About

A job well done is often a complete waste of time.

In the old days people like me would get an idea, buy a domain name, then realize that building it was too hard and expensive.

Now you can actually afford to build the thing. But it turns out, it’s still expensive and difficult to make the thing an actual Thing.

I bought the domain name, assbrain.com, for no reason other than I thought it was a good one and I couldn’t believe it was available for $12.99. I thought I could use it to brand a line of brain health supplements. Or a beer. Or a game. Assbrain guitars was another idea, importing them from China with an Assbrain logo on the headstock. A sure winner for the rebellious teen market.

Too many ideas. Most of them won’t work.

So assbrain became a public scrapyard for vibe-coded projects that died — apps people built fast with AI tools and then quietly abandoned. The kind of thing that gets three excited tweets at launch and then never mentioned again. And the app you couldn’t even get your wife to try.

The idea is simple: instead of letting these things vanish, we park them in the scrapyard just in case there’s something worth salvaging.

For those of you who, like me, don’t actually know anything about the code, the logo is ass?.brain — with a ?. in the middle. That’s optional chaining, a piece of JavaScript syntax that means “try to access this thing, but if it doesn’t exist, don’t crash.”

It seemed like an accidentally perfect metaphor for a site full of things that tried to exist and didn’t quite make it.

(My lawyer asked me to clarify that “ass” refers to a donkey. A stubborn, half-brained donkey who keeps building things. We are professionals here, who eschew profanity.)

If you’ve got a dead project stinking up your hard drive, submit it here.

thanks, Jeff Rabkin