One experienced developer with extensive anthropology experience, probably a PhD, working with Claude Code and Claude Cowork, full time over a two month period. Or somebody with limited dev experience over four months.
Anyway, sad that all the first comments were complaints… what a wonderful project!
This is a strawman.
The original point was "the economics ... have changed"
I read this as, it's much easier to spin up a project of this scale even non-monetized, and more people are able and willing to do so.
(As for whether it's a good thing, I'm conflicted. It's cool to see more stuff like this, but if it crowds out the more intense passion projects, we lose something too.)
To elucidate for this particular example, before AI agents existed, projects with this level of data and depth might've needed to be monetized in order to justify the resources to bring it to life.
Now that the barrier is much lower, the creator didn't mind spinning up and providing it with no monetization (e.g. no ads).
Yes, this was exactly what I meant in OP.
It's, of course, not even loading right now, which gets at the other problem with this "economics" framing. The biggest expense in running an actually popular website isn't creating and publishing the first version. It's paying for the infrastructure to serve a meaningful proportion of the entire world. This is clearly not a static site. It's presumably doing some computation on the server side to draw from all these hundreds of different probability distributions that works well enough for a few dozen simultaneous requests but not thousands. There might even be some kind of perverse anti-economics going on here where thought devoted upfront to efficiency and architecture might have made this far more scalable, but the "publish the first thing that passes a basic sanity check" vibe-slop ethos doesn't usually get you that.
Yeah it is imperfect and was maybe not ready for the HN front page hug. But I say, bravo to the person or team!
Do you see the problem here?