Refetch

Refetch is an open-source alternative to Hacker News, built by Eldad Fux, the CEO and founder of Appwrite. Fux famously launched it after roughly 15 hours of net work spread across three weekends, claiming he wrote "zero lines of code himself" — instead directing Cursor and Appwrite's backend platform to assemble the entire application.

The project went viral on X and Hacker News as a high-profile demonstration of vibe coding by a serious infrastructure founder. Fux shared the story in a widely-discussed tweet (x.com/eldadfux/status/1963240910835065000), which was followed by an extensive Hacker News thread (news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45116521) where commenters dissected the codebase, the workflow, and the practicality of "no human-written code" as a methodology. Appwrite later wrote up the project on their blog as one of their canonical examples of vibe coding in practice.

Functionally, Refetch mirrors the core Hacker News experience: a community-curated feed of links and discussion, with submission, voting, and threaded comments. The differentiator is that the entire stack is open source and built on top of Appwrite, so it doubles as a reference implementation for developers who want to see what a real, production-shaped social app looks like when it is generated by an AI coding agent against a managed backend.

The build itself is part of the story. By using Appwrite for authentication, databases, and serverless functions, Fux removed most of the infrastructure surface area that would normally slow down a weekend project, leaving only the application logic for Cursor to handle. The result is a working, deployable Hacker News clone that Fux uses to argue a broader thesis: when the backend is a platform and the frontend is generated by AI, a single founder can credibly ship category-defining apps in dozens of hours rather than months.

Refetch is open source and welcomes community contributions on GitHub.