Indigene

Indigene is a progressive web app that answers a deceptively simple question: which native plants belong where you are standing? Give it your location and it recommends the wildflowers, grasses, and shrubs that actually feed your local wildlife — complete with eco-scores, plant photography, and the ecological reasoning behind each pick.

The project comes from olivierlacan, the developer best known as the author of Keep a Changelog. It is also one of the most transparently vibe-coded projects we have featured: in his Show HN launch post Lacan wrote, "Candidly, as many of us have, I've also leaned heavily on LLMs (mostly Claude here) to bring this to life." The app even ships a public ledger at indigene.app/llm documenting exactly what building with an LLM cost — 139 work sessions with Claude, 8.5 billion tokens read, 23 million written, roughly $5,151 at API rates (figures as of October 12, 2026) — and every pull request carries an LLM usage warning.

Under the hood, Indigene keeps things deliberately simple: vanilla TypeScript on the DOM with no framework, backed by a thin Hanami 2 JSON API. As a PWA it works offline, requires no account, and tracks nothing — everything stays in the browser.

Status: the open-source repository (MIT) holds 980 commits and is still being worked on, with community discussion active as of October 15, 2026. Eight stars so far — a young project with an unusually honest build story.