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Your app subscription is now my weekend project

rselbach.com

61–70 of 390 posts

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#61
This reminds me so much of Maggie Appleton blog post on "Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers" [1]

We have so many people who are so excellent and fast and developing nowadays that we can even afford the time to build things for our community, friends and even just for ourselves.

It has probably always been like this, but I am just personally observing a higher-degree of people doing and talking about it. Even just the small-web/neocities bobble points into this.

[1] https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#62

[flagged]

I doubt LLM-generated software is going to replace more traditional software any time soon, especially when accuracy is pretty important (such as accounting). One thing I learned from years as a PM in a very data-centric organization is understanding data, how it is generated/stored/cut/etc. is very important to getting accurate results. Where I could see some really interesting results is the marriage of the two. Fo…

i think the same, i think backend where data is more prominent is not going anywhere soon. llms produce very bad data structures.

but from good apis, good data, good interface they can generate quite nice frontends.

i guess, frontend as job is going to have a hard time.

also, writing code is not cognitive load, its always reading code. and llms just increase that. so i mostly try to avoid using them.

but i do like researching with them. context free. like googles ai mode, etc. not from my code editor cause then they get biased and suggest stupid sh8t all the time.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#63
post #32

I did this recently at the company I work at. Someone suggested GitBook, I 'Vibe coded' an internal docs website in under and hour. Does what we need, looks good. Unless the app has a large community/network and is just a SaaS with some offering, it'll be very easy to replace it.

We're currently paying through the nose for a shitty intranet solution that could've been just hugo with a markdown editor.

Or a vibe-coded simple website.

But "designed and implemented company-wide intranet" looks good in someone's CV so here we are.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#64

I think there's still an underestimated burden to vibe-coding an app for a non-software engineer. I'm not recommending my parents vibe-code apps to solve problems, so I think the market is smaller. But Roberto's use-case is definitely more sane than most.

I'm currently assisting three very non-programmer people in-house who did just this.

Their problem is solved, now it's up to me to update the internal guidelines and agent instructions so that the code is at least semi-decent.

None of these are going to "production", they all live on local company controlled laptops and only one of them might access an external API automatically later this spring.

But each of them takes hours of manual work and does it in minutes.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#66
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$20 claude code subscription for a month can replace the $15 + $10 for each month. How is that 3x more espensive? The user just saved $280 per year, on just two subscriptions alone. Hardly doubt that this was the 'most waste of ones time'. For one, it's not like most of us can decide to "work" for 3-5 hours on a Saturday and get any money. I play games on my pc while claude codes for me. I alt tab each few minutes an…

Hey, CC has a way to trigger a notification chime on completion. (How? Idk, I just asked it to guide me through the short hook process)

Afaik it's built in now.

I get a notification on macOS with the title of the context.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#68
post #5

First of all, I’m skeptical about these being free. Time isn’t free, and the tokens to make these projects certainly weren’t free. Second of all, all of these SaaS apps that don’t actually have a need for recurring charge probably should be paid one time. I don’t use Loom — I use CleanShot X and it was a one-time $30 payment and has a lot of great features I benefit from. I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $3…

How are you completely disregarding the data integrity and privacy aspects of rolling your own tools?

I vibecode an app that only I use and store data locally. That means my data never leaves my device, I never have to share my email with anyone, never have to enter my credit card info anywhere

You buy SaaS and you have to then login, share credit card info, and have your data stored in the cloud somewhere with godknows what security practices

That’s worth more than the cost of any tokens

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#69
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most apps rationale for subscriptions is "Ongoing development" without an option like jetbrains etc. to fall back to a perpetual license. In practice, regardless of whether an app needs ongoing development or not, this is the best way to try to guarantee continuous income and make a living off of a project I guess. Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating…

It is not irrational on the part of the developer -- I've definitely felt this too. The problem comes from the fact that practically everyone has subscription fatigue these days, and each of us probably has only a few pieces of software we truly care about enough to want to support them out of the goodness of our hearts. But everyone wants us to pay $10/mo. It just isn't sustainable from a consumer perspective.

And so the solution is… paying Anthropic $200/mo…

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#70

Turning a paid sub like WisprFlow into your own weekend build (Jabber) is a great move, but you can take it further by finding open-source alternatives that already implement the features you're replicating. For dictation and speech-to-text like what WisprFlow does, there's Handy[0], a free, open-source, offline speech-to-text app that runs locally with Whisper models. Once you identify something like Handy, instruct…

So basically steal code from OSS, oh no I meant "get inspired by" OSS code without actually contributing anything. This is just gross as a developer imo.

We're big believers in personal software: even with OSS alts existing, building your own in your stack is valuable. Before AI, you'd read code from other apps, understand the implementation, and reimplement it yourself. This just makes that easier and faster.

My projects (Openship/Openfront[0]) are the first on the chopping block. We're creating modular OSS alts for every vertical (barbershops, hotels, etc.) for folks to take, remix, adapt, or fork into their tools. Chances are your AI model is already trained on similar OSS and building from it anyway. We make finding the exact code reliable. Check out our ethos to learn more [1].

[0] https://openship.org

[1] https://opensource.builders/ethos

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