Made this website as an exercise in vibe-coding and GCP. It was posted about a few times around the internet, on sites like [Morning Brew](https://www.morningbrew.com/issues/business-buzzkill), [MetaFilter](https://www.metafilter.com/209703/Draw-A-Fish), boingboing.net, etc. I think it's cute!

I built a basic CNN trained against penises and swastikas, and then anything that doesn't hit the 63% confidence score gets sent to a mod queue, a [vibe-coded fish-tinder](https://bsky.app/profile/bigass.bsky.social/post/3luvikxn3f2...).

Was a fun exercise, spent about a month on it. Frontend is HTML5 hosted on github pages, backend is Node.JS on GCP.

The leaderboard is fascinating. Some people are clearly putting a lot of time into this, while the rest of us are trying to sneak phallic shapes past your CNN.

1. https://drawafish.com/rank.html?userId=1753510318634_cdeh6a4...

The website is great!

> I built a basic CNN trained against penises

After seeing it in action, my second thought (first was just watching my fish) was that I was amazed at the good behavior of the users because I would have expected a lot of penises floating around. Now I understand. Nicely done!

https://imgur.com/a/Vtoxc7p

35% for this masterpiece? Rigged

Somewhat interesting thing with my 9yo. She's a pretty good artist, she can draw various characters and objects pretty well.

With this she clearly just wanted to do the standard stick fish shape, but it turns out she only knows how to do it facing left. Facing left, looks typical, facing right, almost a figure 8. So after like 6 attempts being judged by the computer she's getting frustrated, and I'm like how about this, turn the phone upside down to have her draw facing left. But now she can't do it left either!

> exercise in vibe-coding

The code shows it... Your escaping routine seems OK, but you really __should not__ be building HTML and JS(!) using raw string interpolation. Or letting the client decide whether the submission needs moderation.

Suggestion: canvas.addEventListener('dragstart', (e) => { e.preventDefault(); } );

At least on Firefox/Mac, sometimes while dragging it "picks up" the image to drag it. This should prevent that.

I did this on a trip to Japan but can't remember for the life of me where. Some museum. My wife and I drew fishes and then they were uploaded and we went to a room and watched them swim across walls/ceilings. Really cool experience

I couldn’t get it to go above 50% and then I wrote “fish” on it and it went up 5 points

https://i.imgur.com/SADe8kn.png

6.3%??????

> I built a basic CNN trained against penises and swastikas

Isn't this how some Lego MMO died? They spent too many resources on "moderation" and too few on the actual game.

If you post that more proeminently, maybe you'll get a bunch of kids on summer holidays finding ways to make penises pass your filter...

I tried my damnedest to give my fish a ballsack. That's a real good fishiness detector.

What a fun game! Especially on a Note 10+, and I have to say, seeing the dongnet keep up with each pen stroke on a 2019 device is really impressive! Possibly still a little generous, though, I think. Writing "FISH" on a rectangle shouldn't hit 50%, but this does explain why SSN-69 didn't have much of a chance :D

This is the most wholesome thing I saw on the internet for a long time. Thanks for the effort!

That is fun. And it's nice to know that everyone else on HN is about as artistic as I am.

We visited the St Louis Aquarium a couple years ago and they have a similar set up. It's pretty awesome and great for kids. It's simply called "Fish Draw" https://www.stlaquariumfoundation.org/education/conservation...

Fun, but really frustrating to spend a ton of time making a detailed fish, get a fish probability of 67.2%, submit it successfully with no note about it needing moderation, and it still never shows up.

And I don't mean "I never noticed it show up in the public tank". I mean my profile says "8 fish created", but if I "view my fish" there are only two in the list. If I go to my default fish tank I see all 8, but if I click on one of the missing ones and try to add it to a different tank or vote on it I get "Failed to <do whatever>: Fish not found".

They exist but they don't exist. This isn't a tank, it's a window into purgatory.

This is too much fun! If anyone missed it, you can also rank the fish here: https://drawafish.com/rank.html

Fun!!!

Small changes if make: - Change the background colour of the drawing canvas to match the water background - Add fill tool? So folks can color this fish white? Bonus points if you automatically color the inside part of the fish white - Fix the discontinuity of how the fish swim by stretching the pixels of the fish that you draw

I drew a fish but I couldn't find it anywhere when it switched to the tank. Perhaps you could highlight the user's own fish, at least initially?

EDIT: Tried again and now I see there is a highlight, but it's pretty hard to see a in a busy tank, the color contrast is not very high

This doesn’t work for me on Firefox Focus on iOS, even with all the ad and tracker blocking disabled. Tapping on the make it swim button does nothing. I’m able to see the tank with the tank button though.

OP has a clear bias against angelfish.

This is brilliant. Checkout my [Anatomically Correct Fish Tank](https://drawafish.com/fishtank-view.html?id=gYCWJ24lhxSvR4lG...)

I keep getting this error on both Safari and Firefox:

Uncaught (in promise) Error: Fish model not loaded verifyFishDoodle https://drawafish.com/src/js/app.js:514 <anonymous> https://drawafish.com/src/js/app.js:170 EventListener.handleEvent* https://drawafish.com/src/js/app.js:168

Edit: Never mind, I had to wait till the model loaded. Took some time though. Fun project nevertheless!

There used to be something like this at the Boston Museum of Science, where you created a fish (don’t remember if you drew it freehand and/or selected from different fish parts) and released it into the tank with other fish and predators.

Shocking no one has mentioned Jian Yang's hotdog app :) [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWwCK95X6go&ab_channel=Felix

Love the simplicity of this.

This is fantastic, the leaderboard is really nice! It reminds me of Paper Planes.

https://paperplanes.world/

My initial fish likelihood score was 7% and I couldn't get it past 12% without looking up what a fish looks like. I learned a lot about myself via this app, so thank you.

Nice, I got my upside down penis fish past the filter! Although, once it was swimming it did look very much like a fancy guppy. I don't think anyone would recognize it, but I still feel smug about "beating" the machine.

As Bret would say, please stop drawing dead fish.

Does not work for me on desktop Firefox. When I press the "make it swim!" button, there's an error in console: "Uncaught (in promise) Error: Fish model not loaded"

Some of you are wayy too bored at work - some of these are too realistic

What a fun, whimsical idea. I love this.

Also: When you release something like this to the public, I'm amazed at how quickly humans race to the bottom. That bit can be awful to watch.

Kudos to the person who managed to sneak a tiny fish, in a fish tank, on a table, with a plant in a plant pot, past the detector.

> Frontend is HTML5 hosted on github pages, backend is Node.JS on GCP.

So this means it's doing CORS? Why not just have GCP serve everything?

I'm glad we've stopped drawing dead fish (beautiful talk by Bret Victor, 12 years ago): https://vimeo.com/64895205

Also inspired by that: https://drawdeadfish.com/

This is my favorite thing today! I only saw one penis fish (with the penis nestled inside the face, as a facial feature of sorts). That's pretty good for a drawing app on the internet, well done! I've given up on running public apps that accept user contributions.

Cool but ......

This is my feeling of vibe coding this kind of stuff so far. It's never really good, it's just kind of acceptable because it was vibe codeded.

The way the fish are stretched where they gets sliced into bands is not something I think most humans would generally choose to do. With a few characters of code change you could at least stretch each column so it scales to the next column.

I know vibe coding will continue to get better. There's a bunch of people at my work that have a vibe-coding chat where they show off their latest creation. Most of them they'd done in Gemini Canvas. The prompts are usually 1 or 2 paragraphs like "Make a 3d tower defense game with joypad input where you move a character using the joypad and can place towers by pressing the button. ....." And it spits out a working game but it's only interesting because it was vibe coded, not because the game is actually in any-way-shape-or-form interesting, good, pretty.

Also, I appreciate that this game had a fish recognizer but I also found it super scary. I tried to make to make a sunfish and it was like "not a fish". I don't want bad AI judging what is and isn't acceptable.

Locally we have the National Museum of Play. One of the exhibits right near the entrance is a virtual aquarium where you can color in a picture of a fish. Then you take it to a scanner and press a button and your fish starts swimming in a huge screen that serves as a virtual aquarium.

Show me a tank of the leaderboard fish!

This is so cool!

I did just about spit out of coffee reading the words vibe coded fish tinder though. But a smart thing to implement.

Would love to hear more info on how you actually vibe coded this as the fishbowl seems incredibly cool

It looks like this has been hijacked by some edgy online communities.

Is there some sort of overlap between HN and cesspits like 4chan? Or did this get posted elsewhere?

I drew a 100% fish but it was classed only 58% a fish.

https://drawafish.com/rank.html?userId=1754072603630_i0f8iw6...

I recently went to an aquarium in Exmouth, Western Australia, which had a giant wall mounted display with a tablet which allowed kids (of all ages!) to draw a fish and "release" it into the tank.

I realized that my drawn with a mouse fish looks a lot like the fish quilt block I made. Neither were very good. But I enjoyed making them both :-)

Now to share with my grandkids.

I carefully drew a lion fish. Turns out only 37% odds of being a fish. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionfish)

Fun idea, fun site!

This is the same thing I did when going to teamLab Borderless in Japan, very cool.

I’m so bad at drawing it only had a 46% confidence level that it was a fish

This is so fun. I wonder if there is a similar page for other animals,

There’s a museum in Tokyo that has this but for physically drawn fish and is then projected on a large wall. Cool to see a digital version

I love that the common styles of fish are a function of what tools people were given.

For example, if a fill tool was available I bet we would see far far fewer hollow fish.

Very cool! NN seems too focused on precision over recall (not allowing enough false positives) but trying to get stuff past it is also part of the fun.

Very fun. My only suggestion would be a small highlight when you submit your fish so you can easily see which fish is yours - at least for a few seconds.

I love these kind of websites. After finishing my drawing, I spent way more time than I expected looking through other people drawings.

I know you tried to hack it the same way as I did.

Well the first thing I did was submit a good ole CNB (use your imagination) and it put it under review.... so nice job hah!

you can upvote your own fish as much as you want

I'm hard stuck on fish probability 59% fml

Please approve my anglerfish. Thank you.

i love frivolous stuff like this. it's art that reminds me of the internet's early days, well done.

No obscene fishes observed. Well done! :)

My eel didn't qualify as a fish :(

Tell me why my fish just died!? Just went through a little loss and now feel sad

its got nazi fish (one with a swastika on it) in the tank already, hooray for the internet

If vibe coding means more silly fish-drawing apps in the world then I’m 100% for it.

This is what the internet should be all about.

Now, make a man and we will make him adventure in the forest?

How do I eat the other fish?

In firefox I'm able to vote for the same fish over and over.

I can't find the fish l drew swimming there

This is the only type of thing people should actually vibe code. I love it

Very nice work. You could improve the tank rendering performance though...

"Built with hate"...? Too bad. Love the rest of the project.

hi kiwifarms is drawing offensive images please ban them

Reminds me of Team Lab Borderless in Tokyo, Japan

Asking ChatGPT Agent to try doing this is hilarious

Cool

Getting that fishmax is really hard, any tips?

is it normal to expose API key and App ID on Github? I don't use firebase but figured I should ask

Haha this is good times - solid site

This is who I want to be when I grow up

Can you add search by fish name?

I get neal.fun vibes from this

It did not like my fish :(

Missed opportunity to call it

Fish or no fish

No worky (Android/FF)

Cool, just made nemo!

Start drawing live fish

sorry, i accidentally broke it by giving 500 in the url-param

I saw my fish die :(

that's so random and fun! I love it!

Fun to try to draw a fish that passes the looks like a fish test, while having as many penis-like features as possible.

10/10 love it!

This is ingenious

No mobile support?

Great capcha!

Great project!

I waited for my fish. But it never came. Made me sad.

Now I want to see the adult version of this project: same thing with no CNN.

Inundate me with penises and swastikas!

RS HN crossover didn't expect to see this lol

omg best shit that happened in 2025 yet, well done

Recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44670499