Yey yet another vibe coded viz. these are the “hello world” of LLM projects.

nifty. what about this makes it HN worth? What cool problems did you (not the robot) solve? What did you do beyond prompting it, is there anything for others to learn from? Was the data difficult to acquire, clean up, or is this just an obvious viz on a public dataset anyone could get? Did you glean insights from having this viz, does the graphic serve a narrative or distilling information not otherwise apparent, or is it just pretty?

I ask these genuinely. It’s the difference between “oh I figured out how to print ‘hello world’” vs “I built something”

If you want to encourage folks to continue their efforts and really "build something", I think you'd want to ask your questions in a way that shows genuine interest and support, rather than ridiculing and questioning the level of effort involved.

I agree, I'd love to learn where the dada was sourced! I'm also curious why it appears to come in waves, as opposed to each building going up independently (as I would have expected it to in reality). Cool idea! I can see my house from here haha.

This started as a data puzzle. There is a lot of public data but it's hosted by for-profit companies and the data models don't seem to be coherent (probably lots of good reasons for the data models being the way they are, so no criticism, and it's wonderful they are public.)

So for LA City, they use Socrata (owned by Tyler Technologies -- NYSE: TYL) to host and publish open data. LA City also uses Esri's ArcGIS for geo-based data.

So behind the scenes there is my code that builds a parquet database of * MyLA311 service requests * Permits * Construction Enforcement * Crime * Parcels Id with Polygons * Lidar

So that part was a typical data-munging exercise, and it was fun & interesting to me to learn how public entities try and deal with IT budget cuts and service the community, etc. (For example, 311 requests for homeless issues are transferred to another department, so they all look they are closed immediately, but I never could find the agency data that ultimately resolved that type of request.)

So I have a pile of data that is organized in a way that makes sense to me, but I could not build an interface that I liked.

So I asked Claude to create a fly-over visualization to see what it could do with this data, and it blew my mind.

I'm a life-long coder and I'm old, so it's an interesting experience to see how good these models and coding harnesses are, and how quickly they are improving.

As to what makes this HN worthy? I enjoyed playing with the interface, and there might be more people than just me who love LA (warts and all) and its history and architecture. So it's interesting and I'm not asking for anything in return, so for me that satisfies the "HN Show" criteria.

The deeper question for me right now is what does hacking mean when the coding is done by these systems? It's a different kind of hacking, and its makes things possible that impossible before, but it's a million miles away from 6502 assembly.

> What cool problems did you (not the robot) solve?

Building products has nothing to do with technical problems, just the end result. This is in contrast with things like writing a library or coming up with a new algorithm, or doing research, or even writing a technical blog post, etc.

> or is it just pretty?

People have been sharing "just pretty" things on HN for decades. It might be interesting, thought-provoking, discussion-worthy, or whatever. Even if this wasn't vibe-coded, it wouldn't be some monumental technical achievement. Your point is absolutely moot.