The Megillah App Sprint, Purim 2026
How a community of shluchim shipped a synchronized Megillah reading app in about ten days.
On this page
The chat's collective shipping moment. In about ten days in the run-up to Purim 2026, the community built a Megillah App, synchronized Megillah reading with a live broadcast mode, with feature requests, bug reports, and design critique flowing live from the chat. The effort was later featured in COLlive under the headline "700 Shluchim Built a Megillah App in 10 Days." See the Toolbox for the app itself.
Timeline
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Feb 13 | The group splits: an AIFS Builders subgroup is created so feature debates do not crowd the main channel. |
| Feb 20 | A first version ships. A suggestion to make the grogger a phone-shake-triggered button, rather than a Haman-name highlighter, is accepted. |
| Feb 21 | Live broadcast mode is added, with password-protected sessions. |
| Feb 22 | Six languages, a pause button, Haman highlighting, a Chabad.org link, a kids version with images, and QR codes for sharing. A "Shluchim Vibe Coding Sprint" kicks off with prompts for several AI coding tools, and the repo opens on GitHub. |
| Feb 22 (eve) | Live-broadcast latency reports arrive from shluchim testing in their shuls; the builder iterates. |
| Mar 3 | Post-Purim debrief and a shared post-mortem from an adjacent project. |
Feature requests, granted versus punted
| Feature | Status |
|---|---|
| Multiple language toggles | Shipped |
| Transliteration | Shipped |
| Pause and resume controls | Shipped |
| Settings panel and font controls | Shipped |
| Haman name highlighting and sound effects | Shipped |
| Shake-to-grogger | Shipped |
| Kids mode with images | Shipped |
| Auto-scroll via voice recognition | Not shipped: "the tech is not ripe enough, too much time delay." |
| Do Not Disturb auto-trigger | Not shipped: websites cannot trigger OS-level DND; would need a native app. |
| Settings sync between session participants | Pending, promised as a fix. |
| Kehos translation | Pending Chabad.org approval. |
| Sound effects triggered by voice recognition | Not shipped: same root cause as auto-scroll. |
What broke, and got fixed
- Live broadcast latency on slow networks, diagnosed across multiple test threads and iterated to an acceptable state in the same week.
- Hebrew font choices, criticized and then corrected.
- Centering for auto-scrolling, adjusted from top-pinned to center-pinned mid-sprint.
- Translation register. An archaic 1917 public-domain translation felt wrong; a Metzudah-based text was the interim swap.
Why this thread matters
- Proof of concept for community-built shliach software. Hundreds of shluchim deployed the same app from one maintainer's repo.
- Single-maintainer bus factor. Almost all merging was done by one person. Whether that is sustainable is unclear; the follow-up AIFS Builders group is the collective answer.
- A template for future sprints. The sprint set a cadence: the community proposes, one builder ships, and iteration happens in hours rather than weeks.
- A live demonstration of vibe coding done correctly: no logins, no payments, and no database of user PII, just real-time synchronization of public Torah text.
Adjacent shipping in the same window
- An image-heavy Esther reader at learningtanach.org drew roughly 7,000 visitors in two days despite launch bugs; its transparent post-mortem became its own artifact.
- An alternative reader at ai770.com.
- Sound-effects, twelve-pesukim, and grogger entries in a community tool suite. See the Toolbox.
The COLlive moment
The debrief was captured publicly. As one participant reported on the post-Purim reaction:
"People were telling me Chabad are geniuses and leaders. People loved it."
The COLlive write-up ran as "700 Shluchim Built a Megillah App in 10 Days."
Related
- Vibe Coding
- The Kinus Hashluchim AI Day
- Toolbox, for the Megillah App and the community tool suite.