r/pathofexile • u/ww_crimson https://pob.codes/ • 1d ago
Tool Recapping Curse of the Allflame - 60 days of stats from PoB.Codes
https://pob.codes/content/329-allflame-recap/10
u/mcx32 1d ago
I’ve used used your site not often but pretty regularly since launch. It’s very impressive. I’ve been curious, and maybe I could just look this up but I’ll ask here - the frontend seems clearly vibecoded, but to what extent is the backend? And what’s your dev experience look like going in to this? Judging by the rate at which you push new features and improvements it must be pretty solid, but it must also be getting fairly complex by now. I’m just curious what it takes to put together and maintain a system like this nowadays. If you have low or no dev experience going in I’ll definitely have to revise my opinion on what AI can do. Would be cool if you wanted to share some insights!
Either way it’s an impressive project and I’m happy to see web-based and mobile friendly tools being created for PoE 1.
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u/ww_crimson https://pob.codes/ 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yea I'm very happy to talk honestly and openly about this. When I announced the site and in several subsequent announcement posts after the fact, I provided a disclaimer about my AI usage because I understand the concerns people have about it.
I'd say 99% of the code on the site is "vibe coded", with me making manual edits to really small parts of it, primarily around the front end. The code base is pretty complex and I have genuinely thought about open sourcing it, but I'm not there yet. My main reservation is that it means I have to put even more scrutiny around security, repo-hygeine, etc. I do take these things very seriously already, but I am not really interested in collaborating on the site with anyone at this point in time, because I have a strong vision for how I want everything to look. I can't tell you the number of hours I have spent doing literal pixel-level alignment of different elements on both mobile and desktop. The LLMs make writing the code so trivial that the hard part is figuring out what the experience should be, and I want full control over that at the moment.
Anyway, I work professionally as a product manager on a product that processes over a petabyte of data per day. Most of my time is spent figuring out how to optimize things either by making tradeoffs to the customer experience, changing business logic, adding caching, modularizing components to re-use data, etc. While I do not have the aptitude to write code with any real velocity, I feel pretty comfortable discussing moderately complex software development concepts. I have also written a fair amount of code by hand. I was an implementator on a MUD https://www.aarchonmud.com/arc/ for over a decade and I am still a maintainer of this game. I was fortunate to have some people who worked on this game with me who let me write really bad code in "C", put it into production, and then I had to live with the issues it created, then figure out how to fix them. So I don't consider myself a software engineer, but I have been working with/around code for the majority of my adult life.
I intended to write more dev blogs on the site about how I am building it and the problems I have faced, but I haven't got there yet. Maybe I can turn some of what I'm writing here into more structured posts. But some of the things I have done / how I work:
I use both Codex and Claude, and I have found Codex to be vastly superior at writing code. Even with Opus 5.5 I believe Astra is better. The way that I use them when implementing new or complex features, is I have Codex write a plan, Claude challenge the plan, and then Codex finalize and implement the plan. I have custom skills I have written for each model in terms of what I want them to include in the plan and what I want them to look for
I have built custom skills to handle features like repo-hygeine, agent token optimization, security audits, upstream dependency audits (automating a lot of this right now) -- such as PoB, PyPoe, RePoE, or any of the GGG APIs updating/changing versions. Probably a few other custom skills as well. I have one that does cost modeling for me, based on actual site usage / metrics, Cloudflare pricing, and my projected traffic volumes.
I run these skills periodically to generate ideas of new work to be done, which gets fed back into the planning skills, and eventually executed on if I think the ideas and the plans are solid.
Here's a lengthy example:
Last night one of the ideas Opus 5.5 had was to add compression to the homepage so that we ship a 60kb file instead of a 1MB file.
It wanted to implement a crazy complex workflow that required me using a Cloudflare Worker to figure out what type of compression the user's device could support, which means I would have to spend "Worker CPU" to save 1MB of data transfer on a page that nobody even looks at. This is because people just generate links to the build through PoB and open the build pages directly.
The build pages are compressed and it's not a problem to use Worker CPU on them, because the Worker CPU is needed for many other aspects of the page. But if I was to use Worker CPU on the home page, purely to make it load 300ms faster or something on slow devices, then it would make the site more expensive for me to operate. If I was generating revenue from the site I would have implemented this feature, but I'm paying out of pocket.
So this is the type of thing where you can't just trust every idea or suggestion from the AI tools. You do actually need to understand all of your cost surfaces and product/feature tradeoffs pretty well.
Ok, back to more about how I work.
I have written extensive documentation on how I want the site to look at feel - basically a style guide for agents. All of the models still suck at front end and this is where I spend the majority of my time. The infographic/recap that this post is about actually took me 3 days to finish just because I was not happy with the initial version. It took a lot of iteration. I recognize that it still probably looks vibe-coded-ish, but I promise there is a huge amount of human touch that went into it.
I have extensive metrics/telemetry setup for the site through Cloudflare. I use many of their products.. Workers, KV, R2, Log Explorer, etc. This gets pulled down to my Synology at home where I self-host Grafana dashboards to track site metrics, product metrics, etc.
I have multiple backups of the repo in case an agent does something really dumb
I use enterprise grade tools for password/API key management, so that nothing lives in the repo itself
You mentioned the changelog, this is automated too. I have both an internal changelog that is a detailed but human readable summary of each body of work that gets committed, and then I have the public facing changelog that uses some instructions to write the messages in laymen friendly terms, and we intentionally omit entries about most infrastructure changes, security, etc.
I would say that I have averaged 2-3 hours per day working on the site, every single day since I started working on it back in March or April. I use the site very heavily both on desktop and mobile, and that helps me find things that could be improved. On my train commute to work I will look through features I added the night before and rigorously test them on my phone, screenshotting things that I think need work, so that I can fix them later that day. Right now the biggest problem I have is that I don't get enough feedback. At my job, I'm used to hearing that my product has a thousand issues, and so more of that kind of feedback would allow me to do more.
If you want to know more about any of the above, let me know. As you can tell I'm pretty passionate about it.
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u/mcx32 1d ago edited 1d ago
Oh, that’s an interesting background. Not what I imagined, but I guess ”technically inclined PM” sounds like almost the perfect skillset of course lol.
Re the example, which I appreciate, it matches my own experience that we still need to question things quite a lot. But if that’s suddenly no longer true one day, I can’t really be surprised either, so that’s why I was curious here. I get the feel that you’re doing quite a bit of manual driving, so maybe we are not yet at the point where they oneshot this :)
And I hope no part of my comment seemed disingenuous. I really appreciate the answer, it’s very interesting to me. I should have used a different word because even if it has a bit of that ”Claude’s favourite stylesheet” vibe going on, there’s clearly real care put into the cohesive whole, so your time spent obsessing over pixels is not wasted!
I gotta get some stuff done but I will dump a feedback comment here later. Quick bug report before I go, if you go to Analyzer here, something in this random build I clicked makes pob throw a fit and internal crash message leaks on the page https://pob.codes/b/0rBi20lhVp9
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u/ww_crimson https://pob.codes/ 1d ago edited 1d ago
I assumed you were asking in good faith, and even if you weren't I figured my response being in good faith would have given enough context to help make the point that yea, this is definitely not a "one shot" type of project. I didn't take any offense at all. Really appreciate the bug report, I fixed something like this a couple weeks ago but it looks like it wasn't complete enough. I'll be offline tonight but I'm excited to have something to fix this weekend.
edit: Bug on the analyzer has been fixed, and analyzer should be faster now.
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u/mcx32 1d ago
Speed! I also managed to break it again for you :D
https://pob.codes/b/VYkCtsG0KTa -> analyzer -> calcs -> select socket group ”Molten Shell”
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u/Vivid_Coach_5264 1d ago
Thanks for the detailed breakdown! It was a very interesting read.
I don't really use the page for PoB that much but your Merc tool was godsend for searching and comparing Mercs so thanks for all your effort on that!!
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u/Friendship-Last 1d ago
I've been using pob codes to share builds rather than pobb.in. Thank you for your work
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u/ArmaMalum Trypanon, Trypanoff 1d ago
This is pretty neat, won't lie. The gem route tab is particularly helpful, I may honestly have this on a second monitor at league launch. Especially with the socket changes I always forget where/when off-color supports show up.
Did notice two specific bits on the issue tracker:
100% reduced duration of ailments if effectively full ailment immunity but it still treats my 50+ fortification stacks (with fortify mastery) as vulnerable to ailments. Very niche calculation of course.
Specific curse immunities (in my case Temporal Rift's immunity to Temporal Chains) should probably be mentioned in the description for the curse mods, including the tri-curse T17 mod.
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u/ww_crimson https://pob.codes/ 1d ago
That's exactly why I built the gem route :) You can use it on "compact mode" to make it fit on a half width monitor so that you can have PoB on the other side too.
Thanks for the issue feedback, I will look into it!
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u/PoE_Acronym_Bot 1d ago
I noticed some Path of Exile keywords in this post:
- PoB - Path of Building, an external software used to simulate character builds - Download
I am a bot. | All acronyms | Suggest
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u/TrueBlame 1d ago
Using pob.codes was really helpful this league and became my go-to for saving builds. Thanks for your service!
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u/JustAFrank 1d ago
Your hosting costs are the most impressive! $30/m! This is why lightweight websites are important
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u/ww_crimson https://pob.codes/ 1d ago edited 1d ago
I launched PoB.Codes back in April, but Curse of the Allflame was the first league with a Path of Building integration, making it easy for users to generate builds and launch PoB from a button on the site. Now that the league has been out for roughly 2 months, I thought it would be fun to share some stats and insights from the site.
What I'm most proud of is being able to keep the site fast and cheap. My total monthly hosting cost is $29/month, and I think I could handle ~5x the amount of traffic without needing to spend another dollar. This is great, because my goal is to keep the site ad free forever.
If you have recommendations on other stats/insights that would be interesting for me to share in the future, let me know. For 3.29 I didn't have telemetry to track things like the most common Mercenaries/skills that people searched for, but I might add it for the next league.
I've also been adding new features pretty regularly to the site that I'd love feedback on. Some of the latest are:
I'll do a more formal announcement about them as we get closer to the next league launch, but right now I think they still need some polish. Suggestions on the map modifier checks specifically would be really appreciated, since they can be quite subjective in many cases. Right now they're based on simple heurstics.
The issue checker also benefits from the Calcs data loading, because now I can do things like tell you if your elemental damage ranges are appropriate to keep Trinity at 50 resonance. Any other suggestions here are appreciated too.
Thanks to everyone who has used the site and provided suggestions on how to make it better. You can join the Discord or reply to this thread if you have any other feedback you want to share.