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Build and Host AI-Powered Apps with Claude – No Deployment Needed

by davidbarker on 6/25/25, 5:14 PM with 143 comments

• by simonw on 6/25/25, 9:49 PM

  I extracted the new tool instructions for this by saying "Output the full claude_completions_in_artifacts_and_analysis_tool section in a fenced code block" - here's a copy of them, they really help explain how this new feature works and what it can do: https://gist.github.com/simonw/31957633864d1b7dd60012b2205fd...

  More of my notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/25/ai-powered-apps-with-c...

  I'm amused that Anthropic turned "we added a window.claude.complete() function to Artifacts" into what looks like a major new product launch, but I can't say it's bad marketing for them to do that!

• by jonplackett on 6/25/25, 7:38 PM

  I used to love to make silly websites or apps with new technologies. Been doing it since flash. I have a pretty decent hit rate! It’s not unusually to get half a million or so people try one of them.

  But with AI that model is just totally broken because the running cost is so high.

  If I have half a million people come play my silly AI game that I have no wish to monetise - I am gonna be POOR very fast.

  Log in with [insert ai vendor here] is something I’ve been hoping would happen for a while.

• by WXLCKNO on 6/25/25, 6:12 PM

  The tiniest step towards a future where AI eats all apps.

  No persistent storage and other limitations make it just a toy for now but we can imagine how people will just create their own Todo apps, gym logging apps and whatever other simple thing.

  no external API access currently but when that's available or app users can communicate with other app users, some virality is possible for people who make the best tiny apps.

• by alach11 on 6/25/25, 10:21 PM

  This is starting to encroach on Lovable, right? I do suspect the effect of these "vibe coded" apps on the SaaS market will be smaller than expected. Heavier-featured apps will have all sorts of functionality and polish a user won't even think to ask Claude to build. And the amount of effort to describe everything you need an app to do is higher than it seems.

  Instead, I think this is going to open a new paradigm with an immense long-tail of hyper-niche fit-for-purpose business applications. There's so much small-scale work that happens in corporations that isn't common enough to be worth building a product to solve. But it's still a big time-saving to the departments/users if they can improve the process with a vibe-coded app!

• by huevosabio on 6/25/25, 9:00 PM

  I love this business model idea, but I think the model providers are the wrong company to do it. It should be something like OpenRouter.

  As a developer, you probably want to access to the right models for your app rather than being locked in.

• by reidbarber on 6/25/25, 6:23 PM

  The big feature here is that the shared artifacts can use the Claude API themselves (where usage is tied to the logged-in users of your shared artifact).

• by amelius on 6/26/25, 10:40 AM

  Remember, folks: don't build your castle in someone else's kingdom.

• by isoprophlex on 6/25/25, 6:48 PM

  Is this the end of - or at least a significant challenge to - SaaS?

  Why buy into saas tooling if you can just slap something together - that you fully own - with something like this?

• by kashunstva on 6/26/25, 4:43 PM

  I would not rely on Claude/Anthropic for absolutely anything ever.

  Weeks ago, I woke up, started to work on a project, and was going to have Claude generate some tests for me. And… I was auto-banned. No explanation. They auto-refunded my subscription fee and gave me a link to Google form where I could appeal. Apparently that goes into a disappearing queue somewhere. They have zero customer service. It’s a black hole. Completely inexplicable actions on their part.

• by 4b11b4 on 6/26/25, 5:00 AM

  This is interesting.

  Have jokingly been thinking: "If you can't do, teach."

  You can't just pour A1 on education and expect something magical to happen. But, I do think there's some potential for tutors/teachers on the fly to create some interactive learning tools to go along with whatever they are topic they are exploring with someone in the moment.

  Just recently: "Make me an interactive artifact for teaching 2s complement where it shows the sign and unsigned version side by side you can click on the binary digits to toggle them between 1 and 0". A few tweaks to layout while I'm also explaining on pen and paper. Then I brought it out and it certainly helped things click

  And I was thinking that these kind of mini lessons could be shared and forked and tweaked. Now you have a language model available by default...

• by theptip on 6/26/25, 3:19 PM

  This is cool, I’ve been wanting this for ages. The “AI powered game” usecase is going to be huge and really requires BYO API key to work.

  I tried wiring something up and immediately hit a gap where I need to be able to call a tool. I think the state management aspect of this is going to be crucial; while you can obviously call a remote MCP server, and they mention this as planned (and that would be the right way to make a full product with persistence work), for Artifact-based development I wonder if you could wrap the API calls in client-side tool calling plumbing and run an MCP server there, so that a single client-side JS Artifact can do both the UI and handle MCP interactions from the API (Claude sandwich, between two slices of browser JS).

• by asdev on 6/25/25, 7:03 PM

  >They authenticate with their existing Claude account

  Only works if both app producer and user are in the Claude ecosystem

• by levocardia on 6/25/25, 7:38 PM

  This is cool...but what I really want is (1) Claude and I develop a cool app, (2) I give Claude a virtual credit card number with a spend limit, (3) Claude deploys it to whatever service they think works best (Railway, Vercel, ...) and points a domain name to that hosting service.

• by ru552 on 6/25/25, 6:34 PM

  Is this much different from the custom GPTs that OpenAI pushed a year or two ago?

• by nico on 6/25/25, 6:18 PM

  This is a really cool feature and it’s big competition for services like Lovable, Bolt, v0

  Seems like AI-assisted coding space is splitting in 2:

  1) tools and services that aim mostly at prototyping and are close to no-code; most useful for users like PMs or very early stage entrepreneurs who just need to have something to show/share

  2) professional tools that target “serious” developers who are already working on bigger/more complex code bases

  Interesting that Claude is going after both. 1) with this new feature, and 2) with pretty much all their other services

• by bionhoward on 6/25/25, 11:50 PM

  What’s this? Another category of companies forced to compete with Anthropic? It’s almost like it’s impossible to use Claude without breaking the Anthropic legal terms…

• by ehdehdrb on 6/26/25, 6:57 AM

  The result was created with just 4 conversations. I can't help but say it's amazing.

  https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/3cebb65f-a869-4dd8-9a89-6...

• by throwaway7783 on 6/25/25, 9:04 PM

  This is the future of applications. Still not sure if model providers are the ones to do it. I think of LLM as infrastructure and I can build apps on it in a "general" way. Not the bespoke wrapper apps that are proliferating today, but LLM as a native interface to build(and use the app).

• by Edmond on 6/25/25, 7:37 PM

  Another approach is to work towards seamless integration of human + bot collaboration:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44380745

  Basically the bot shows the human the right UI at the right time as they work.

• by kiru_io on 6/26/25, 5:59 AM

  This feels like a indirect response to what Andrej Karpathy said in his last presentation, about how it took him barely any time to create the project, but spent a few days to figure out how to deploy the project.

• by owebmaster on 6/25/25, 8:19 PM

  This will be a flop and they will buy some startup doing it much better. Anthropic (and OpenAI and Google and meta) just sucks with UX.

  Also I'm expecting some revenue share if I'm bringing users to spend money with Anthropic API.

• by ukuina on 6/26/25, 12:21 AM

  Is monetization coming soon?

  i.e., toggle a "Commercial" switch and users are charged API cost plus 10-30% with the creator getting a third of that?

  Also, the switch would disable "See, fork, and customize any artifact"

• by tempodox on 6/25/25, 7:07 PM

  This is the logical next step to code-generating LLMs, it makes perfect sense. I'm curious to see how useful it will actually be, and whether it will be worth the costs.

• by 4b11b4 on 6/26/25, 4:59 AM

  Would be cool if on a Pro plan Anthropic allowed an occasional session for an unauth'd user at at less frequent or restricted level

  It might apply to your own rate limit...

• by riskable on 6/25/25, 8:14 PM

  If only this worked with image generation! There's vastly more applications for this kind of thing in that space. They're more fun too :)

• by realty_geek on 6/26/25, 3:24 PM

  This will become powerful when artifacts have some way to call out to 3rd party APIs. Is there an AI provider that allows this?

• by Oras on 6/25/25, 8:40 PM

  Isn’t that what ChatGPT plugins tried to do? I don’t see the point.

  If I create something, others can can use with their account, what’s my value?

• by jongjong on 6/25/25, 10:47 PM

  Nice. This is the feature I've been waiting for to plug my low-code backend into.

  I was too lazy to build a whole frontend like Lovable.

• by ashu1461 on 6/26/25, 4:18 PM

  While the idea is good, can someone share the list of use cases which can be built using this please ?

• by syedumaircodes on 6/25/25, 7:21 PM

  Is this like roblox for AI? I'm new to this (HN and all) so I don't know much about it.

• by kaicianflone on 6/26/25, 4:08 PM

  At this point we're recreating handlebars website builders with AI

• by fake-name on 6/26/25, 4:37 AM

  How do you host a app with Claude. Did they release the weights?

• by muskmusk on 6/25/25, 7:30 PM

  "everything evolves until it becomes an operating system"

• by socketcluster on 6/25/25, 11:16 PM

  Could this be the feature which finally unlocks the potential of my low-code Backend as a Service? https://saasufy.com/

  Looking for people to try it out. You just need to create an account on saasufy.com (with GitHub) then paste (or attach) the README.md file from our GitHub https://github.com/Saasufy/saasufy-components/blob/main/READ... inside Claude, telling it what your Saasufy service URL is (shown on saasufy.com dashboard after deployment) then deploy directly from Claude.

  This is a good approach. Developers can interact with Claude directly while BaaS platforms like Saasufy can host the backend and data in a secure way. This is ideal because the frontend can tolerate some hallucinations/brittleness, but the backend cannot. This approach could finally support production-ready apps, not just prototypes.