Just 5 Words
An AI story + image in seconds
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Dragos Roua

Just 5 Words - An AI story + image in seconds

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Hey PH! I'm Dragos, solo dev with 35+ years of coding. Just 5 Words came from a simple question: what's the minimum input to spark something creative? Five words — enough to set a direction, few enough to surprise you. Pick 5 words, get a unique story and illustration via Apple Intelligence, on-device. No API calls, no cloud, all on device. The same 5 words never produce the same result twice. Kids love it, adults get hooked trying weird combos. Would love to hear what you come up with!

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Dragos Roua
Maker
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The backstory: I've been coding since 1987 and building iOS apps as a solo dev for the last 15 years. Just 5 Words started as an experiment — I wanted to see how little input you need to create something genuinely surprising. A few things I'm proud of: → Everything runs on-device via Apple Intelligence. Your words never leave your phone. → There's no login, no hidden API calls. You just open it and play. → I've tested this with my kid and with adults — both get obsessed, for completely different reasons. Kids go wild with random combos. Adults try to "hack" it with carefully curated words. Both approaches produce something unexpected. Try these combos and tell me what you get: 🔹 moon / volcano / thunder / cake / wolf 🔹 robot / ocean / whisper / fire / dragon I read every comment — hit me with your best 5 words!
Vlad Stan
Good to see you shipping Dragos! This is something I wish existed when my kids were young. They were always asking for new stories
Dragos Roua
Maker

@vladstan Thanks mate, appreciate your support. And glad to see you shipping as well. Best of luck!

Vikas

Hey Dragos, Love the clean design here! The way you handled the UI is super smooth. I’m also launching my first solo project today (ToolXray), so I know the grind. Upvoted and supporting you! Best of Luck!

Dragos Roua
Maker

@toolxray Cool project, man, best of luck to you too!

Mihai Dragomirescu

congrats man! yey, what a time to be alive :) @vladstan and @dragos_roua1 let's reconnect and have a show and tell session where we can show off what we are building

Dragos Roua
Maker

@vladstan  @respira yeah, mate by all means, there are many catchups that are long overdue in my agenda and this one is top 5! Thanks for the support, appreciate it!

Will Carter

The on-device angle is what makes this feel genuinely different — most "AI creative" apps are just a thin wrapper around an API call, so having it run locally via Apple Intelligence changes the trust dynamic entirely. I'm curious how the unpredictability holds up over time though; do the same 5 words start converging toward similar outputs after a while, or does it stay genuinely varied? Could see this becoming a fun little ritual — same 5 words, different day, see what you get.

Dragos Roua
Maker

@wcrtr that’s exactly what pulled me in, the fact that you can get decent results with on device models. That being said, it’s a struggle to make it work, mostly because this is new and relatively opaque / undocumented (like all things Apple) and it took a lot of iterations to bring it to the current level. Re: eventual convergence for the stories, in theory this may happen, but I try to mitigate it at the harness / code level, I mix types of prompts and do extra passes, etc. one word about Korean and Japanese: the initial feedback is very good, but I had to pick a specific vocabulary subset for those languages - for English, the BIP39 set is good enough. Thanks for your support, btw, appreciated!