DEV Community: Einorde

"Be Anything You Want" — OK, Here's How (Technically)

Einorde — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:11:02 +0000

This is a submission for the DEV April Fools Challenge

What I Built

"I Want To Be..." is a life advice generator that takes your dreams and fulfills them — literally.

Want to be rich? Change your name to Richard.
Want to be a ninja? Wear all black and move slightly too quietly. People will get the idea.
Want to be a cat? Knock something off a table and maintain eye contact. Cat energy.

It's a genie who passed the bar exam for loopholes. You asked, we delivered. Technically.

44 categories of deadpan, literally-correct life hacks — from "astronaut" to "wizard" to "left alone" — plus 24 universal fallback answers for the truly original dreamers. Every answer is technically true. None of them are helpful. All of them are stamped 100% LEGIT ADVICE.

Demo

Try it live on GitHub Pages

Type in your dream (or click a suggestion chip), hit GO, and receive your personalized life hack — complete with confetti, because every piece of advice deserves a celebration.

Features:

Instant, client-side advice — no API calls, no loading spinners (well, a fake one for dramatic effect)
"Another One" button when one piece of wisdom isn't enough
Copy & Share to spread the enlightenment
Previous Wisdom history so you can review your journey of personal growth
Fully responsive — receive life-changing advice on any device

Code

Einorde / i-want-to-be

I Want To Be...

Technically correct advice. Guaranteed results.

Try it live

Tell us your dream. We'll find the shortcut.

"I want to be rich" → "Change your name to Richard."

"I want to be a ninja" → "Wear all black and move slightly too quietly. People will get the idea."

"I want to be a cat" → "Knock something off a table and maintain eye contact. Cat energy."

What is this?

A life advice generator that takes your dreams and fulfills them in the most literally correct way possible. Think of it as a genie who passed the bar exam for loopholes.

Built for the Dev.to April Fools Challenge.

Features

44 categories of literal life hacks covering everything from "rich" to "a wizard" to "left alone"
24 universal fallback answers for when your dream is too unique even for us
Zero API calls — all advice is locally…

View on GitHub

The entire engine lives in a single answers.js file — a keyword-matching system with 44 category pools and a fallback pool. No AI, no APIs, no machine learning. Just a large switch statement's spiritual successor and a lot of deadpan energy.

// The core loop: match keywords → pick random answer
export function getAnswer(wish) {
  if (!wish || typeof wish !== 'string') return pick(FALLBACKS);
  const normalized = normalize(wish);
  const cat = findCategory(normalized);
  return cat ? pick(cat.answers) : pick(FALLBACKS);
}

How I Built It

Tech stack:

HTML + CSS + vanilla JavaScript
Zero dependencies, zero build steps
Google Fonts (Bebas Neue + DM Mono) for that editorial/brutalist aesthetic
Deployed on GitHub Pages

Design approach: The UI is intentionally designed to look like a legitimate, well-crafted advice tool — editorial typography, a newspaper-inspired layout, sharp borders, noise texture overlay, and a "THE SOLUTION" label with a red "100% LEGIT ADVICE" certification stamp. The earnest presentation makes the deadpan answers land harder.

The humor engine: Each category has a list of keywords and a pool of 4-6 answers. Input is normalized (lowercased, punctuation stripped), then matched against keywords using word-boundary regex. First category match wins. If nothing matches, you get a universal fallback like "Google it. Click the first result. You now know as much as most experts."

The whole thing started from a meme about literal problem-solving — want to live in a mansion? Apply to be the housekeeper. Want to be Elon Musk? Just change your name. We turned that energy into 200+ answers across 44 categories.

Prize Category

Community Favorite — because everyone has something they want to be, and everyone deserves technically correct but spiritually empty advice about how to get there.

This Rubber Duck Doesn't Debug — It Roasts

Einorde — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 10:05:17 +0000

This Rubber Duck Doesn't Debug — It Roasts

This is a submission for the DEV April Fools Challenge

What I Built

Rubber Roast — a VS Code extension that turns your rubber duck into a judgmental code critic.

We're all vibe coding now. You prompt, the AI writes, you hit accept, and ship. But AI-generated code still leaves behind catch(e) {}, hardcoded secrets, 80-line functions, and enough console.log statements to fill a novel. And when you're vibing, you're not reading every line.

So I built a duck that does.

Inspired by CS50's rubber duck debugging — except this duck doesn't just listen. It reads your code, finds the smells, and roasts you for them.

Every time you save a file, Rubber Roast scans for code smells and drops sarcastic inline annotations right next to the offending lines:

Hardcoded an API key? "This credential has the security of a screen door on a submarine."
Left a catch(e) {}? "Pokemon exception handling: gotta catch 'em all... and ignore 'em all."
47 console.log statements? "This is not a program, it's a console.log delivery system."
TODO comment from 3 years ago? "This TODO has been through 47 sprints and 3 project managers."

Each roast is color-coded by severity — green for mild, yellow for medium, pink for spicy — with a duck emoji so you know exactly who's judging you.

Two roast engines included:

Template mode (free) — hundreds of savage one-liners, zero API calls
LM mode — uses VS Code's Language Model API so your AI copilot can roast you too

It catches 7 types of code smells via built-in regex (TODO/HACK, empty catch, commented-out code, console.log spam, hardcoded secrets, long functions, repeated magic strings) — plus everything your linters and language servers already flag (type errors, unused variables, deprecated APIs, lint violations, and more).

Behind the jokes, it's a real code smell detector. You just happen to learn about your mistakes while laughing at them.

Demo

Try it yourself: Rubber Roast on VS Code Marketplace

Code

Einorde / rubber-roast

Rubber Roast

Your rubber duck finally has opinions — detect code smells, get roasted with sarcastic inline annotations.

Inspired by CS50's rubber duck debugging, but this duck fights back.

Features

Inline roast comments — sarcastic one-liners appear as italic annotations next to problematic lines, color-coded by severity (mild/medium/spicy)
Two roast engines — free template-based roasts or AI-generated roasts via the VS Code Language Model API (requires Copilot or similar)
Auto-roast — triggers on file save, file switch, and diagnostic updates

What Gets Roasted

Rubber Roast detects code smells from two sources:

Built-in regex rules — these work out of the box, no linter required:

Smell	What it catches
TODO/HACK comments	`// TODO`, `// FIXME`, `// HACK`, `// WORKAROUND`, etc.
Empty catch blocks	`catch(e) {}` — swallowing errors silently
Commented-out code	3+ consecutive lines of commented code
Hardcoded secrets	API keys, tokens, and high-entropy strings in

…

View on GitHub

How I Built It

TypeScript — the entire extension, zero runtime dependencies
VS Code Extension API — inline text decorations, diagnostic listeners, commands, status bar
Regex-based scanner — custom pattern matching with line classification (code vs comment vs string) to avoid false positives
Diagnostic scanner — hooks into existing language servers (ESLint, TypeScript, Pyright, Ruff, rust-analyzer, etc.) and classifies their output into roastable categories
VS Code Language Model API — optional AI-powered roasts via Copilot with template fallback
Shannon entropy detection — for catching hardcoded secrets that don't match known prefixes
esbuild — bundling everything into a single file

No external APIs. No telemetry. Just pure, locally-executed judgment.

Prize Category

Open to any category the judges see fit — this duck doesn't pick favorites, it just roasts everyone equally.