelty alone does not hold attention.