Why some demos are live and some are videos

Every kit on Robot Academy has a demo, and we're strict about what counts as one. Screenshots don't. Neither does a description of what it would do. The demo has to be the kit's real output.

Live demos

For anything that runs in a browser (games, small apps, PWAs, dashboards) the demo is the actual HTML file the builder prompt produced, hosted by us. You play the game. You add an invoice. You install the PWA to your phone's home screen if you want.

Two details matter here. First, demos are untrusted code written by creators, so they're served from a sandboxed page: the browser gives them an opaque origin, and they can't touch your cookies, your account or anything else on the site. Second, we inject the Built with … · Robot Academy badge at serve time, so it can't be stripped from the file. When someone shares a demo link, the badge brings people back to the kit, and the creator gets the sale.

Video demos

A Slack bot runs inside Slack. A Mac menu bar app runs on a Mac. A Chrome extension needs Chrome. None of those can be embedded in a web page, so the demo is a short screen recording of the kit's real output, with the badge burned into the video. Two minutes is plenty: we'd rather see one complete run than ten features.

Creators paste a normal YouTube, Vimeo, Loom or Cloudflare Stream link and we embed from an allow-list of players. Nothing else gets through.

What the review checks

Whichever type it is, review means a human runs the builder prompt in a clean agent session and compares the result to the demo. Not "is it good" but "is it this". A demo that shows features the prompt doesn't reliably produce is the most common reason a kit gets notes instead of a yes.

Your own demo

When you buy a kit and publish your build (step 5 of every lesson), you get a demo page of your own, with your name on the badge. Same sandbox, same rules. It's the easiest way to show someone what you made without sending them a file.