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tptacek 6 hours ago [-]
Things I've built in the last month or so:
* A personal music player for Apple Music with an embedded agent loop, so I can say things like "I'm going to work in the wood shop, play woodworking-appropriate music and keep the playlist full and non-repeating indefinitely".
* A calorie/protein tracker that takes 1-liner summaries of meals, resolves them to macros with GPT5 calls, and tracks them in SQLite.
* A macOS menubar combined Apple TV and Roku TV remote control.
* A calculator front-end to SageMath that renders Latex math notation and has point/click shortcut affordances for linear algebra and MVC.
* A "self driving wiki" macOS desktop llmwiki that imports and digests PDFs.
* A menubar tracker for the little temperature sensors I have scattered all throughout the house so I can click my menubar and instantly see the temps in the different rooms of the house.
* A layout tool for designing picture frames to get cut lists and rabbet depths and stuff.
That's just the desktop stuff. These applications are generally better than what I'd get from the App Store. The calorie tracker is one of the better-designed apps on my dock.
I feel like I'm not doing this enough yet, it hasn't fully sunk in, and I'm going to be building a lot more stuff when it does sink in. I haven't yet gotten to the point of writing my own note-taking application (still Bear.app for that), but how long can that last?
jedbrooke 4 hours ago [-]
> A personal music player for Apple Music with an embedded agent loop, so I can say things like "I'm going to work in the wood shop, play woodworking-appropriate music and keep the playlist full and non-repeating indefinitely".
how is AI (or a human for that matter) supposed to know what “woodworking-appropriate music is”? I had the same thoughts when spotify released their “let AI make a playlist for you”. Like, we already have recommender algorithms, why do we need to get a LLM involved?Maybe I just don’t understand woodworking and the connection it has to music though (I’m also the kind of person who’s had the same playlist for like the past 4 years)
But, I do want to say, personal app built just the way you like it, an alternative front end to a closed source ecosystem even, is super cool, and has been one of the things that AI coding has really enabled.
I’ve done a few project where I just give claude a har file and tell it to reverse engineer a cli from some web interface and it’s so powerful to be able to do stuff like that now
eviks 2 hours ago [-]
> how is AI (or a human for that matter) supposed to know what “woodworking-appropriate music is”?
It doesn't, but you'll believe it is because that's what you asked for. It's not like you have a solid test for what it is yourself
tptacek 3 hours ago [-]
Because I played a bunch of music while doing woodworking stuff and asked for more like that. Things like this are easy with a simple agent loop. It's not picking random music out of the sky; it's working from my Apple Music library (and then expanding on it from the Apple Music catalog).
latexr 2 hours ago [-]
> Things like this are easy with a simple agent loop.
To be fair, they’re also easy (trivial, even) without one. It’s not like “play more music like this” is something we ever needed AI for.
ButlerianJihad 4 hours ago [-]
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_dark_matter_ 3 hours ago [-]
This sounds like such a security risk. It just takes one bad library. Your phone and desktop are not a sandbox.
tvink 3 hours ago [-]
Don't think it has to be, if you are mindful of it. Ai uses fewer dependencies usually, as it doesn't mind rewriting things, and you can easily add scans and sanity checks to your sdlc
tptacek 3 hours ago [-]
These are all simple SwiftUI applications with minimal dependencies. My phone, by the way, definitely is a sandbox.
what 5 hours ago [-]
How are you counting calories from a 1-line description of your meal? Surely that’s not even close to accurate.
keiferski 5 hours ago [-]
If it includes all ingredients, cooking method, and weight in exact grams, it’s probably reasonably accurate.
tptacek 4 hours ago [-]
For basically anything but chicken I give exact gram weights of proteins and of any fats or carbs. I generally don't give it any precision about vegetables that won't drive protein, fat, or carbs. Most meal components aren't going to meaningfully change the macro breakdown except for fiber, which I don't care enough about to track.
cure_42 4 hours ago [-]
You should care more about fiber than any of the others if health is your goal.
tptacek 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kingkongjaffa 3 hours ago [-]
Snark aside, your GP took one module on nutrition in medical school, years ago.
Doctors are not experts in nutrition.
Most modern western diets lack fibre the most so eating more fibre is a sensible recommendation for basically everyone.
tptacek 2 hours ago [-]
Uh huh.
witx 2 hours ago [-]
All that snark and you're still wrong, fiber is very important OP is correct
tptacek 4 hours ago [-]
A typical (in fact, the modal) line from the database, which goes back to April, is "oyakadon 1/2c rice, 2 thighs, 1/2 breast, 2 eggs, bunch broccolini, std oyakadon broth", and the model works out for itself that these are average-sized thighs and breast (boneless and skinless, because it's oyakadon). "std oyakadon broth" is a reference to a "house recipe", of which there's a side database, each costed by GPT5. There's a low/med/high adjuster on every entry; sometimes the thighs are bigger or smaller, for instance.
I've:
* Checked these against all three major frontier models and gotten the same macros breakdown within relatively tight bands
* Manually researched a couple of the most common recipes
* Run this system over many months against my most likely TDEE and reconciled against scale weight loss (which has been profound).
My confidence in frontier model's ability to generate "good enough, probably more than good enough" from this level of meal description is quite high.
Key simplifying assumption (for the model): I'm cooking most of my meals. I cook. I virtually never order out or eat packaged food of any sort. This would be a harder problem and the answers less reliable if I was giving it, like, "1/2 JP Graziano muffaletta, extra hot giardiniera".
Ldorigo 2 hours ago [-]
You can actually get just as good results for packaged food if you just allow the agent to use a web search tool & keep a growing local database of "known food items". I did the same for a while, but it was quite expensive (this was a while back with less powerful models and required a bit of orchestration to make it reliable)
faangguyindia 5 hours ago [-]
perhaps using ai.
whateveracct 4 hours ago [-]
uh oh
stared 35 minutes ago [-]
Apps for one, but when I think there is even a mild potential others may use it, I share.
* And weather in Warsaw: https://github.com/stared/trmnl-x-weather-warsaw (here's location is hardcoded, so the expected use is fork and vive code to match both your location and visual preferences)
And many, many others I did not share, mostly because they were too peculiar, really unlikely to be useful for anyone else than myself.
a_c 32 minutes ago [-]
Writing code with real use is very different from writing code for the sake of writing (looks cool, sounds cool).
Writing code with one user is the base case of a “why am I writing this” recursion - because I use it.
Every action leads to next insight.
For me, a browser extension that provides a table of content to chat interfaces because I always need to scroll up and down to read preview queries. Writing browser extension leads me to writing a RSS reader navigating with only keyboard. Writing RSS reader leads me to writing a virtual book shelf that visualize Goodreads record on a virtual 3D bookshelf. Writing virtual book shelf lead me to making a virtual climbing gym where I scan my local climbing gym into 3D model where I can map climbing videos on it. And it is just one chain
swiftcoder 1 hours ago [-]
> sleep consultant
I'm not sure I believe this is a real job. Do we really need to pay consultants to tell us that babies need naps?
a2800276 52 minutes ago [-]
To me it sounded like they're paying someone to plan not only their kids' naps but also their own AND spend their spare time writing an app to help keep up with the recommended nap schedule. Just take a fucking nap, maybe after going outside for a walk in the park.
te_chris 54 minutes ago [-]
No, it’s a plague on anxious, over-optimised middle class parents.
The idea that someone can send over a schedule in advance is pure voodoo. Much like huckleberry, the ml app that makes new parents insane over wake windows.
p2detar 38 minutes ago [-]
Building software steadily becomes accessible to non-developers. A freelance client I had now does most things alone with chatgpt. As a developer I have less and less the urge to build software. Instead I lately started doing more hardware stuff - flashing devices, setting up RPis and antennas, learning to solder. I hope I can keep my software dev job until retirement, but I‘m a bit pessimistic on that matter.
ShinyLeftPad 8 minutes ago [-]
They basically inserted themselves between clients and developers. A few corporations ingested developer work and offered clients to pay a fraction, not giving anything back to developers.
ymolodtsov 2 hours ago [-]
Same thoughts here.
About four years ago I started building an RSS reader that was supposed to use an algorithm. The problem is, I didn't code in years and wasn't familiar with the modern web stack. I had to drop it, although was still able to sell the domain I got for $500 (nice).
And then, with Codex and Claude, I finally built it this year and enjoy it every day, along with 30 other strangers, since I made it public. It's a great feeling.
I now finally have an app that I use to save both links and articles to read, sort of in-between of Readwise Reader and Raindrop (and it does sync with Readwise).
I write my blog posts in a little browser-based note-taking app with sharing. It's minimal and looks great but has all I need.
I built a few Chrome extensions that I really wanted but couldn't find (well, couldn't find beautiful options).
I don't think everyone will do this. And getting the audience is a major pain, always has been, but now most of your early adopters just go and build their own things just like you. I'll still take it.
LtWorf 1 hours ago [-]
wait for the hackers to find it
ymolodtsov 1 hours ago [-]
Find out what? These apps are as protected as they could be. Always could be a zero-day or a package vulnerability but that's the same for everyone.
pornel 6 hours ago [-]
This mitigates problems with LLMs' low quality code. For a single user, the bar is much lower. The app doesn't have to have all the features that work for everyone's edge cases, implemented in a way that other devs can maintain. It only needs to be good enough for one user, and can be discarded and recreated when it gets too messy.
eviks 2 hours ago [-]
> can be discarded and recreated when it gets too messy.
That's the result of poor quality, how is wasting time redoing an app mitigate itself?
pydry 35 minutes ago [-]
If you want toys then sure. If you want something that, say, reliably calculates your taxes you might want a little more...certainty.
matheusmoreira 6 hours ago [-]
Resolves the copyright nonsense too.
Programmers want you to review and own the code or they'll dismiss it as slop. Then the lawyers come in and say that doesn't give you copyright over the result. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Maybe it's better to just stop publishing stuff. If everything is uncopyrightable slop, the rational move is to just keep it to ourselves. So much for the free and open source software commons.
mac-mc 3 hours ago [-]
Funny he said "Good APIs matter more than ever". My software for one these past few weeks has been my mega archive project, making an APIs & UIs out of 50+ providers whether they like it or not. I'm calling it clump chart. I even got into my turbotax TaxML files.
rrvsh 5 hours ago [-]
Side note, why not just deploy onto a VPS and save the money from using hosted services, as well as protecting yourself from when they inevitably go down? The CBA clearly shows that while active development is going on its trivial to have hosted service subscriptions because the AI sub is way more, but what if that sub disappears? You're left paying (relatively) exorbitant amounts compared to $1-10 per month per VPS for life, or less if you have the privilege and wherewithal to self host. It's also dead easy with AI. Maybe this just reinforces how much a personal runtime solution is needed, as stated in YC's recent RFS.
ymolodtsov 1 hours ago [-]
That's what I did after I realized how much I'd pay for managed databases and auth.
I now have 3 VPS on Hetzner that run about $14/month in total (the old pricing, thankfully). I mostly got three so I wouldn't worry about wiping one if something terrible happens.
Works like a charm. Even with the new pricing, Hetzner or DO would be cheaper than what OP uses. And the maintenance isn't that hard.
Easier to leave vulnerabilities but you can also do it on Vercel and Neon.
4 hours ago [-]
faangguyindia 5 hours ago [-]
Many people build calorie / macro tracker like OP but they don't build maintenance calorie tracker.
Your app tracks calorie intake, doesn't keep track of total calorie burn of the day (maintenance calorie tracking)
And no, calorie burn from watch is not good enough!
>A 2020 systematic review by Fuller et al. found that consumer wearables often perform poorly at estimating energy expenditure, even when they measure steps and heart rate reasonably well. Across brands like Apple, Garmin, Polar, and Withings, calorie burn estimates frequently showed substantial error, often in the 15–40% range and sometimes exceeding 50%. Wearables can still be useful for tracking trends, but not for precise calorie calculations.
If the smartwatch data isn’t precise enough to estimate energy expenditure, what data does your website use that is so much better? Also, how much better it is? How do we even know it’s better? (I am not necessarily doubting it’s better, I am just interested in metrics you used)
JeffRosenberg 5 hours ago [-]
This was really interesting, but I admit I bumped on this throwaway detail:
> Our sleep consultant's plan arrived as a PDF full of conditional logic: wake windows, nap caps, what to do when a nap fails
Every so often, you get a glimpse into a whole world you never knew existed.
wojciii 4 hours ago [-]
> Every so often, you get a glimpse into a whole world you never knew existed.
I had no idea that people did this. This sounds expensive.
Just like other people have no idea that we (Scandinavia) let babies sleep outside in a baby carriage wrapped in a tiny sleeping bag. Fresh air is awesome. Cold air is even better.
This works for some babies and is not universal in any way.
LtWorf 1 hours ago [-]
I've been living in scandinavia for several years and I've never seen this happen in person. Just on reddit and now here.
I kinda doubt it's something widespread.
wojciii 49 minutes ago [-]
Around here (Northern Jutland, Danmark) this is the norm.
There is no limit really. The baby is in warm clothes and in a sleeping bag during winter. Less clothes when its warm.
My children slept outside while it was below zero C. The only time they were not sleeping outside was while they were ill.. having a cold or something.
This person seems insane. You don’t need to pay a “sleep consultant” to make a plan for your child’s nap times. It’s really not that complicated.
tptacek 4 hours ago [-]
Have you raised kids? This is the least shocking expenditure I've heard of; if this had existed when my kids were born I might have shelled out for it.
rrvsh 5 hours ago [-]
If you want to optimise and have the money to spare, I think it's fine. There are going to be people in the world that are better than you at most given tasks, and if working on those tasks is not fun for you and delegation is not a net negative, why not? It's why personal trainers exist (though I don't like them for separate reasons)
a2800276 48 minutes ago [-]
Its clearly a net negative, though, because missing a nap is now causing tremendous anxiety to the point where they'd rather spend a week chatting with Claude to build an app which handles the consequences of missed naps than just spending some time with their infant, maybe reading to them so they fall asleep.
arjie 5 hours ago [-]
In Precious Little Sleep the writer says some half of babies sleep well and some half require help. We must have had the former and so there’s no advice to give. If you were in that set it’s possible that your actions changed something or it’s possible it’s just what it is.
tonyedgecombe 4 hours ago [-]
I suppose there are babies with some kind of pathology in this area although I'm not convinced that is what this is.
whateveracct 4 hours ago [-]
it's sleep training
it is insane and unnatural but it is also common
fundamentally capitalist concept
contact napping to beyond 1yo is deeply natural and special
CalRobert 4 hours ago [-]
For some it is and some it isn’t. My eldest was always a terrible sleeper.
lloydatkinson 20 minutes ago [-]
The article is also obviously written by Claude too. I’m starting to hate the internet.
hamdouni 2 hours ago [-]
Genuine question: how will this "software for one" outlive its creator? I realize that if it were truly intended for just one user, it wouldn't matter, but in this specific case, the software is used by family members, so...
a2800276 46 minutes ago [-]
The "one" in "for one" likely is the creator, so it really doesn't need to.
chr15m 2 hours ago [-]
Clay Shirkey has a great article from 2004 about this called Situated Software.
Can confirm. I spent maybe 5-6 hours rebuilding an app I did in WinForms (originally Java… I forget the framework, Swing or something?) as a web app for a small business. Nothing fancy, basic CRM with existing database ported to SQLite and hosted on a cheapo VPS. Pure Codex CLI play none of that Cursor Orca rubbish. They’re very happy with it. Responsive, dark mode, works even without JavaScript. Nice unit test suite, simple server-side rendered. The traditional way. It’s the cats ass. Additional 2 hours for a couple of new requested features. Whatever! Easy peasy.
At work the team is leaning be heavily into internal tooling. Doesn’t need heavy support. Doesn’t need a fancy designer. Duct tape glue and liquid wrench are more than enough. It’s quick enough that it’s throw away and so if need be we can always write a v2 without losing months or years of work. Just enough to be useful, and then back to actual work.
42 minutes ago [-]
chrysoprace 6 hours ago [-]
I'm building a podcast app just for me, because the podcast app I typically use (PocketCasts) is really good but there's just a couple of features I'd like and they don't bring out a lot of new features since it's not a monthly SaaS.
LLMs are a good help here because side projects typically slow down for me when I run into bugs / troubleshooting. So while I genuinely believe struggle is necessary for learning, being able to get over that hump to build something I need makes a big difference.
I'm not vibe coding the app though, since I actually want to know what it does. But I can see it being helpful for people who just need something and don't care about how it works.
SyneRyder 2 hours ago [-]
> ...they don't bring out a lot of new features since it's not a monthly SaaS.
But it is! The Patron level of Pocket Casts is $15.99 / month!
I used to love Pocket Casts, but it didn't have the ability to easily add an RSS feed URL locally without submitting it to their index - which I don't want to do with my AI's personalised morning podcast (and that's another category, Podcast For One). I've had to use AntennaPod for that, but it's missing all the silence clipping and audio normalising features that Pocket Casts has. I'd love to see someone improve on it, and I've been tempted to do it myself too. Good luck!
botiomez 6 hours ago [-]
Yup! Can confirm, I wanted to blog, but I wanted it to work in a certain way to let me focusing on writing that no single system had, or cost too much.
Now I'm actually doing it.
I've had an idea for how I want to be social with friends and family (a website, but setup within my vision). Now it's done
Could I have done all of these things on my own or just paid for existing services? Yes
But now AI can do it for me while I watch TV. I just show up to test.
altmanaltman 4 hours ago [-]
I get it but just a word of advice - also look at industry standards like how SEO works as well. Otherwise your blog or content wouldn't even be discoverable.
But isn't it like super cheap to host a website in 2026? A lot of those builders are actual better if you just want to write. Otherwise you will have to maintain your website and also focus on writing, which would not allow you to just focus on writing.
I am not saying this out of my behind. I have done the exact same thing and ran into issues. If you just want to focus on content, building and maintain your own website can be a big distraction
fny 6 hours ago [-]
This is such a romantic idea, but unfortunately Apple and Google are hostile to this model.
Of the two, iOS is /worst/ for running vibe coded apps.
You need to pay $99 a year to be an Apple developer if you want your app to live on your phone for more than a a week.
Distribution is a also pain in the ass even for personal use alone (you can't just toss around an IPA).
Finally, so many useful APIs are totally locked up. The fact that I cannot in 2026 extend Siri, for example, us infuriating.
Android is far more promising but Google recently shot themselves in the foot with their verified APK nonsense. Google's privacy posture is infamously nonexistent as well, and I have little interest in rooting a Pixel at my age.
Hopefully now that enough people can vibe code, these walls will crumble a bit.
rpdillon 5 hours ago [-]
I ran across WebXDC this past weekend, and I'm intrigued. I've built a few apps on it already, and I'm very pleasantly surprised by how cleverly inverted the whole model is (in combination with ChatMail). Delta Chat is available on iOS, I believe. I use Arcanechat on Android.
The beauty of the ecosystem is that apps are just zips of a webapp that is self-contained, and uses the webxdc api to message other copies of itself running on other folks' phones that are part of that chat group. Basically, the app communicates (and is distributed over!) the group chat (it's otherwise insulated from the internet). And because apps are just zipped webapps, they can be pulled apart, hacked on, and reassembled as needed for your group.
ChatMail relays tend not to retain info - they aren't hosts, they just relay encrypted messages (the platform mandates encryption). This sidesteps all the approval/review processes, and there is no app store or developer fee or even SDK. It's just folks trading apps and running them together.
It can't solve a lot of cases, but it solves some use cases (like a shared grocery list, or real-time card games, or games with leaderboards) really well.
aryehof 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting. What apps have you built? How/where is state maintained?
mercutio2 4 hours ago [-]
You don't need to pay Apple $99.
You can make perfectly good apps that run great with a free account. They expire in a week instead of 3 months (for TestFlight builds). That's it. You can redeploy with minimal effort. You have to reauth with Apple every ~30 days. The reauth is the only part of that you can't have a cron job run (you need to authenticate the keychain).
For normie folks, the hoops here are mildly annoying. But if you're someone making vibe-coded apps, we're talking about two scripts and a cron job, here. Or just run Sideloadly, which I hear works pretty well.
There exist reasons to be annoyed by Apple's iOS security posture, but "I can't run my vibecoded apps" isn't an especially good one.
hard_times 1 hours ago [-]
> You can redeploy with minimal effort every week
No thank you
ymolodtsov 1 hours ago [-]
For most people I believe it's a good exchange for the value of a more secure device.
But yes, I don't really want to pay Apple $100 a year just to run my apps. So I just have them as PWAs. Wouldn't work for many use cases, like when you need Apple Fitness data, but works for me and it looks fine.
2001zhaozhao 6 hours ago [-]
A PWA might be well suited to your needs. Even Apple's restrictive model leaves plenty of room to build useful apps especially if they are designed to connect to a backend (like the ones in the post).
fny 6 hours ago [-]
I have used PWAs and online web apps for a lot of my vibe coded tools, but sometimes you just want/need native features and performance.
genghisjahn 6 hours ago [-]
I totally hear you on that, but for my one off apps (and even some of my not one off apps) if I can't implement a feature in a PWA, I just learn to live without that feature.
matheusmoreira 6 hours ago [-]
Which is why computer freedom is so important it needs to be enshrined into law. Stuff like remote attestation, locked down boot loaders and "app stores" need to be made literally illegal. Ownership of the computer should be a constitutional right.
pornel 6 hours ago [-]
App Store will be the place to download apps you can't avoid, like your bank's client.
For personal apps, the locked down stores are making themselves irrelevant. When you have software for one person, you don't want to publish it there. You want to bypass the gatekeepers.
epihelix 6 hours ago [-]
It still holds for the desktop, though. LLMs have helped me quickly code new software for lab equipment (total users ~6), a research tool for my partner, and for several desktop apps I just use for me.
Two apps fill niches that I've wanted to code myself (one, I've wanted to code for the last twenty years on and off), but have never had the time to do so. Now, the speed from thought to working prototype is insane (less than an hour); it then takes a few days of occasional work to turn that prototype into something architecturally sound and half-decent.
And after that... well, I just keep improving, refactoring, refining, because it's so much fun.
chrysoprace 6 hours ago [-]
Local first is a model I'm exploring. Combined with PWA it's pretty good and doesn't need to be native. LLMs are most useful for apps that are Good Enough™ anyway, and struggle with the remaining 5-10%.
Georgelemental 6 hours ago [-]
> rooting a Pixel at my age
Don't do that, that's a PITA. Put GrapheneOS on it instead—simple, no hassle, works great
fragmede 6 hours ago [-]
Oh no! $99! If you're rich enough to have bought into the Apple walled garden, $99 is nothing. Can't go out for a nice dinner with the family for less than that these days. Yeah it would be great if Apple gave it away for free, but it's their walled garden that we've locked ourselves into. My bigger complaint about Apple is how overboard they've gone with the security stuff, making it it that much harder to develop software for their systems, on top of costing more. But, gotta go to where the users are.
rvz 6 hours ago [-]
> You need to pay $99 a year to be an Apple developer if you want your app to live on your phone for more than a a week.
No complaints over paying more than >$100 a month in subscriptions with coding agents but $99 a year is some how too much?
Yet another reason why “developers” are just consumers that are selective complainers that want their tools to cost $0.00.
Clearly as already stated in the article, hosting and distribution is not free.
matheusmoreira 6 hours ago [-]
> No complaints over paying more than >$100 a month in subscriptions with coding agents
Plenty. The problem isn't so much the price as it is the loss of sovereignty.
It's not your model running on your computer, it's $CORPORATION's model running on their own data centers. They're just generously allowing you to use it, and only on their terms.
woah 5 hours ago [-]
hosting and distributing binaries to one person, who is also the person who created the app is free
BobbyTables2 6 hours ago [-]
Imagine paying $100/year for the privilege of running homemade software on your desktop computer…
Aside from Apple, running homemade software on a phone was free of cost, even back in the days of Motorola flip phones running Java…
raajg 6 hours ago [-]
the post on BoopSnoop was very impactful for me too! As a software engineer, it's drilled into your brain that you have to think about high scalability and user facing products. I used to have a lot of ideas, but the first instinct was always to build a paid user facing product. None ever got built. But after reading that post a few years ago, my mindset was completely flipped. Since then I've built umpteen tools, services, macOS menubar apps, tail scale services .. just for myself. And I love it!
satvikpendem 5 hours ago [-]
I thought the opinion of this article was widely known by now, as every thread about AI here talks about personalized software built with vibe coding.
ifh-hn 4 hours ago [-]
My first thoughts on reading the article and even now after is: sleep consultant?
cryo32 34 minutes ago [-]
Been doing this sort of stuff for 30 years. Mostly in Excel.
Hasn’t cost me anything.
CalRobert 4 hours ago [-]
“ The app took him a week to build, half of it lost to code-signing purgatory”
Maybe Google is eliminating sideloading to force people to not make their own apk’s now that it’s easy to do so.
__rito__ 3 hours ago [-]
Agree with the general spirit of the piece, but the examples that he gave create more problem than solving problems.
> A fitness app that sizes my smoothie to that morning's run
I don't feel I need more than the phone's calculator app for this particular problem.
Other examples could be solved by the Notes app, I feel.
I deliberately avoid creating new "apps", and make do with existing apps and solutions and create workflows rather than apps.
I write scripts, add features to scripts and understand all lines of them.
There are very few exceptions to this, like, I vibe coded a visual PDF cropper app that also handles scaling, merging in a GUI built with PyQt and GTK.
Having entire apps create maintenance burden and headaches.
hard_times 1 hours ago [-]
To me it just sounds like we need an even higher level language for these sort of 'software for one' apps. There is still tons of boilerplate. Declarative is king.
croisillon 51 minutes ago [-]
honestly happy for him, but i wish he would have written the article before posting it
resonance_dev 35 minutes ago [-]
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tom2948329494 4 hours ago [-]
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EtienneDeLyon 6 hours ago [-]
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EtienneDeLyon 6 hours ago [-]
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tim-projects 6 hours ago [-]
"building personal software won't require a developer's stack for much longer."
I will if you are building anything good. What even is this statement?
farfatched 5 hours ago [-]
They're suggesting you won't need an IDE and a VM to build a service, for example.
You'll just prompt your LLM provider and they'll provision your software. It'll do testing, dependency updates, monitoring, and regular audits.
If you want fixes/features, you'll prompt your LLM and it'll make it so.
ymolodtsov 1 hours ago [-]
Which is completely right. For my latest several apps I never even looked at the code.
* A personal music player for Apple Music with an embedded agent loop, so I can say things like "I'm going to work in the wood shop, play woodworking-appropriate music and keep the playlist full and non-repeating indefinitely".
* A calorie/protein tracker that takes 1-liner summaries of meals, resolves them to macros with GPT5 calls, and tracks them in SQLite.
* A macOS menubar combined Apple TV and Roku TV remote control.
* A calculator front-end to SageMath that renders Latex math notation and has point/click shortcut affordances for linear algebra and MVC.
* A "self driving wiki" macOS desktop llmwiki that imports and digests PDFs.
* A menubar tracker for the little temperature sensors I have scattered all throughout the house so I can click my menubar and instantly see the temps in the different rooms of the house.
* A layout tool for designing picture frames to get cut lists and rabbet depths and stuff.
That's just the desktop stuff. These applications are generally better than what I'd get from the App Store. The calorie tracker is one of the better-designed apps on my dock.
I feel like I'm not doing this enough yet, it hasn't fully sunk in, and I'm going to be building a lot more stuff when it does sink in. I haven't yet gotten to the point of writing my own note-taking application (still Bear.app for that), but how long can that last?
how is AI (or a human for that matter) supposed to know what “woodworking-appropriate music is”? I had the same thoughts when spotify released their “let AI make a playlist for you”. Like, we already have recommender algorithms, why do we need to get a LLM involved?Maybe I just don’t understand woodworking and the connection it has to music though (I’m also the kind of person who’s had the same playlist for like the past 4 years)
But, I do want to say, personal app built just the way you like it, an alternative front end to a closed source ecosystem even, is super cool, and has been one of the things that AI coding has really enabled.
I’ve done a few project where I just give claude a har file and tell it to reverse engineer a cli from some web interface and it’s so powerful to be able to do stuff like that now
It doesn't, but you'll believe it is because that's what you asked for. It's not like you have a solid test for what it is yourself
To be fair, they’re also easy (trivial, even) without one. It’s not like “play more music like this” is something we ever needed AI for.
Doctors are not experts in nutrition.
Most modern western diets lack fibre the most so eating more fibre is a sensible recommendation for basically everyone.
I've:
* Checked these against all three major frontier models and gotten the same macros breakdown within relatively tight bands
* Manually researched a couple of the most common recipes
* Run this system over many months against my most likely TDEE and reconciled against scale weight loss (which has been profound).
My confidence in frontier model's ability to generate "good enough, probably more than good enough" from this level of meal description is quite high.
Key simplifying assumption (for the model): I'm cooking most of my meals. I cook. I virtually never order out or eat packaged food of any sort. This would be a harder problem and the answers less reliable if I was giving it, like, "1/2 JP Graziano muffaletta, extra hot giardiniera".
* Doom launcher and Megawad Steam-like library for macOS: https://github.com/stared/rusted-doom-launcher
* TRMNL X e-ink screen vibe coding usage screen: https://github.com/stared/trmnl-x-claude-codex
* And weather in Warsaw: https://github.com/stared/trmnl-x-weather-warsaw (here's location is hardcoded, so the expected use is fork and vive code to match both your location and visual preferences)
* Image upscaling script for a thermal camera, https://github.com/stared/thermal-upscale
And many, many others I did not share, mostly because they were too peculiar, really unlikely to be useful for anyone else than myself.
Writing code with one user is the base case of a “why am I writing this” recursion - because I use it.
Every action leads to next insight. For me, a browser extension that provides a table of content to chat interfaces because I always need to scroll up and down to read preview queries. Writing browser extension leads me to writing a RSS reader navigating with only keyboard. Writing RSS reader leads me to writing a virtual book shelf that visualize Goodreads record on a virtual 3D bookshelf. Writing virtual book shelf lead me to making a virtual climbing gym where I scan my local climbing gym into 3D model where I can map climbing videos on it. And it is just one chain
I'm not sure I believe this is a real job. Do we really need to pay consultants to tell us that babies need naps?
The idea that someone can send over a schedule in advance is pure voodoo. Much like huckleberry, the ml app that makes new parents insane over wake windows.
About four years ago I started building an RSS reader that was supposed to use an algorithm. The problem is, I didn't code in years and wasn't familiar with the modern web stack. I had to drop it, although was still able to sell the domain I got for $500 (nice).
And then, with Codex and Claude, I finally built it this year and enjoy it every day, along with 30 other strangers, since I made it public. It's a great feeling.
I now finally have an app that I use to save both links and articles to read, sort of in-between of Readwise Reader and Raindrop (and it does sync with Readwise).
I write my blog posts in a little browser-based note-taking app with sharing. It's minimal and looks great but has all I need.
I built a few Chrome extensions that I really wanted but couldn't find (well, couldn't find beautiful options).
I don't think everyone will do this. And getting the audience is a major pain, always has been, but now most of your early adopters just go and build their own things just like you. I'll still take it.
That's the result of poor quality, how is wasting time redoing an app mitigate itself?
Programmers want you to review and own the code or they'll dismiss it as slop. Then the lawyers come in and say that doesn't give you copyright over the result. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Maybe it's better to just stop publishing stuff. If everything is uncopyrightable slop, the rational move is to just keep it to ourselves. So much for the free and open source software commons.
I now have 3 VPS on Hetzner that run about $14/month in total (the old pricing, thankfully). I mostly got three so I wouldn't worry about wiping one if something terrible happens.
Works like a charm. Even with the new pricing, Hetzner or DO would be cheaper than what OP uses. And the maintenance isn't that hard.
Easier to leave vulnerabilities but you can also do it on Vercel and Neon.
Your app tracks calorie intake, doesn't keep track of total calorie burn of the day (maintenance calorie tracking)
And no, calorie burn from watch is not good enough!
>A 2020 systematic review by Fuller et al. found that consumer wearables often perform poorly at estimating energy expenditure, even when they measure steps and heart rate reasonably well. Across brands like Apple, Garmin, Polar, and Withings, calorie burn estimates frequently showed substantial error, often in the 15–40% range and sometimes exceeding 50%. Wearables can still be useful for tracking trends, but not for precise calorie calculations.
Here's completely free one i built, https://macrocodex.app/ 16,000+ users already.
> Our sleep consultant's plan arrived as a PDF full of conditional logic: wake windows, nap caps, what to do when a nap fails
Every so often, you get a glimpse into a whole world you never knew existed.
I had no idea that people did this. This sounds expensive.
Just like other people have no idea that we (Scandinavia) let babies sleep outside in a baby carriage wrapped in a tiny sleeping bag. Fresh air is awesome. Cold air is even better.
This works for some babies and is not universal in any way.
I kinda doubt it's something widespread.
But do doubt away. :)
Please see the official guidelines: https://www.sst.dk/vidensbase/graviditet-og-smaaboern/barnet...
My children slept outside while it was below zero C. The only time they were not sleeping outside was while they were ill.. having a cold or something.
Edit: the limit is -10 C according to https://www.sst.dk/vidensbase/graviditet-og-smaaboern/barnet...
This is well known around here:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21537988
it is insane and unnatural but it is also common
fundamentally capitalist concept
contact napping to beyond 1yo is deeply natural and special
https://devonzuegel.com/situated-software
At work the team is leaning be heavily into internal tooling. Doesn’t need heavy support. Doesn’t need a fancy designer. Duct tape glue and liquid wrench are more than enough. It’s quick enough that it’s throw away and so if need be we can always write a v2 without losing months or years of work. Just enough to be useful, and then back to actual work.
LLMs are a good help here because side projects typically slow down for me when I run into bugs / troubleshooting. So while I genuinely believe struggle is necessary for learning, being able to get over that hump to build something I need makes a big difference.
I'm not vibe coding the app though, since I actually want to know what it does. But I can see it being helpful for people who just need something and don't care about how it works.
But it is! The Patron level of Pocket Casts is $15.99 / month!
I used to love Pocket Casts, but it didn't have the ability to easily add an RSS feed URL locally without submitting it to their index - which I don't want to do with my AI's personalised morning podcast (and that's another category, Podcast For One). I've had to use AntennaPod for that, but it's missing all the silence clipping and audio normalising features that Pocket Casts has. I'd love to see someone improve on it, and I've been tempted to do it myself too. Good luck!
Now I'm actually doing it.
I've had an idea for how I want to be social with friends and family (a website, but setup within my vision). Now it's done
Could I have done all of these things on my own or just paid for existing services? Yes
But now AI can do it for me while I watch TV. I just show up to test.
But isn't it like super cheap to host a website in 2026? A lot of those builders are actual better if you just want to write. Otherwise you will have to maintain your website and also focus on writing, which would not allow you to just focus on writing.
I am not saying this out of my behind. I have done the exact same thing and ran into issues. If you just want to focus on content, building and maintain your own website can be a big distraction
Of the two, iOS is /worst/ for running vibe coded apps.
You need to pay $99 a year to be an Apple developer if you want your app to live on your phone for more than a a week.
Distribution is a also pain in the ass even for personal use alone (you can't just toss around an IPA).
Finally, so many useful APIs are totally locked up. The fact that I cannot in 2026 extend Siri, for example, us infuriating.
Android is far more promising but Google recently shot themselves in the foot with their verified APK nonsense. Google's privacy posture is infamously nonexistent as well, and I have little interest in rooting a Pixel at my age.
Hopefully now that enough people can vibe code, these walls will crumble a bit.
https://webxdc.org/
https://chatmail.at/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/delta-chat/id1459523234
https://arcanechat.me/
The beauty of the ecosystem is that apps are just zips of a webapp that is self-contained, and uses the webxdc api to message other copies of itself running on other folks' phones that are part of that chat group. Basically, the app communicates (and is distributed over!) the group chat (it's otherwise insulated from the internet). And because apps are just zipped webapps, they can be pulled apart, hacked on, and reassembled as needed for your group.
ChatMail relays tend not to retain info - they aren't hosts, they just relay encrypted messages (the platform mandates encryption). This sidesteps all the approval/review processes, and there is no app store or developer fee or even SDK. It's just folks trading apps and running them together.
It can't solve a lot of cases, but it solves some use cases (like a shared grocery list, or real-time card games, or games with leaderboards) really well.
You can make perfectly good apps that run great with a free account. They expire in a week instead of 3 months (for TestFlight builds). That's it. You can redeploy with minimal effort. You have to reauth with Apple every ~30 days. The reauth is the only part of that you can't have a cron job run (you need to authenticate the keychain).
For normie folks, the hoops here are mildly annoying. But if you're someone making vibe-coded apps, we're talking about two scripts and a cron job, here. Or just run Sideloadly, which I hear works pretty well.
There exist reasons to be annoyed by Apple's iOS security posture, but "I can't run my vibecoded apps" isn't an especially good one.
No thank you
But yes, I don't really want to pay Apple $100 a year just to run my apps. So I just have them as PWAs. Wouldn't work for many use cases, like when you need Apple Fitness data, but works for me and it looks fine.
For personal apps, the locked down stores are making themselves irrelevant. When you have software for one person, you don't want to publish it there. You want to bypass the gatekeepers.
Two apps fill niches that I've wanted to code myself (one, I've wanted to code for the last twenty years on and off), but have never had the time to do so. Now, the speed from thought to working prototype is insane (less than an hour); it then takes a few days of occasional work to turn that prototype into something architecturally sound and half-decent.
And after that... well, I just keep improving, refactoring, refining, because it's so much fun.
Don't do that, that's a PITA. Put GrapheneOS on it instead—simple, no hassle, works great
No complaints over paying more than >$100 a month in subscriptions with coding agents but $99 a year is some how too much?
Yet another reason why “developers” are just consumers that are selective complainers that want their tools to cost $0.00.
Clearly as already stated in the article, hosting and distribution is not free.
Plenty. The problem isn't so much the price as it is the loss of sovereignty.
It's not your model running on your computer, it's $CORPORATION's model running on their own data centers. They're just generously allowing you to use it, and only on their terms.
Aside from Apple, running homemade software on a phone was free of cost, even back in the days of Motorola flip phones running Java…
Hasn’t cost me anything.
Maybe Google is eliminating sideloading to force people to not make their own apk’s now that it’s easy to do so.
> A fitness app that sizes my smoothie to that morning's run
I don't feel I need more than the phone's calculator app for this particular problem.
Other examples could be solved by the Notes app, I feel.
I deliberately avoid creating new "apps", and make do with existing apps and solutions and create workflows rather than apps.
I write scripts, add features to scripts and understand all lines of them.
There are very few exceptions to this, like, I vibe coded a visual PDF cropper app that also handles scaling, merging in a GUI built with PyQt and GTK.
Having entire apps create maintenance burden and headaches.
I will if you are building anything good. What even is this statement?
You'll just prompt your LLM provider and they'll provision your software. It'll do testing, dependency updates, monitoring, and regular audits.
If you want fixes/features, you'll prompt your LLM and it'll make it so.