AuraWatch — a vibe finder for movies, TV, anime, and songs. Pick a format, genres, optional “like these titles,” and a short mood note; it returns a few grounded picks with posters and where-to-watch / listen links.
Devlog 8 — Group Vibe Rooms
Biggest thing: you can now match with a group, not just yourself.
Flow: host signs in → shares /room/... → guests only need a nickname +
vibe (no account). Host hits Calculate. We merge everyone’s
notes/likes, run one recommend, and save the same cards for everyone
— including where to watch / play. Rooms self-destruct after 24 hours.
The annoying bit: at first anyone could hit Calculate and burn a Gemini
call for the whole room. Calculate is host-only now, and the host’s
filters (region, rating, decade) actually stick on the room instead of
getting dropped.
Also this round:
Try it: aurawatch.org/room
Devlog 7 — One hour, one login button
Swapped the Email field for Username on sign-in (it quietly becomes [email protected] behind the scenes), and the Save to Playlist modal finally opens in the middle of the screen instead of hiding in the bottom-left corner. Then Discord OAuth ate the rest of the hour. “Invalid OAuth2 redirect_uri” three separate times: first the wrong callback path, then www.aurawatch.org vs aurawatch.org — which Discord treats as two completely unrelated sites. Fixed both, felt great, got a 500 instead: my sessions table has an id column my schema file never knew about, so every login worked perfectly right up until it tried to remember you. One missing column, one hour.
Visual: Login page and after login
Devlog 6 — Tabletop, Amazon, and no more blank panes
Board Games is actually live now. Gemini still names the titles; BoardGameGeek’s XML API does the rest (box art, year, player count). The painful bit: /thing often answers 202 (“come back later”), and search loves burying the real game under fan expansions, so Cards Against Humanity was coming back with no cover. We retry that queue, batch the IDs, and rank exact titles first.
Books were doing the same disappearing-cover trick. Open Library is fine until it isn’t, so covers now fall through to Google Books, then Jikan / AniList for manga. While those images load, cards show a brutalist skeleton instead of a dead square, then fade in.
Games, board games, and books/manga all got a Buy on Amazon button. It follows the region you picked (US .com, UK/Ireland .co.uk, Italy .it, most of Europe .de) so you’re not dumped on the wrong storefront. Affiliate tags are baked in, with the Associates disclaimer in the footer.
Copy Link used to fail silently. It now pops a terminal toast: [SYSTEM]: Link copied to clipboard successfully. Same deal on playlist share. And if a vibe query returns nothing or the request dies, Match doesn’t sit there empty — you get [ERROR]: No vibes match this exact query. plus Surprise Me or Reset Filters.
Visual: board-game → Amazon button on a book/tabletop card → Mobile UI
I just pushed a pretty massive update to AuraWatch. Honestly, the old UI was getting way too cluttered, and the backend routing had some really annoying edge cases I needed to iron out.
Here is what changed:
The routing is finally feeling exact. Let me know what you think of the new stuff!
Devlog 4# — Posters that survive rate limits
Covers were dying when TMDB/iTunes rate-limited us — blank squares and broken-image icons on match cards. Now a failed or missing poster falls back to a sleek gradient with the title’s initials. Also shipped a lightweight cache (server TTL for TMDB/iTunes + localStorage for like-title search) so repeat queries stop burning the quota. Friction: the CDN images weren’t the problem — we were refetching the same poster paths every match and hitting the wall.
AuraWatch — song search that actually finds niche tracks (+ a tiny secret)
Song search used to fail hard on queries like “all i want is you rebz” — Apple only returns U2/LAROI covers, never Rebzyyx. Fixed it by detecting title + artist-fragment queries, resolving the artist via Deezer/MusicBrainz, then pulling the real track from their iTunes catalog so the niche hit ranks first. Also shipped Sur Ronster easter eggs: Songs + “Surron”/“Talaria” → only On My Own by Kyle The Hooligan; Movies/TV + “surronster vibe” → his newest YouTube uploads in-app (no Zflix CTA). Friction: iTunes artist search for rebz only finds random “Rebz” artists — prefix expansion was the missing link.
Visual to attach: Then notes surronster vibe → latest Sur Ronster video cards with Play video.
Fixed the buttons and added STREAM RENT BUY categories
Added a dual-path recommender: vibe prompt / genres go through Gemini, and “like this title” goes through TMDB similar — then both get posters + region watch providers.
The painful part wasn’t the AI. It was Gemini’s JSON. Trailing commas, curly quotes, markdown fences mid-object. Spent a chunk writing a repair/parse loop and bumping maxOutputTokens to 3072 after it kept truncating mid-array.
Also shipped songs mode (Gemini → iTunes covers/listen links) and a local catalog fallback so the app still picks something when keys die. UI has two themes now (minimal / desktop)
