Hypercard vibes
Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends
71–80 of 153 posts
Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends
#72I think "vibe coding" will not replace developers in the short term, but it will be the strongest competition for such simple systems. I asked a few LLMs to make apps like these (plain HTML with embedded JS), and they got it right after a few edits. They are also visually more appealing [1]. [1] https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/bb451732-9559-401a-8000-b...
except it's broken
Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends
#73I think "vibe coding" will not replace developers in the short term, but it will be the strongest competition for such simple systems. I asked a few LLMs to make apps like these (plain HTML with embedded JS), and they got it right after a few edits. They are also visually more appealing [1]. [1] https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/bb451732-9559-401a-8000-b...
except it's broken
Vibe coding seems to be synonymous with "sort of works, bunch of bugs"
Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 over this. As someone without a deep technical background, LLMs enabled me to improve my life unimaginably, being able to quickly sketch and develop small features that remove every day annoyance.
examples?
My very first thing was automation of placing my journal entry to appropriate Google Drive folder. I write my brain dump/journal everyday in Google Docs, and if I just click "New document, it places it in the root GDrive folder, and I had to move it manually which I am to lazy to do it.
LLM helped me write a python script that searches the root folder, finds the right document (name is always the date of the day), and searches for the right folder in assigned Google Drive repository (and creates a yearly or monthly folder if a new month starts).
It also helped me create a yaml script for Github actions to trigger this once every day.
I felt like a magician. Since then I created second brain databases, internal index of valuable youtube videos, where I call the api to get transcripts and send it to llm, other note taking automations etc etc
Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the OPs app but there's an app doing something similar that I enjoyed for many years, you can also import from GPS trackers and others: https://fogofworld.app
Does that work like a game map where the fog disappears where you have been? That would be cool, although the reviews aren't great.
Yea that’s the idea. Worked well for the years where I tried it.
Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends
#76One of the best things that I did was spending a week making a simple app that can put all my Apple Watch walks on a single big map, then sharing it with my friends after it got published on AppStore. It's been a year since I worked on it, but I still get messages from my friends (and some random people who found it!) how they've walked through an entire city or something. Really rewarding experience, despite having…
Just think about the thousands of useless obstacles and moats you’ve had to navigate and overcome to make that. How many millions have given up at any one of them. After all that you still control nothing and are vendor locked. Imagine if you could just AI prompt that up and simply transfer to your open source watches. What a world that would be.
Fair point, but as I grew up, I realized those things really don’t matter to me. My thought process was — oh, I walk around a lot, I’m curious how much of the city I’ve covered -> oh, there’s no free app for that -> oh, I’ve never made an iOS app and this looks simple -> let’s spend a week making it and share it with friends.
As a side note, as I grew up, I realized I genuinely don’t care about the walled garden flame wars, and things alike. Life is pretty simple, I’d rather walked around a new neighbourhood and grab a pint.
Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends
#77I like the spirit of it, but the execution isn't what I'm looking for. With this being a hosted solution, it makes me dependent on another SaaS tool for little personal projects. If it's a little counter needed for an afternoon, that's not such a big deal. However, if I'm looking for a scrappy little app I may use for years, this is a problem. Plus, no matter how low the learning curve gets, it will still exist, so I…
It seems the way to go would be to open source the SaaS code to ensure that longevity. The folks at Penpot have a good thing going with that—most people will use the SaaS offering but it’s available for self-hosting.
One of the difficulties of course is notarizing/signing the apps and so-forth. Perhaps some Web3 solutions could help as well.
OR, another option would be like what PICO-8 does (or flash I guess)—release the runtime and distribute the “carts” or apps. :)
Still, it’s pretty complex creating a trusted distribution network outside of SaaS. Definitely could work though it’s been done before!
[1]: https://penpot.app/
Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends
#78Oh haha, I simply program little apps for my friends to solve their problems. I thought this would be about that
Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends
#79[dead]
Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends
#80I like the spirit of it, but the execution isn't what I'm looking for. With this being a hosted solution, it makes me dependent on another SaaS tool for little personal projects. If it's a little counter needed for an afternoon, that's not such a big deal. However, if I'm looking for a scrappy little app I may use for years, this is a problem. Plus, no matter how low the learning curve gets, it will still exist, so I…
It seems the way to go would be to open source the SaaS code to ensure that longevity. The folks at Penpot have a good thing going with that—most people will use the SaaS offering but it’s available for self-hosting. One of the difficulties of course is notarizing/signing the apps and so-forth. Perhaps some Web3 solutions could help as well. OR, another option would be like what PICO-8 does (or flash I guess)—release…
I was also thinking back to when I used TiddlyWiki almost 20 years ago. If this tool is effectively just HTML, CSS, and Javascript... could they bake it all into a single HTML file. Download a template, design your app offline, and save your work to a file that can run on its own, offline, in a browser window. Maybe the about of JS they need to bake in, or images, would make that impractical.
Of course, as it stands, the examples were so simplistic that they could easily be vibe coded. I just tried it with the attendance counter and ChatGPT gave me that's only 50 lines. I'm sure I could make that much shorter doing it manually. Granted, a project like this has to start somewhere, but as it stands it's adding a lot of infrastructure without adding enough value to make it worth it, when AI is pretty good at these really basic things, like "give me a text box with a button to increment it".