Well, last month, I spent an evening in my apartment, building something that had a total user base of exactly one person.
It was my friend’s niece’s birthday who has a pollen allergy and still loves flowers a lot!
The goal was simple: building a garden for someone who isn’t allowed to step into a real one and It could be played on her TV!
It’s already a cruel irony for a kid who loves flowers.
So, I decided to use the one superpower I have.
Code
But, I’m not a front end engineer.
So, what?
I have Cursor-Claude and also Antigravity!
So, I spent the weekend vibe coding with Three.js and a generative AI model.
I wanted to create something tactile and vibrant.
I ended up with a digital field of 50 procedurally generated 3D flowers.
They sway in a virtual wind, they glow, and most importantly, they don’t trigger a single sneeze.
Then, I closed my laptop, took my phone over to my friend the next day, and opened the URL.
He verified it on his TV!
Then came her birthday, and man did she love it! :)
She didn’t ask about the polygon count. She didn’t care if the textures were AI-generated or hand-painted.
She spent forty-five minutes walking through the garden, pointing at the purple ones, laughing when they reacted to her touch, and telling me which ones were her friends.
I was proud of it. Not because the code was revolutionary, but because the “vibe” was right.
I was so amazed, I decided to share it on Reddit, thinking people might appreciate a wholesome use of the tech stack and AI. And considering valentine’s was near, they could probably use it too.
I forgot that the internet is currently a very cynical place.
The comments started rolling in, and they weren’t exactly “wholesome.”
- This is just AI slop. Why didn’t you hand-model every petal?
- Another low-effort Three.js demo. We’ve seen this a thousand times.
- Why build this when real gardens exist? Just take her to a park with a mask.
For a second, I felt that familiar sting of developer ego.
But then I thought of the kid.
And, In that moment, the Reddit comments felt like they were written in a language that didn’t matter.
As developers, we are trained to build for the “Many.” We want stars on GitHub, upvotes on Reddit, and thousands of users in our databases.
We’ve been convinced that if a project doesn’t “scale” or get “validation” from the crowd, it was a waste of a weekend.
But engineering is, at its core, about solving a problem for a human being.
If I had listened to the critics earlier, I would have preferred not to show this to her.
But, I’m glad I did not!
I’m keeping the “slop.” She loves the garden. And that’s the only metric that counts.
Repository: https://github.com/hubshashwat/flowers
In case we are meeting for the first time, come over here, it’ll be worth the roller coaster of articles that are gonna come up in the next few weeks.