Empty Folder Projects

Three claims, made out loud, in writing

  • Incorrect claim: The channel name is free.
  • Incorrect claim: This line of CSS stops the numbers jittering.
  • Incorrect claim: This command won’t print the API key.
  • Correction: It printed the API key.

Wrong three times. Everything shipped anyway.

A card game, a puzzle game, a hockey news feed and a YouTube channel for seven-year-olds, built by one person with AI. Free to use, with a record of what went wrong.

All you need is an idea and an empty folder.

Pip Bo

The projects

Eight things that started as nothing

Try it

Four you can play, use or watch today.

  • The opening screen on green baize: the Hawaiian Rummy logo, a name field, and new or join buttons.
    the opening screen — type a name and deal
    Live — play it now

    Hawaiian Rummy

    The card game, in a browser, for up to four players. No account, no install, no ads. Type a name and deal — the whole thing is a link you can send someone.

  • A flat-drawn level backdrop: turquoise Moraine Lake below the Valley of the Ten Peaks, and canoes.
    moraine lake — one of a hundred destinations
    Live on the App Store

    Bus Tourist Craze

    Dispatch colour-matched buses across a hundred hand-verified levels, Vancouver to Ottawa, learning a Canadian destination on the way. Free, no ads, no tracking, and it works with no signal at all.

  • The live site: Sharks News Aggregator masthead and last scan, above tag, player and time filters.
    wplepla23gjn.nobgp.link — the live feed
    Live — web app

    Sharks News Aggregator

    A San Jose Sharks news feed that clusters stories instead of repeating them. It once published a rugby story, which took sixteen minutes to revert and became an episode.

  • Thumbnail on warm paper: “A chicken for a sandwich?”, a brown hen, a sandwich and a doubtful Bo.
    pipedia · money · ep. 1 — thumbnail
    Live — YouTube channel

    Pipedia

    A YouTube channel that explains one big idea per episode for ages 7–11, starting with money and how a business works. An agent was given one sentence and an empty folder and built the whole thing: the scripts, the characters, the voices, the render pipeline, the thumbnails.

How it’s built

Four more: the build log, the tools, and the habit underneath.

  • Thumbnail on ink: “It printed the API key”, “API key” boxed in orange, Pip shocked, Bo furious.
    empty folder · pipedia — thumbnail
    Live — the build log

    Empty Folder

    What these projects actually took. Every episode takes one thing built with an AI agent and says what happened, what broke, and what it cost to find out. No timelapse, no highlight reel.

  • The app on navy: its cat-with-a-trolley logo, “Price Monitor”, “19 items tracked”, a URL form.
    the dashboard — 19 items tracked
    Private tool — source public

    PriceReduced

    A personal price monitor: give it a product URL and it reads the price on a schedule, keeping the history until you delete the item. The argument is about where the language model sits — 19 URLs, and only one of them needs one.

  • A frame of the video: the kanji 凪 and “Nagi: the dead calm when the land and sea breezes cancel out”, beside Davin, talking.
    keeping the agents · the plan — a frame
    Series — 1 of 6 out

    Nagi

    A video series on letting AI agents work without handing them your own computer. A used mini PC with a virtual machine behind a firewall which refuses all private traffic, three capped keys, and snapshots to roll back. It built two Pipedia series with permission prompts off.

  • the running record, which is the whole idea
    Public — the practice itself

    making-of

    Not a project so much as the habit underneath all of them: keep a running record of what got decided, what got tested, and what turned out to be wrong. Two files and a rule you can copy.


Behind the builds

Latest from the build log

Every episode, by project

Start your own

You can do this too — and here is the boring reason why

Nothing here needed a studio, a team, or a skill learned in advance. What it needed was a willingness to be wrong in writing, repeatedly, and to fix the machine instead of the output.

Start with one project folder. The making-of README has two blocks to copy: the instruction for CLAUDE.md and the opening for MAKING-OF.md. Add your idea, then record the first decision and what you actually checked.

Get the starter blocks on GitHub

Three things that transferred. Each one cost something first.

Cost: a channel name

Checking whether a name was free meant asking for the page and treating “not found” as available. It looked rigorous. There were percentages. There was a methodology note. The recommended name was taken. A tool can rule a name out; it can never rule one in.

Ask what your check actually proves.

Cost: ninety-four missing pictures

A script reported that every level already had an illustration, and exited zero. Ninety-four were missing. The list had come back empty and it could not tell the difference between nothing wrong and nothing examined.

Absence of findings is not evidence of health.

Cost: it would have been a rebuild

Nobody asked an AI to make a video. The agent was asked to build the thing that makes videos, and that ran forty-one times. Episode ten took a fraction of the effort episode one did, because every fix from episode one was still in the machine.

Don’t prompt for output. Build the factory.

None of those are clever. They are the residue of getting them wrong in public, which is the whole method and the only part worth copying.

The write-ups are long and they are the best part. Start with the practice, not the tools — making-of is two files and a rule, and it is the one thing worth keeping if everything else goes.

Bo Pip

What it actually took

Counted, not estimated

Snapshot: . Published means on YouTube and public.

See the counts and how they were checked

Pipedia’s published count was read off the channel’s Videos tab on 9 October 2026: Money and Business, ten full episodes each. Shorts and the trailer are not counted. Empty Folder’s count is the build log on this site, which lists an episode the day its full cut goes public.

What is in the pipeline is counted separately, from the local project files. One configuration file counts as one video cut; it does not prove a render is finished or a video is public.

  • Business: 20 configured cuts.
  • Detectives: 20 configured cuts.
  • Money: 20 configured cuts.
  • Shopping: 20 configured cuts.
  • Empty Folder: 13 configured cuts across 6 episode folders, including alternate vertical cuts.

The writing count uses dated Act and Session headings in five making-of records. Words are counted by whitespace, including code and tables. These are frozen counts, not a live counter.

Making-of records included in the snapshot
Project recordSessionsWords
Pipedia4545,435
Bus Tourist Craze2242,045
This website4240,934
Talking Head69,109
Hawaiian Rummy45,330

The project files include private repositories; this breakdown publishes the totals, not those repositories. See the work on Pipedia, watch the Empty Folder build log, or read the making-of practice.


What this is

Everything on this page was built by one person working with an AI agent. A YouTube channel for seven-year-olds. A puzzle game with a hundred hand-verified levels. A hockey news feed. A card game.

The projects are free to use. This website has no accounts or advertising; linked platforms have their own practices. The write-ups say what broke, because a project that only shows its finished side is an advertisement for itself.

You will not see a face in an Empty Folder episode, and that is not shyness. It is how the show is built.


Disclosure

Disclosure, since it's the whole subject: both voices are synthetic (ElevenLabs), the characters are drawn in code rather than illustrated, and the composition is generated HTML rendered frame by frame. Nothing on screen is stock footage or a mock-up.

Nothing above is a mock-up either. Every screenshot is the live site or the shipped file. Where a project has no screen to show, it gets a drawn prop instead — and you can tell which is which.