Varchive is an experiment in AI eating its own dogfood: a directory for AI-assisted products, itself assisted by AI.
Varchive (‘vibe’ + ‘archive’) is built and maintained with a heavy reliance on Cursor and a bit of love from Codex too. Cloudflare, Resend, and Vercel provide key parts of Varchive’s infrastructure.
Roughly 80% of the design and branding you see was handcrafted by Cameron Moll in Figma & Illustrator and the remaining 20% by Cursor and Unicorn Studio. Conversely, roughly 80% of the code was created with Cursor and Codex—including an extraordinary amount of prompting and correcting mistakes—and the rest handcrafted by Adam Spooner and Cameron Moll.
We’ve spent a few hundred hours (yes, that many) prompting and refining what Cursor has written, yet flaws remain. Rather than trying to eliminate these entirely we offer Varchive as a model of what signficant AI assistance can and cannot do.
Varchive’s success or failure is a script still being written. You can play a part in writing the unwritten narrative by populating Varchive with useful, beautiful products that span the full spectrum of AI assistance—from ‘just enough’ to ‘significant.’
Reach out with questions and suggestions. We’d love to hear from you.
Declaration* work in progress
- We acknowledge “AI-assisted” means different things to different people and takes different forms: “AI-assisted development,” “agentic coding,” “vibe coding,” “vibe designing”, and so on.
- In the best case, AI-assisted creation refers to using AI carefully and methodically at the hands of a skilled engineer and/or designer with checkpoints at every step of the process. In the worst case, it refers to carelessly deferring most of the generative output to AI with little understanding of the quality of what has been produced.
- We’ve chosen not to discriminate between the two extremes just mentioned, welcoming submissions of any kind, while maintaining a high bar for the ones we approve.
- Extreme views for or against AI-assisted creation are not likely to move the industry forward in a healthy manner. We favor a cautiously optimistic view and encourage others to adopt a similar view.
- Security is paramount. Currently, AI-assisted creation often carries an elevated risk of vulnerability and therefore must be subjected to the same or greater levels of care, caution, and scrutiny at as traditional development methods. For this reason Varchive stores only email addresses beyond what’s publicly visible in each product. We cannot guarantee the security of products featured on this site, so user beware.
- There is no replacement for the human mind, heart, and gut. In this new era of AI-assisted creation, human creativity, ingenuity, and craft will only become more important, not less.
If your work is featured on Varchive grab one of our badges and wear it proudly on your site. Help us spread the word!
CoType’s Aeonik Pro is used throughout the site for all text and headings. Talbot Type’s Kelso is featured in the word logo at the top of this page. Credit to Justin Windle for the text effect beneath this logo.