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Andrew Van DykeAndrew Van Dyke
Meme Generator app with a description input and generate buttonLive demo

2023 · Development

AI Meme Generator

Built on DALL·E 2 in 2023 and still running today on gpt-image-1 — a small app that's survived every OpenAI image-model deprecation since.

  • JavaScript
  • OpenAI API
  • Vercel
Live demo Source

Problem

The 2023 wave of AI image APIs made "text in, image out" apps trivial to start and easy to abandon. The real work turned out to be keeping one alive while the underlying models were deprecated out from under it.

What I built

A meme generator: describe the meme you want, and the app orchestrates async calls to OpenAI's image-generation API and returns the result. Originally built on DALL·E 2; when OpenAI retired that model in 2026, the app was migrated to gpt-image-1 with base64 delivery.

Outcome

Deliberately dumb, deliberately durable. Three years and multiple model migrations later it still works — which is more than most hackathon-era AI apps can say.