Can I vibecode Letterboxd?

NOT REALLY · don't bother

price $1.58/moyou'd save $18.96/yrbuild time one sittingcategory 🐦 social mediareplaced by 0 people

The logging half of Letterboxd is trivial: a table of films, a date, a rating, a note. The half people actually open the app for is everyone else, friends' four-star shrugs, review pages with thousands of jokes, lists that function as film school syllabi, and the year-end stats that only mean something because they are comparable. A one-shot build gives you a private diary with no one in it, and you will still need TMDB to get posters and metadata that do not look broken. If you genuinely only want a watch log, build it and enjoy the speed. If you want the film internet, you are not building the film internet this weekend.

the prompt

Build a local-first personal film diary web app. Single user, no accounts, no cloud, no telemetry.

Stack, non-negotiable:
- Next.js 15 with the App Router, TypeScript, Tailwind.
- SQLite via better-sqlite3, one file at ./data/diary.db, schema created on first run.
- No auth, no external services except TMDB for metadata.

Secrets:
- .env.local with TMDB_API_KEY. Commit .env.example only. Fail loudly with a readable message if the key is missing.

Data model:
- films: tmdb_id (primary key), title, year, director, runtime, poster_path, overview, cached_at.
- entries: id, tmdb_id, watched_on (date), rating (0.5 to 5 in half steps, nullable), review (text, nullable), rewatch (boolean), liked (boolean), created_at.
- watchlist: tmdb_id, added_at, note.

Features in scope:
- Search box that hits TMDB search, shows posters and years, one click to log. Cache the film row locally so the app works offline for anything already logged.
- Log form: watched date defaults to today, half-star rating widget, review textarea, rewatch and liked toggles.
- Diary view grouped by month, newest first, poster grid plus compact list toggle.
- Film detail page: local metadata, every entry you have for it, rating history.
- Watchlist page with add from search and a one-click promote to a diary entry.
- Stats page: films per year and per month, rating distribution histogram, top directors by count, total runtime in hours and days, longest streak of consecutive days with a log.
- CSV import that accepts the Letterboxd export format (Name, Year, Watched Date, Rating, Review, Rewatch) and matches to TMDB with a manual disambiguation queue for anything ambiguous.
- CSV export of everything.

Explicitly out of scope: any social features, follower graphs, comments, aggregate ratings, streaming availability, mobile apps, push notifications, deployment config.

Deliver: working app, README with setup in under five commands, seed script that inserts three sample entries so the stats page is not empty on first load.

$ open in your agent (prompt prefilled, you press enter) or copy it raw · this prompt is generated from the build plan · improve it via PR

why people still pay

The paid tier is mostly a tip jar with benefits: no ads, better stats, watchlist filtering by streaming service, and a few power-user views. People pay because the free product already earned a place in their routine and the annual price is roughly a cinema ticket. The value being purchased is not features, it is continued access to a place where their taste is legible to other people who care about films. A private diary cannot sell that at any price.

what you lose

xEvery other human: friends' ratings, popular reviews, comment threads

xCurated and community lists, which are most of the discovery value

xAggregate ratings and the histogram that tells you if a film is divisive or just bad

xMobile apps, offline logging, share cards, streaming availability data

xImporting your existing history back out of anything without a CSV wrangle

prior art · use these instead of building, if you'd rather

Nothing worth pointing at. That's why the prompt exists.

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