Robin Giel

Web & App Full/Jam Stack Developer + Audio Engineer

[Robin Giel @RobinGiel]

After 3 years of building in the evenings and weekends — Mercala is finally live. 🚀First commit: March 17, 2023. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Link in comments :-)

#buildinpublic #NextJS #Supabase #CaribbeanRealEstate

[pnpm @pnpmjs]

We were able to make the rust rewrite faster than pnpm in all scenarios

[Aurora Scharff @aurorascharff]

Wrote a post on component architecture with React Server Components.

Covers:
• The progression from 𝚞𝚜𝚎𝙴𝚏𝚏𝚎𝚌𝚝 to React Query to route loaders to RSCs
• How Suspense shapes the loading experience
• Why colocation makes components easier to move and reuse (including for agents)

https://t.co/lFzsFnqYnp

[Robin Giel @RobinGiel]

https://t.co/0MPkP0pXPf

[Robin Giel @RobinGiel]

After 3 years of building in the evenings and weekends — Mercala is finally live. 🚀First commit: March 17, 2023. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Link in comments :-)

#buildinpublic #NextJS #Supabase #CaribbeanRealEstate

[Robin Giel @RobinGiel]

@andrewkley_ I'm glad I posted the site here :-) Thanks again mentioning this issue. Let me know what you think about the site. Cheers 😎

[Robin Giel @RobinGiel]

@yabsssai When it’s ready means everything is well tested and ready to bring to the public

[Robin Giel @RobinGiel]

@andrewkley_ Thanks for this Andrew, it was some settings I had to fix in order to get it right 👍🏽

[Robin Giel @RobinGiel]

@rutu_3 .env can be pushed if you used DotenvX to encrypt all your keys

[Javi @rameerez]

I made this product launch video over the weekend with just prompts

It's all vibe coded

https://t.co/V9i8Z6N8ow

There's something you should know, though:

Like everyone else, a few days ago my timeline started getting full of videos like this when Remotion launched their Claude skill, so I decided to give it a go

I was captivated by all the examples, so I started like everyone was saying: "just write a prompt"

I typed the prompt, and it created an extremely bland, untasteful, stock-looking video

10 prompts in and it was not getting better. It was very, very bland. But at least it was something, so I kept going at it

I ended up spending my entire weekend on this, 2-3 days of work. Only to realize my original reference videos that inspired me to get started were all fake

Everyone was outright lying about their results. They all claimed "I made this with just one prompt", but it was just bait, they didn't really use Remotion or code at all, it was just a normal, human-made motion video

Then you expand the X post and read the replies and they're all like "haha joke" in the comments, but their main post already got 1.5 million views and bamboozled everyone who didn't read further

And this is a problem: when a viral trend happens, these posts flood your timeline, and you only realize that they're all noise and bait (and that they haven't even used the tools they claim) when you click through the post and read its comments. But 90% of people (like me, initially) just see the post on their timeline while scrolling, and assume it's all real. You don't go in to check every single post you see: you just like it, or save it for later, and carry on with your day, thinking what you saw was the real thing, and that it's all outstanding results, and that motion designers are really done

And it's so anxiety inducing, because everyone is hyping their results, but most of it is just not true. I have stopped reading X lately because going in makes me so anxious, everyone is claiming extraordinary outlier results just for the views and clicks, and you feel like you're lagging behind and you're not good enough because you don't get those results

So for this video I decided to actually take the tech out for a spin, and see what results I could really get out of it

I used Remotion and Claude Code 4.5, but contrary to what everyone was claiming, this video was not "just a prompt". It was fully vibe coded, but it required much more than a prompt. It was multiple days worth of work

Here's what I learned:

- Making vibe coded videos with Remotion is ~10-20x slower than building app code. I've been wasting my Claude limits on this video

- Everything takes a lot of manual work and reprompting. You often need to go frame by frame correcting tiny things

- It makes very silly mistakes

- Even Opus 4.5 has very very limited knowledge of spatial / visual things. It doesn't understand well z-indexes, layers, compositions, proportions, temporal coherence, etc. Claude Code feels extremely dumb when creating code for Remotion videos, which surprised me a lot, beacuse I had been mind blown by how incredibly well it worked with my Ruby on Rails SaaS codebases

- You need to have some design knowledge to adjust things manually, you need to ask for exactly what you want, in the technical jargon it expects. You can't just say "make this more beautiful" or "animate this better" because it just creates slop

- Right now vibe coded videos are promising, but I think I could have done this video faster just by doing it manually in After Effects. It really took that much work

- If you have a creative idea for something you want to animate, it takes multiple hours of back and forth prompting to create just one or two seconds worth of **good** animation

- Tip: PARAMETERIZE everything! It tends to hardcode magic numbers everywhere in the code, so if you change something earlier in the video timeline, everything else breaks. You want to essentially be creating "key frames" with code by telling it to parameterize every frame where something important happens, and calculate the rest of the keyframes based off that. This comes in handy when you need, for example, to adjust keyframes to match the music

So in summary: vibe coded videos are promising, but right now it only works for very stock-looking videos unless you put in a ton of effort

Maybe actually useful for 1-2 second web animations though, I'll try that next

It will obviously get better, this feels like the quality of code generation in 2023-2024, you need to hold its hand and correct it at every step along the way. But even if video code generation was better, you would still need someone with motion design knowledge to at least set the creative direction, lay out the overall script and composition, etc. It's not completely hands-off unless you want slop

And a word on caution: especially here on X, there's 90% hype and 10% reality, nothing is what it seems. Do not believe what you see online, people are constantly baiting and then just laughing it off in the comments

[Remotion @Remotion]

Remotion now has Agent Skills - make videos just with Claude Code!

$ npx skills add remotion-dev/skills

This animation was created just by prompting 👇

[Robin Giel @RobinGiel]

@CreeCoder Music match jukebox

[Robin Giel @RobinGiel]

@ThePrimeagen Next week for sure 🔥

[Robin Giel @RobinGiel]

@MKBHD S25 ultra?

[Robin Giel @RobinGiel]

@tom_antok Only for you 🤣 I was trying to ignore it for years, but it appeared in my life weather I liked it or not ����

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

Such a great addition to React. Felt like the story wasn’t complete without this

[Robin Giel @RobinGiel]

@ennycodes Tooling / good for compilers. Rust: Tailwind, Turbopack, Rspack, FNM and the list goes on

[Robin Giel @RobinGiel]

@_devJNS One word: Fork

[Robin Giel @RobinGiel]

@braelyn_ai Meaning you just upgraded to Nextjs 16 and realized it's a full migration 😂

[Robin Giel @RobinGiel]

@Sarabjeet___ All day 😎

[Robin Giel @RobinGiel]

@tranmautritam Left