Same, I've added a .#screenshots derivation. High up-front effort but almost zero maintenance afterwards.
Bonus: since you're generating screenshots programmatically anyway, you can generate a pair of each with your app's light/dark theme, and swap them in/out depending on prefers-color-scheme: dark. <picture> elements work in GitHub READMEs, too: https://github.com/CyberShadow/CyDo#readme
neobrain 2 hours ago [-]
+1 for this approach. For a mobile app, I made Nix spawn an ephemeral Android emulator instance for generating up-to-date screenshots, requiring no prior setup and leaving no lingering data around after running. Setting it up wasn't that high-effort in my case either; coming up with the idea was the hard part, the Nix code was one-shot by your favorite LLM.
Granted manually updating the screenshots isn't the most laborious task in the world, but the "upload-apk + take-screenshot + transfer-back-to-PC + edit" process is usually barely annoying enough that you end up almost never doing it otherwise (similar to the OP's experience in the closing paragraph).
Nashooo 3 hours ago [-]
Hey, you need to make your code examples horizontal scrollable on mobile! I could still guess their content based on context clues but still.
merelysounds 7 hours ago [-]
This is very useful in mobile projects.
App stores require screenshots, but generating N images for NUMBER_OF_SCREEN_SIZES times NUMBER_OF_LOCALIZATIONS can be a chore.
In the past I wrote my own scripts for that, today tools like Fastlane[1] help.
I use Fastlane for my logic puzzle game Nonoverse[2], you can see sample screenshots in its App Store page.
I also automated App Preview video recording, complete with multiple scenes. If anyone wants to read more let me know, perhaps this is a good topic for an article.
It doesn’t support App Preview automation, this is something that I had to script myself.
furyofantares 9 hours ago [-]
Very cool.
For the small casual games I've been vibe coding, I always start from a place where the application has a CLI where it can run headless, rendering to offscreen texture, with a a screenshot command as well as performance instrumentation. It takes no time to include all this, and gives the agent a way to automate the ui and inspect important things. It also lets me trivially have the agent update screenshots.
Not as neat as being part of the build process, but I will now add that.
sho_hn 7 hours ago [-]
I do the same :-)
I have an offscreen screenshot path, as well as a CLI arg for world pos/camera view vector, and scripted benchmark runs with a simple text-based input format that has rows of named segments of n game ticks length with control inputs per segment. Use that extensively for A/B testing of visuals and performance while working on the game code.
_fzslm 7 hours ago [-]
Would you mind sharing a link to some of these casual games? I ask cuz I'm also interested in how vibe coding can make game development easier.
We had such a vibrant indie game scene when Adobe flash was about and since then nothing's really touched that level of ease of development. I think vibe coding is the first tool that actually exceeds it.
ryanjshaw 2 hours ago [-]
Search for #vibejam on X, there’s a contest running right now with lots of people sharing their dev experiences.
avaer 5 hours ago [-]
> It takes no time to include all this
In some cases it does. Which engine?
Mackser 2 hours ago [-]
Super cool! Love that you can declare the screenshots inline in the markdown document.
For my desktop app I created a solution that generates screenshots in multiple languages, light/dark mode, removes noise and adds Windows/macOS window frames.
It's currently a separate script (which is a pain to maintain). I should look into making it a part of the markdown/mdx. Thanks for the inspiration!
LeoDaVibeci 20 hours ago [-]
I've needed this so many times. BTW this should be a meme: "I think this might be the neatest thing I’ve built in X that nobody will ever notice."
schneems 8 hours ago [-]
This is neat. I wrote https://github.com/zombocom/rundoc. It has a similar feature. The main driver is to produce tutorials so it also puts the output of commands run back in the document.
cocoto 4 hours ago [-]
Wouldn’t a real live render approach work in this case? Have a live preview of your tool inside a rectangle. If the tool is light it should be optimal visually: it will respect browser rendering settings like accessibility parameters or custom addons.
> Your users might not notice, but you know, and it gnaws at you.
The users WILL DEFINITELY notice if the screenshots don't match what they have in front of their eyes.
taspeotis 9 hours ago [-]
I’ve wondered about doing screenshots from the e2e test run, even keeping docs/ all together in the same repo so when you update the documentation and need a new screenshot you add a new test
maderalabs 8 hours ago [-]
Nice! I actually started to build this exact thing a couple years back, and ended up abstracting it out to something more generic with https://picshift.io/. That said, I still love the screenshot use case - the original name of this project was ScreenSync ;)
Barbing 6 hours ago [-]
Neat, good job, and good to have these different approaches out there
efortis 1 days ago [-]
same here, but linking to the screenshots used for pixel diffing, which get committed to the repo.
NoMethodError at /self-updating-screenshots
undefined method `name' for nil:NilClass
Ruby title-for: in handle, line 12
Web GET interblah.net/self-updating-screenshots
followed by a very detailed traceback when I try to access the page
borplk 2 hours ago [-]
Site appears to be down intermittently with a Django error
If author sees this: Turn off Django debug mode
xp84 7 hours ago [-]
Bravo. This is incredibly useful, and really improves the quality of documentation, especially for many applications whose design and UI are always in flux.
npodbielski 1 hours ago [-]
I do not know why but looking at the title I was sure that this involves something like webserver that updates static file it serves by some external webhook.
bobek 6 hours ago [-]
Plus we had a visual diff on the top of that as a part of the CI pipeline. It prevented a bunch of mishaps ;)
Biganon 4 hours ago [-]
You should set DEBUG=False in your Django settings.
est 9 hours ago [-]
I maintain an internal wiki, the contents were generated by each CI/CD and always reflects from latest running code.
davidtio 4 hours ago [-]
Interesting app, definitely will reduce a lot of work updating documentation.
dhruv3006 5 hours ago [-]
This is very cool - I think I will try having this in https://voiden.md/.
Diti 39 minutes ago [-]
“Crafted with care”, but the website has all the telltale signs of LLM slop.
You can get responsive design in "screenshots" with this. Super nice, and people can copy paste, look at the code (useful for dev tools), etc.
irishcoffee 8 hours ago [-]
I wrote a gui app once that ran on a safety-critical platform. I ended up stuffing a rendering of the gui (rendered offscreen) into shmem at I think 24hz, and rendered that screenshot into the safety critical application. I passed clicks (no typing for this gui) back from the statically rendered image updating on a cadence, to the offscreen GUI.
Worked well. Not quite the same as this, but that’s what this reminds me of.
yjftsjthsd-h 7 hours ago [-]
I don't think I follow. What is that giving you that you wouldn't get by just having the user click in the application and see its real interface directly? Or are you saying you were embedding one application inside another?
jfim 7 hours ago [-]
My guess is that it's to ensure that the UI logic crashing or hanging doesn't bring down the safety critical process.
2 hours ago [-]
erikmay 5 hours ago [-]
Awesome!
Now you could even go a step further and add satori to the pipeline to add content to the the fresh screenshot. This way annotation could be easily added to the screenshot.
sublinear 2 hours ago [-]
Why wouldn't you want to version the screenshots along with the text? That's a feature, not a bug.
At best, this seems to require an unpublished draft state for all automatic screenshot updates until explicitly approved so that mistakes don't leak out to everyone else.
At worst, this is an unrealistic level of discipline to keep things in sync that is far greater than just updating the docs normally with the next major version release.
My alternative suggestion would be to make sure your test suite takes screenshots with every build. They're already perfectly organized and in the context of what you're documenting.
devmor 7 hours ago [-]
Really love this, it should be standard practice!
immanuwell 1 days ago [-]
nice, embedding the capture instructions right in the markdown as comments is a dead-simple solution that'll age way better than any fancy external tooling
TranspectiveDev 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
willm 5 hours ago [-]
I approve of this approach.
The docs for Textual (TUI library for Python) build screenshots along with the docs. Technically not really screenshots, they are SVGs, but principle is the same. They never get out of date.
> Then you change the UI slightly – tweak a colour, move a button, update some copy – and suddenly every screenshot that includes that element is stale. You know they’re stale. Your users might not notice, but you know, and it gnaws at you.
Bonus: since you're generating screenshots programmatically anyway, you can generate a pair of each with your app's light/dark theme, and swap them in/out depending on prefers-color-scheme: dark. <picture> elements work in GitHub READMEs, too: https://github.com/CyberShadow/CyDo#readme
Granted manually updating the screenshots isn't the most laborious task in the world, but the "upload-apk + take-screenshot + transfer-back-to-PC + edit" process is usually barely annoying enough that you end up almost never doing it otherwise (similar to the OP's experience in the closing paragraph).
App stores require screenshots, but generating N images for NUMBER_OF_SCREEN_SIZES times NUMBER_OF_LOCALIZATIONS can be a chore.
In the past I wrote my own scripts for that, today tools like Fastlane[1] help.
I use Fastlane for my logic puzzle game Nonoverse[2], you can see sample screenshots in its App Store page.
I also automated App Preview video recording, complete with multiple scenes. If anyone wants to read more let me know, perhaps this is a good topic for an article.
[1]: https://fastlane.tools/
[2]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6...
> 100% open source under the MIT license
See: https://docs.fastlane.tools/
It doesn’t support App Preview automation, this is something that I had to script myself.
For the small casual games I've been vibe coding, I always start from a place where the application has a CLI where it can run headless, rendering to offscreen texture, with a a screenshot command as well as performance instrumentation. It takes no time to include all this, and gives the agent a way to automate the ui and inspect important things. It also lets me trivially have the agent update screenshots.
Not as neat as being part of the build process, but I will now add that.
I have an offscreen screenshot path, as well as a CLI arg for world pos/camera view vector, and scripted benchmark runs with a simple text-based input format that has rows of named segments of n game ticks length with control inputs per segment. Use that extensively for A/B testing of visuals and performance while working on the game code.
We had such a vibrant indie game scene when Adobe flash was about and since then nothing's really touched that level of ease of development. I think vibe coding is the first tool that actually exceeds it.
In some cases it does. Which engine?
For my desktop app I created a solution that generates screenshots in multiple languages, light/dark mode, removes noise and adds Windows/macOS window frames.
Wrote about it here: https://maxschmitt.me/posts/cakedesk-website-redesign#screen...
It's currently a separate script (which is a pain to maintain). I should look into making it a part of the markdown/mdx. Thanks for the inspiration!
The users WILL DEFINITELY notice if the screenshots don't match what they have in front of their eyes.
https://github.com/ericfortis/mockaton/tree/main/pixaton-tes...
NoMethodError at /self-updating-screenshots undefined method `name' for nil:NilClass
Ruby title-for: in handle, line 12 Web GET interblah.net/self-updating-screenshots
followed by a very detailed traceback when I try to access the page
If author sees this: Turn off Django debug mode
https://github.com/simonw/shot-scraper
You can get responsive design in "screenshots" with this. Super nice, and people can copy paste, look at the code (useful for dev tools), etc.
Worked well. Not quite the same as this, but that’s what this reminds me of.
At best, this seems to require an unpublished draft state for all automatic screenshot updates until explicitly approved so that mistakes don't leak out to everyone else.
At worst, this is an unrealistic level of discipline to keep things in sync that is far greater than just updating the docs normally with the next major version release.
My alternative suggestion would be to make sure your test suite takes screenshots with every build. They're already perfectly organized and in the context of what you're documenting.
The docs for Textual (TUI library for Python) build screenshots along with the docs. Technically not really screenshots, they are SVGs, but principle is the same. They never get out of date.
https://textual.textualize.io/widgets/markdown/#example
F
Related: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47890799