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Posted by sungam 9/7/2025

Show HN: I'm a dermatologist and I vibe coded a skin cancer learning app(molecheck.info)
Coded using Gemini Pro 2.5 (free version) in about 2-3 hours.

Single file including all html/js/css, Vanilla JS, no backend, scores persisted with localStorage.

Deployed using ubuntu/apache2/python/flask on a £5 Digital Ocean server (but could have been hosted on a static hosting provider as it's just a single page with no backend).

Images / metadata stored in an AWS S3 bucket.

429 points | 259 commentspage 5
johannes_ne 9/7/2025|
I made a quite similar app 7 years ago. https://melanoma.jenevoldsen.com/

May have been in the training data.

sungam 9/7/2025|
That's great! I used the publicly available images from the ISIC challenge dataset which are CC licensed.
johannes_ne 9/8/2025||
Sorry, my point was not that you had taken the idea or the images (I also used ISIC).

I just considered that the language model (Gemini) may have been especially effective at coding this specific app idea, sine my old app (which is on GitHub) was probably in the data it was trained on.

AbstractH24 9/8/2025||
I just opened this up to see if HN was supportive or hyper-critical of vibe coding in medicine.

Since this isn't invasive I'm glad to see its the supportive option.

retinaros 9/7/2025||
Ok everything is cancer. Thanks for nothing now I wont sleep
cindyllm 9/7/2025|
[dead]
derbOac 9/7/2025||
Cool but it seems like it would get more difficult with more non-cancerous but medically concerning lesions (eg due to infectious disease).
sungam 9/8/2025|
This is true - there are more than 2000 different conditions in dermatology but the most important ones to recognise are skin cancers
derbOac 9/8/2025||
My concern (?) is the task is unrealistically easy without more varieties of lesions to distinguish from cancer.
orliesaurus 9/7/2025||
What did you use to build this? Where did you deploy?
sungam 9/7/2025|
Coded using Gemini Pro 2.5 (free version) in about 2-3 hours.

Single file including all html/js/css, Vanilla JS, no backend, scores persisted with localStorage.

Deployed using ubuntu/apache2/python/flask on a £5 Digital Ocean server (but could have been hosted on a static hosting provider as it's just a single page with no backend).

Images / metadata stored in an AWS S3 bucket.

aegypti 9/7/2025||
Basal Cell Carcinoma is very gross!

Think a set number of questions to start with would be good. Not sure if there’s an end point, I drifted off after ~20 or so

sungam 9/7/2025|
Good idea will implement this is a future version
krunger 9/7/2025||
No reason why it couldn't have been done in reverse, have a programmer code it while using AI to understand skin cancer.
sungam 9/7/2025||
There are lots of apps that do this. It's (relatively) easy to get AI to perform at the same level of a dermatologist but liability/risk management/regulation is much harder to solve
ajkjk 9/7/2025||
Well.. there is somewhat more on the line if it's wrong that way.
yieldcrv 9/7/2025||
It’s great that more people can express themselves

For personal fulfillment, humanities evolutionary fitness, and for commercial purposes

akeck 9/8/2025||
How do you tell the difference between benign Seborrheic Keratosis and melanoma? Some of them are very similar!
ks2048 9/8/2025|
The "About" link leads to "Oops! The page you were looking for doesn't exist.".
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