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Basit Jumani says he stopped promoting Halcyon, the photo-editing website he had built with AI tools, after criticism made him feel embarrassed. When he checked back, he says visitors were still arriving. His account is a small, personal story—not proof that websites reliably grow without promotion—but it captures the gap between public reaction and whether a project is useful to someone.
What Halcyon does
Halcyon is a photo-editing and color-grading website. In his October 1, 2026, DEV Community account, Jumani describes it as offering more than 30 presets. The current site presents a free, no-login browser workflow: upload a photo, choose a look, and download the result. It says processing happens in the browser; the current description may not match every detail of the version Jumani first built. Halcyon’s current site
How Jumani built it—and why he felt exposed
Jumani says he became interested in “vibe coding,” tried several platforms, and eventually chose Lovable for Halcyon. He reports using free plans while prompting and building, and says he began learning HTML and CSS along the way. This was not a project built without AI assistance: the AI-built nature of the site became part of the criticism he received.
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What he found when he returned
Jumani reports that Halcyon had passed 100 visitors after he promoted it, and later passed 200 while he was inactive. He says people were still visiting and using the site. These are his reported analytics figures: the account does not define the measurement, provide an analytics export, or establish that the counts represent unique people, sessions, or returning users.
He also says Google and ChatGPT began recommending Halcyon. That claim, including when and how often recommendations appeared, is not independently established in the sources available here. The useful distinction is between what Jumani says he observed and what can be verified: the visitor counts and recommendations belong to his account, not an audited traffic record.
The lesson is about attention, not automatic growth
Jumani’s reflection is that he had given critics’ opinions more weight than signs that people were finding and using his project. He describes the realization simply: “The website was still alive.” He also writes, “It just had to be useful enough for someone to visit, use and come back.”
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Why the story resonates with people learning to build
Halcyon’s story is not a claim that AI tools replace learning to code. Jumani says he used Lovable and started learning HTML and CSS while developing the site. The two things happened together: AI helped him build, and the project gave him a reason to learn more about the web.
For a new builder, that distinction matters. A project can be imperfect, visibly assisted by a tool, and still be useful to someone. Feedback can help improve it, while ridicule can be emotionally loud without being a reliable measure of demand. In Jumani’s case, the reported visitors gave him a reason to look again; they do not settle what Halcyon’s future will be.
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