> 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...

I opened Obsidian, wrote down the steps that I performed + pieces claude did. Most of what I did was little troubleshooting bits or hooking things together.

That + every little quirk or weird thing I ran into (eg: phantom process killer, which I actually did setup via adb) that I felt was worth mentioning and might help.

Then I told Claude to organize the document better, read it over myself, asked for edits or things to add, etc.

My god, the amount of hate this site has for LLMs, it's unbearable. Good for you for having a project and seeing it through, all the lazy "It UsEd An LlM So It DoeSn'T CoUnT" gatekeeping doesn't belong here and I wish all those uncurious comments were flagged.

I thought the content was interesting, but didn't really match the headline - I didn't learn how I could vibe code a website on a phone - I learned how I could "traditionally" deploy an existing site on a phone (ie: no help on using LLM, no information on how to create a static website).

That's good input actually. I should have added details on my usage of Claude Code.

Ops’ title is pretty clear on the content of the post.

it was $25

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.

Claude Code made the simple little home page and did much of the configuration of the system inside andronix. The phone is available at Walmart for $25.

LLM inference is remote, yes, but tool calls happen locally on the device. So CC knows it has access to modify files, perform bash commands, etc.

Ok, so why not dial this in through a dildo?

That'd be cool too, wanna hack on it together?

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.

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.

> Can you please explain

No, because they didn't program this or make these decisions, an LLM did.

I had a vision for a fun project, made decisions, tried to understand why to make certain decisions or what was working or not.

I didn't write the front page index.html and I don't want to. Sure, I prompted it how I wanted to look, though.

tl;dr I had fun and learned stuff.

Thx! That's a good next step for sure. Rn git is my backup

> Can you please explain why [...]

I can't read the site - it won't load - but there's one obvious answer to your question: "No. AI did it."

I think your comment is meant to imply I don't know what I'm doing.

Do you? If someone asks you to change anything in the configuration, do you think you can do it without the help of AI?

That's the difference between knowing and understanding. I may read a Math proof and understanding. That doesn't mean I can replicate it or adapting to other proofs (and that's basically the Advanced Calculus tests I used to take when I was in college).

I think that's what happened to you. Someone/something (Claude) provide you with instructions you copy and pasted. You underestood them. That's different from knowing.

Yep, I have worked in IT professionally for many years.

I also didn't copy and paste, Claude ran the commands for me, so it was even easier than that.

You are making a lot of assumptions.

What makes you assume people who use LLMs don’t understand what’s going on?

That seems to me to be one of the least generous interpretations, no?

It could also imply that, for whatever reason, the LLM opted for those tools. Therefore there isn't necessarily "reason" in the asked sense.

No, it meant to imply you don't know why AI did it. Don't fret - nobody does.

I mean, you said it.

Because it's cooler setting it up on your own than having an app do it for you. (Could even skip Termux really.) And most importantly, this sets up a full Linux environment, which can be used from hosting a simple site to programming (even the site itself; don't know if that's what author did here or site was copied from their main system) and more.

The site was all "written" + configured on the device itself :-)

Termux alone seems really quirky to me. Andronix fakes "having root" as I understand and I was able to get more of the services I wanted running on it.

https://github.com/termux/proot-distro looks really interesting too and I intend to test it in the future!

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.

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...

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?

- I think it just came with a cable, USB-C. no plug. - I do have a battery, but I hear most people pull them and just plug in with none. - No, came with USB-C - Haven't checked! Maybe I will

@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.

This is an awesome idea!

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.

I can't imagine ever voluntarily divulging this kind of thing to others. Anyways, drop a link so we can see what an afternoon of vibe coding is capable of.

divulging what? its not far from taking a screenshot and generating a backend. which will probably be possible some time in 2027, and is mostly possible now. the moat on software is gone for people that know how to use the tooling

> 50k in arr per month

Annual recurring revenue per month? Which is it

What do you mean by "I took a raw css/html assets from a very professional saas app"?

I’ll fill in the part between OPs story and “then they all clapped” that he left out.

He’s likely talking about “Save As”ing or scraping the DOM for rendered HTML/CSS and feeding that to an LLM to convert to actual in app wired up components.

Add in presumably ignoring the license of the scraped documents.

eventually you will be able to generate a database schema/api by just feeding saas app html to an llm. you wont get everything, but you will get close

I mean, I can take the assets from very professional software and use that to make a clone even faster than one afternoon. Copying on disk is quick.

do not share the link.

they aren't engaging in good faith.

haters are going to hate regardless.

> This field is truly on its way to full automation.

What do you even mean by that? Full automation of irrelevant, simple as hell, saas apps? Maybe yes. Everything else that actually needs some thought? Nah, not happening anytime soon - given that no genius with a brand new architecture comes around tomorrow. LLMs just ain't getting any better really. It's just micro steps by now

"LLMs just ain't getting any better really. It's just micro steps by now"

The models itself, maybe yes. But the agents mixing model input and output with classical programming to achieve whatever you programm them to? That just has started to show it's potential.

What industry are you in and what do you do there? I’m always baffled by these “actually needs some thought” that end up being just another CRUD. Maybe you’re Peter Norvig’s alt, or Linus casually browsing on a burner account?

Anything that is safety related or needs signal control. So embedded systems and anything related. Aerospace, defense, anything. There is so so much stuff.

Not even talking about AI writing HDL's. They just can't do it and put latches everywhere (they are bad. you should put registers instead)

I wish I was living in your world. You're in for a big surprise.

you are completely delusional about whats about to happen, hope you have some money saved up

we are no where near the limits of models with regards to software

That's awesome! Totally agree.

sorry but isn't this just theft²?

the time is coming when you can take screenshots of an app and generate a full backend. we are no where near the limits of what we are about to see happen to software. idk whats legal, but its soon an irrelevant question

legality will soon be an irrelevant question? i genuinely fear the world which you would to usher into existence

I believe the OP already said he used AI.

Well you see he ran it through in through an LLM, but LLMs are lossy, so who can say if the output was a direct result of the copyrighted code or if the model focused on his unique prompting words and conjured the output from its own latent space without referencing copyrighted input at all? /s

Alternatively, we could take the model makers’ view and say that if they didn’t want their code reused, they wouldn’t have made it publicly accessible on the internet.

the model makers opinion is no different than "if she didn't want to be ogled/cat called, she shouldn't have been wearing [insert literally any type of clothing here] when travelling from A to B in a public place"

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.

Also, the llm that did the vibe coding did not run on the phone.

Of course not, just the client. But it did make real tool calls on the client device and write + modify existing config, troubleshoot and get it running, which is still pretty damn cool in my eyes

what do you mean by subsidized? do you have to buy a phone plan with it? i tried to add it to cart, and while it says it's locked to Straight Talk, it's not making me pay for a plan (though i'm not in the us so i'm not gonna actually order it to check)

Nowhere in the world can you make a smartphone at $25 each, even with a bit of slave labor. Either the LTV of a phone is like few k dollars for them, or someone argues it is, or they want network effect, whatever. But $25 is too cheap of a price to make sense.

You do not need to buy a phone plan with it (although they hope you will).

Eh, nitpicking I think. It really was $25 and anyone in driving distance of a Walmart can pay 25 real USD and grab one. For sure they are losing money on the hardware in hopes that you subscribe to the plan.

I decided to buy one, but for the price of two Walmart delivered them to my door in just a few hours.

Hell yeah

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.

What? The how-to is the concerning part and not the code?

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?

Cloudflare is not acting as a CDN and every request is actually hitting the phone. Check out the CF-Cache-Status: dynamic header

Thanks for the reply, it’s surprisingly fast then!

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?

I always read that if you keep a phone plugged in for long periods of time, its battery will eventually fail and expand into a spicy pillow, which often deforms the frame, or worse, causes fires.

The solution seems to be removing the battery and keeping it running on the charger.

Definitely, but with just standard playstore apps. You really can't get much hardware access from Andronix/Termux AFAIK so GPS, camera, etc don't work.

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

The only downtime has been due to phantom process killer (I think) still killing Andronix. I can't figure out why. Traffic was "only" 522 uniques today, easyyy for such a small site behind Nginx

phones these days are quite powerful

That $25 phone has 8 cores and 4GB of RAM.

https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_moto_g_(2025)-13624.php

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

Thx, Wifi! Was down for a bit yesterday but back up. No downtime due to volume of traffic

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