OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
mendelgreenberg.com
OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
1–10 of 82 posts
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#2Great writeup and also a great example of where LLMs can step in to help fill the gaps in areas where you don't have as much skill or interest. For instance, your wife used ChatGPT to come up with a name and you used AI to generate the admin flows that you weren't interested in building.
Sounds like Flutter was a good technology choice too, given its flexibility across platforms. As a designer, I know how frustrating it can be that the Google and Apple interface guidelines aren't too prescriptive but patterns vary so much across domains, that it's better to do what you did and evaluate what others do to solve similar problems. Great work!
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#3Cool, glad you had fun building it.
Notably, the only parts of this that could not have been done by a well configured agent in a weekend with SOTA today is the futzing with app stores and the UX iterations.
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#4wow... so much yak shaving, including priceless bits like "sat with ChatGPT for a bit [...] we came up with OurCar" (I mean... how original is that, clearly powerful datacenters computing over a dump of the Internet was needed), I'm impressed.
All this to avoid doing one subtraction (km before, km now) then multiplication (result times average litter/km) in your head.
That's a LOT of effort to be lazy.
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#5wow... so much yak shaving, including priceless bits like "sat with ChatGPT for a bit [...] we came up with OurCar" (I mean... how original is that, clearly powerful datacenters computing over a dump of the Internet was needed), I'm impressed. All this to avoid doing one subtraction (km before, km now) then multiplication (result times average litter/km) in your head. That's a LOT of effort to be lazy.
FWIW if I were to do this I'd do
echo
> index.html to make it available to anyone, Worldwide, for free!
For the fancy version I'd make priceperlitterperkm URL parameter to make it work not just for my area. But that's like an entire additional like of code.
My point being... I'd make a Web page, on app, no deployment, no tracking.
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#6Hmm an app where you can count the users on your fingers, and where it's not a big deal if it's slightly wrong.
Safe to LLM generate it, unless you want to learn something in the process, in which case do whatever parts you want to learn about manually.
Had an 100% generated app with one user - me - on my phone's home screen since some time last year.
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#7Honestly, this is kind of the sweet spot for LLM-built apps.
Small thing, used by a few people, solves one annoying problem, and nobody really cares if it’s not “proper software”.
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#8Interesting, was actually planning on setting up a carshare for our cul-de-sac in Honolulu. This is a great reference, thanks for sharing.
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#9Integrate an OBDii dongle with Bluetooth and have the app read it from there.
Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family
#10Manual data entry is just too unreliable and time-consuming. I don't see how this could work short of integrating OBD-II fuel consumption data combined with some sort of presence tracking.