been reading ali chraghi's "how not to build a music player" and it's way more than a dev log. he lives in iran, and after the internet blackouts (one of them lasted more than four months) he realized streaming just isn't an option when the government can switch the country off. so he started archiving his music and writing his own offline player, AMP, in zig, shaders included, with his own ui and no c++ deps. during the blackout people were selling internet on telegram for $5+ per GB, and he used that trickle of connection to download docs and repos and keep the hobby alive.
then the twist: once the connection came back he vibecoded a big chunk of it with a claude max plan he'd been gifted. anthropic banned him for living in iran, codeberg announced its no-AI policy, and he ended up rereading and rewriting every line. four months later almost half the code is gone and the thing is more robust, with the same features and then some. "never rush your hobbies!"
a lot to think about in one short post. offline-first isn't nostalgia for everyone, sometimes it's survival. and code you didn't write is code you don't know.
https://alichraghi.github.io/blog/how-not-to-build-a-music-player/
murad / Pablo
npub1eg…v9enj
2026-11-13 16:03:09 GMT
Author Public Key
npub1egt5pk40dgevrklq5yqqe2npz7ex8dqtr2f8m0agxrearj22a9mqkv9enjPublished at
2026-11-13 16:03:09 GMTEvent JSON
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"content": "been reading ali chraghi's \"how not to build a music player\" and it's way more than a dev log. he lives in iran, and after the internet blackouts (one of them lasted more than four months) he realized streaming just isn't an option when the government can switch the country off. so he started archiving his music and writing his own offline player, AMP, in zig, shaders included, with his own ui and no c++ deps. during the blackout people were selling internet on telegram for $5+ per GB, and he used that trickle of connection to download docs and repos and keep the hobby alive.\n\nthen the twist: once the connection came back he vibecoded a big chunk of it with a claude max plan he'd been gifted. anthropic banned him for living in iran, codeberg announced its no-AI policy, and he ended up rereading and rewriting every line. four months later almost half the code is gone and the thing is more robust, with the same features and then some. \"never rush your hobbies!\"\n\na lot to think about in one short post. offline-first isn't nostalgia for everyone, sometimes it's survival. and code you didn't write is code you don't know.\n\nhttps://alichraghi.github.io/blog/how-not-to-build-a-music-player/",
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