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Your app subscription is now my weekend project

rselbach.com

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Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#91

Post by kevinsync »

I keep seeing versions of this soliloquy on here, sometimes multiple times every day. They make fine blog posts, it's something to say and something to read, but ultimately remind me more of piling into a Tiktok trend than anything else: everybody's doing it, so I will too!

End of the day, much like when photography went digital (and smartphones got good cameras), yes, there were a LOT more photos taken, but the relative proportion of outsized, lauded photographers remained fairly constant. The upshot is that WAY more people are exposed to the possibility of creating excellence than before, the downside is the market gets flooded with utility and mediocrity. Said excellence never goes away, and the same will apply to software.

The very idea that SaaS (or packaged software, or whatever) "will die" because "anybody" can prompt their way to a "personal tool" (as a mainstream exercise) is so far-fetched to me because the only people who will prompt their way to a tool ARE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS!

Professionals who need functionality will always pay for it.

Boomer dads who can barely work a DVR will always pay for it.

Business owners who need less friction and more reliability will always pay for it.

IMO, this "I'll just replace Salesforce with my own personal CRM for $200 for a month of Claude" thing is just a hobbyist's pipe dream lol -- not that there's anything wrong with it, some people will do it, but, man, there's a reason that Netflix is Netflix, and Plex isn't Netflix.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#94

Post by dimator »

0hw0t wrote: post #81
3rodents wrote: post #44

Software is a manifestation of someone’s knowledge of and experience in and ideas about how a thing should work. We learn from the software we use, we benefit from everyone else’s ideas, we benefit from the hundreds and thousands of hours other people put into understanding a problem to design a solution. My workflow is better because of the incremental improvements made by developer after developer year after year.…

Your entire post is self selection bias and survivorship bias. SWE field is one of the most cognitive dissonant social groups; cries foul at the slightest whiff their free speech and agency is being put upon; seeks to reduce blockers to their productivity, fewer PMs! Less management! Now complains about users using their machines without having to block on an SWE. Insert that quote about how someone will not see the…

you couldn't have missed GP's point any more if you tried. ignoring the ad-hominems about SWE greed:

these tools have been trained on decades of people "obsessing over every last detail". what GP is arguing is that we're detaching from that: you prompt, you get something that works, it doesn't matter how it got there. we're now entering the world where the majority of code will be vibed. So whatever our foredevelopers came up with, that will be the the final chapter of craftsman-produced, understood, code. whatever the previous generation actually learned about software engineering, that's at an end too, because why bother learning when i can prompt.

there's no stopping this transition, obviously. the next generation of tools will be trained on the current generation of tools' generated code. we're passed the "termination shock" of sofwtare understanding.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#95

Post by renewiltord »

altmanaltman wrote: post #58
theturtletalks wrote: post #52

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.

You can't "steal code from OSS". The original code is still OSS.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#96

Post by headcanon »

d_sc wrote: post #15

Loved the article, thanks for sharing. I’m curious if you’d share your setup. I haven’t made any macOS apps before, primarily because I never wanted to really learn XCode and obj-c. I like swift but still prefer simpler editors like Zed/VSC vs. What XCode offers.. so when you’re building these are you doing it in XCode or in another tool like Claude Code/codex/gemini CLI? cheers

Seconded, I would be interested in knowing people's workflows + experiences developing MacOS and iOS apps with claude, etc.

From the repo here, it looks like its just using swift command line tools, which might just work well enough with cursor/vscode/etc. for small projects. You won't have Xcode's other features but maybe thats fine for an agentic-first development workflow.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#97

Post by chasd00 »

0hw0t wrote: post #81
3rodents wrote: post #44

Software is a manifestation of someone’s knowledge of and experience in and ideas about how a thing should work. We learn from the software we use, we benefit from everyone else’s ideas, we benefit from the hundreds and thousands of hours other people put into understanding a problem to design a solution. My workflow is better because of the incremental improvements made by developer after developer year after year.…

Your entire post is self selection bias and survivorship bias. SWE field is one of the most cognitive dissonant social groups; cries foul at the slightest whiff their free speech and agency is being put upon; seeks to reduce blockers to their productivity, fewer PMs! Less management! Now complains about users using their machines without having to block on an SWE. Insert that quote about how someone will not see the…

It’s all fun and games until it happens to you…

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#98

Post by hamdingers »

wolfcola wrote: post #69
Shank wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All of the projects OP mentioned could be vibe coded for <$10 worth of GLM-4.7

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#99

Post by chasd00 »

theshrike79 wrote: post #56
oliwary wrote: post #12

This is a fun article and approach. Subscription apps often have to target a wide userbase. However, most users only need a small subset of the entire feature set, and would be better served by a tailored version. This means that vibecoded apps can get away with being much less complex (specific featureset, no login etc), while still being more useful. I have also created tools with LLMs that are exactly tailored to…

I had to download file attachments from a specific niche web forum that's behind login. I could've went looking for a browser plugin or a 3rd party tool to do it. Once again, it took me about an hour while watching my shows to get a custom one made. The first version operated by me downloading the pages one by one to a directory, the Python app parsed the html, downloaded the files and renamed according to thread nam…

That’s pretty great, I’ve done something similar by hand many moons ago. It was very tedious.

I need a simple S3 compatible API to store some files with basic auth and ssl certs using let’s encrypt. Nothing crazy, Garage is overkill, Minio is overkill. I may see if Claude code can handle that for me using python or something.

/btw, I work in consulting and the above project would have a budget of probably $100k and a schedule of 3 months. I see a lot of change for swe consultants coming.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#100

Post by cosmic_cheese »

Bishonen88 wrote: post #7
Shank wrote: 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…

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…

One-time purchase software would become dramatically more sustainable if platform churn could be ground to a halt. Most types of software achieved peak usability and functionality somewhere between 5 and 25 years ago and there wouldn't be much reason for anybody to upgrade if their one-time purchases continued to work in perpetuity. A substantial number even prefer e.g. Word 2000 or Photoshop CS1 over their modern incarnations but can't use those for either technical or legal reasons.

Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions.

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