GeneGuessr
a daily biology web puzzle
Details
- External ID
- 46363870
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- GeneGuessr
- Website domain
- brinedew.bio
- Launched
- Dec. 23, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 88
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8854961832061069
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I made a web game inspired by Geoguessr and Wordle, where you get shown a 3D model of a random human protein each day, and you have to triangulate its gene name using similarity clues.My background is in wet lab molecular biology and I intend this game to be engaging mostly to other biologists. But if you're outside the field, I'm interested to know if you can still solve it with browser use LLMs, and if you learned something interesting doing so. Let me know what you think.I made it with Claude over the last 2 months. My coding experience is limited to basic python data analysis and figure making. I've seen people online asking, "Now that we have coding AI, why isn't there a deluge of awesome AI-generated apps made by non-coders?" - if this sounds like you, check out Geneguessr to understand what a web app by a non-coder looks like.I might write more about the process if there's a demand, but what really unlocked the project for Claude was Linear MCP, where it could put each individual issue on a shared Kanban board. This, and Playwright MCP for testing on live site, were the two workhorses that got me through this. For bugs Claude couldn't one-shot, Linear was great for consolidating issue information so that I could dump it into ChatGPT Codex - it would usually think for like half an hour, output very confusing explanations, but the bug was gone.Game is free, no log-in required, sorry if you run into any mobile bugs - didn't test it much there.https://geneguessr.brinedew.bio/
Enrichment
- Theme
- indie hacker passion projects
- Vertical
- Education
- Function
- —
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- daily biology puzzle game
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes The game loads public PDB structure files into an open-source 3D molecular viewer (such as Mol* or 3Dmol.js) and checks user guesses against a static daily list.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Claude Chrome (LLM for explaining guesses), BLAST (for sequence comparison)
Concerns raised: Too difficult for people without protein/molecular biology background, Hints not very helpful for experienced biologists, Gene name recognition challenging, especially recent genes, Annotations not clean enough (designed for 'at all' vs 'primary' features), Runtime error on menu navigation
Feature requests: Show primary amino acid sequence, Auto-reveal confirmed features when guessing proteins, Filter/browse proteins by class or cell type, Search by gene function, Start with popular gene names for easier difficulty
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 85 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #11 of 86 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 55 days after the earliest competitor.
- Phage Explorer · hn · 2026-01-31 · 127 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Daily word puzzle game based on polysemy · hn · 2026-05-21 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Agentic Data Analysis with Claude Code · hn · 2026-03-10 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Operon · hn · 2025-12-29 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- A Daily Bible Game · hn · 2026-01-08 · 49 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Inflexa · hn · 2026-07-21 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- I mapped 8.5M research papers into an interactive atlas · hn · 2026-07-09 · 85 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Emergent · hn · 2026-02-08 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.41
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.