A few months back, I made Pingui: a simple GUI tool to Pin (get it?) files on IPFS. It proxies the files to two pinning services - Pinata and Filebase - and pays for them well in advance.
This is a dead simple way to pay with any crypto token to host a single file, get a shareable link, and just spread it around. No censorship, no checks.
But the problem was - it was vibe coded with Emergent. Emergent is a great vibe coding platform that defaults to Python for back end and React for front end. It comes with a simple "deploy" button, and a "connect domain" button and, as such, is a REALLY tempting launch partner. Just click and you're done.
But as I had been using Lovable before too (relentlessly - hours every day!), I found myself now paying rent for deployments to two different services.
And as their prompts aren't excatly optimizable, you're at the mercy of their setup which is, naturally, skewed towards spending credits so they can upsell you. Before I knew it, I was paying a total of 200+ USD for both of these per month, deploying things that earn: zero.
So I decided to consolidate.
The cool thing no one tells you about these agents is that while they will refuse to do work that is outside of their "expertise" (like, build a Vue app, not React), there are certain things that ARE in their expertise.
One of those things is knowing how to deploy applications.
So, I did the following. With my last remaining credits on Emergent, I told the agent to write a SELFHOST.md file containing full instructions for self hosting this on a small Ubuntu server.
This was a good start, but the Agent also insists on Docker and other nonsensical shenanigans the merchants of complexity have inflicted on people.
So the next stage was Cursor - my daily goto.
"This is a python project created by Emergent, a vibe coding platform. It uses too many dependencies and abstractions.
I am okay with leaving it as a python project, but I want you to study @README.md, remove any and all Docker stuff, and prepare it for standalone deployment on a small digitalocean droplet on which I already run several websites using nginx, systemd, and bun.
If we have any database needs, only SQLite is allowed. No other dependencies are to be introduced."
This was all that was necessary to completely prepare this application for hosting on a small DO droplet.
I dusted off my old devops-fu and set up the project on the server, and within an hour we were up and running. It took longer for the DNS settings to propagate.
Man, I love living in this AI age.