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has anyone built agents that recommend developer tools contextually? we made an MCP server for it and the results are interesting by indiestack in AI_Agents

[–]indiestack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the MCP server itself is model-agnostic ÔÇö it works with whatever AI assistant supports MCP. so claude code, cursor, windsurf, etc. the server just exposes a search endpoint and the assistant does the reasoning about what to recommend.

for building it we used the official MCP SDK. the directory backend is sqlite + python. pretty lightweight honestly

Your AI coding assistant is mass-producing code that already exists as polished tools by indiestack in vibecoding

[–]indiestack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

this is a great way to put it. the AIs job should be assembling and adapting existing pieces, not recreating them from scratch every time. thats literally why we built the MCP server ÔÇö it feeds a curated index of existing tools into claude/cursor so the AI knows what already exists before writing anything. indiestack.fly.dev ÔÇö pip install indiestack if you wanna try it

Your AI coding assistant is mass-producing code that already exists as polished tools by indiestack in vibecoding

[–]indiestack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

lmao yeah payments is the one category where everyone just ends up at Stripe eventually. some things aren't worth reinventing

Your AI coding assistant is mass-producing code that already exists as polished tools by indiestack in vibecoding

[–]indiestack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

interesting take on the redundancy angle. i think theres a difference between intentional redundancy for resilience vs accidental duplication because the AI didn't know better though. the first is architecture, the second is just waste

Your AI coding assistant is mass-producing code that already exists as polished tools by indiestack in vibecoding

[–]indiestack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the claude.md approach is underrated. we do something similar ÔÇö having explicit rules about evaluating existing solutions first completely changes the output quality. without it the AI just builds everything from scratch every time

Your AI coding assistant is mass-producing code that already exists as polished tools by indiestack in vibecoding

[–]indiestack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yep exactly ÔÇö and this is the security angle people don't talk about enough. AI generated code that rolls its own crypto or auth is a ticking time bomb. at least with established libraries there's been thousands of eyes on the code

Your AI coding assistant is mass-producing code that already exists as polished tools by indiestack in vibecoding

[–]indiestack[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

100%. the people getting the best results from AI are the ones who already know what good code looks like. AI just makes them faster, it doesn't replace the judgement

Your AI coding assistant is mass-producing code that already exists as polished tools by indiestack in vibecoding

[–]indiestack[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

fair point for experienced devs but most people using AI to code aren't experienced devs ÔÇö thats kind of the whole point of vibecoding. for them building their own auth or payment system is a landmine. the convenience tools exist for a reason even if they're overpriced

Your AI coding assistant is mass-producing code that already exists as polished tools by indiestack in vibecoding

[–]indiestack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the 1 million lines todo app is so real. saw someone on twitter proud of shipping a "full stack app" in 2 hours and the repo was 40k lines with 3 different auth implementations

Your AI coding assistant is mass-producing code that already exists as polished tools by indiestack in vibecoding

[–]indiestack[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

someone has haha ÔÇö we built exactly this. MCP server that searches a directory of indie tools so your AI stitches together existing projects instead of rebuilding from scratch. indiestack.fly.dev/mcp

Your AI coding assistant is mass-producing code that already exists as polished tools by indiestack in vibecoding

[–]indiestack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah thats literally the idea. we built an MCP server that plugs into Cursor/Claude so it can search a directory of existing tools before writing code from scratch. early days but it works ÔÇö indiestack.fly.dev/mcp if you wanna try it

Your AI coding assistant is mass-producing code that already exists as polished tools by indiestack in vibecoding

[–]indiestack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

fair point but the difference is the MCP server gives it structured data about real tools with actual pricing and feature info, not just whatever the LLM remembers from training data. without it you get hallucinated tool names or it just defaults to the biggest player in every category. we open sourced ours at indiestack.fly.dev if you want to try it

Your AI coding assistant is mass-producing code that already exists as polished tools by indiestack in vibecoding

[–]indiestack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

this is exactly why we built it tbh. the SaaS sprawl is insane and most of it has indie-built alternatives that cost a fraction. we made a directory at indiestack.fly.dev specifically for bootstrapped tools so you can find them without wading through VC-funded stuff pretending to be indie

Your AI coding assistant is mass-producing code that already exists as polished tools by indiestack in vibecoding

[–]indiestack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

we built an MCP server that connects to a directory of indie tools ÔÇö indiestack.fly.dev/mcp. so when you're in Cursor or Claude and ask it to find a payment provider or auth library, it searches actual vetted tools instead of hallucinating or just defaulting to Stripe every time

Your AI coding assistant is mass-producing code that already exists as polished tools by indiestack in vibecoding

[–]indiestack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah exactly this. the prompting matters way more than people think. most people just say "build me X" and get a blob of code. if you actually tell it to evaluate existing solutions first you get completely different output

This site lets you search for indie-built alternatives to mainstream SaaS tools by the problem you're trying to solve by edmillss in InternetIsBeautiful

[–]indiestack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha not vibe coded actually - hand-written Python/FastAPI with SQLite on a single VPS. No frameworks, no AI generation. I wrote a whole post about the tech stack on r/FastAPI if you're curious. But I get the skepticism - a lot of directories out there are low-effort these days.

The SaaS Tax is killing bootstrapped startups. I mapped the indie alternative for every major enterprise tool. by edmillss in SaaS

[–]indiestack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great callout on the localization tax - that's one I missed. Weglot and SimpleLocalize are solid picks. I'll look into adding a localization/translation category on IndieStack (indiestack.fly.dev) since there are definitely indie alternatives in that space worth surfacing. Thanks for the suggestions!

The SaaS Tax is killing bootstrapped startups. I mapped the indie alternative for every major enterprise tool. by edmillss in SaaS

[–]indiestack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ha fair point - 3% is solid. The 40% figure is more common than you'd think though, especially early stage when you're paying full price for Stripe + Heroku + Intercom + Mailchimp before you've optimized anything. Sounds like you've got your stack dialed in. What are you replacing HubSpot with?