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OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

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Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#11

Post by utopiah »

utopiah wrote: post #5
utopiah wrote: post #4

wow... 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.

PS : echo "blabla" > index.html is actually becoming my new World reaching publishing method. I do have a home server with a Web server. I connect to it via ssh keys... so

ssh homeserver 'echo hi >> /var/www/self-published/index.html' and voila. I'll probably share my gist this way from the CLI.

ssh homeserver "echo '$(ls)' >> /var/www/self-published/index.html" if I want to run a command locally first, not on homeserver (notice the " vs ').

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#12

Post by jeroenhd »

utopiah wrote: post #4

wow... 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.

The log for "who took the car for how long when and did they fill it up" seems to be much more relevant.

Nothing a notebook and a pencil can't fix, of course, but an app is more fun.

I don't think it's laziness, I think it's an excuse to do a personal hobby project. Makes perfect sense to me.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#13

Post by avicado0o »

DreaminDani wrote: post #2

Great 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…

Flutter was good, but now with Liquid Glass™ I find react native (specifically expo) using expo-ui far far better at designing apps that match their native look and feel.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#14

Post by avicado0o »

nottorp wrote: post #6

Hmm 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.

im curious, what did your app do?

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#16

Post by nottorp »

avicado0o wrote: post #14
nottorp wrote: post #6

Hmm 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.

im curious, what did your app do?

It has a button, records button presses for the last 7 days, saves them to local storage. Then it presents totals per day and detailed timestamps for today's button presses.

This is how I described it to the LLM (which wasn't even one of the coding assistants, just Gemini free). Not the exact prompt, that was more detailed, but that's the idea. I did like 3 iterations just to add features, because everything worked the first time.

It's a javascript app configured to work as a PWA on my phone's home screen. I don't know javascript or what a PWA is, I just told the LLM make it into a PWA and it generated the extra files and told me how to set them up on my web server.

The goal is to record when I smoke in hope that seeing the totals will help me cut down. Unfortunately what a LLM can't solve is me remembering to open the damn app and press the button every time I light one, but at least I'm trying...

Edit: and just for the record, in spite of the above I still think 95% of the "AI" evangelism is lies, bullshit and stuff like that.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#17

Post by darkwater »

utopiah wrote: post #5
utopiah wrote: post #4

wow... 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.

  echo 

 > index.html to make it available to anyone, Worldwide, for free!
You are conveniently leaving out that you already must have:

* a server running 24/7 on the internet, paid for each month

* purchased, setup and keep paying every year a domain name

* configured a web server in that server, ideally with automated SSL certificate issue and renewal

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#18

Post by e12e »

darkwater wrote: post #17
utopiah wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

echo > index.html to make it available to anyone, Worldwide, for free! You are conveniently leaving out that you already must have: * a server running 24/7 on the internet, paid for each month * purchased, setup and keep paying every year a domain name * configured a web server in that server, ideally with automated SSL certificate issue and renewal

That, or know that https://neocities.org/ exists.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#19

Post by nkrisc »

nottorp wrote: post #16
avicado0o wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

im curious, what did your app do?

It has a button, records button presses for the last 7 days, saves them to local storage. Then it presents totals per day and detailed timestamps for today's button presses. This is how I described it to the LLM (which wasn't even one of the coding assistants, just Gemini free). Not the exact prompt, that was more detailed, but that's the idea. I did like 3 iterations just to add features, because everything worked t…

Every time you finish a pack, save it. Seeing the empty packs will be more impactful. And they’ll take up space as an additional consequence of smoking more.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#20

Post by avicado0o »

nottorp wrote: post #16
avicado0o wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

im curious, what did your app do?

It has a button, records button presses for the last 7 days, saves them to local storage. Then it presents totals per day and detailed timestamps for today's button presses. This is how I described it to the LLM (which wasn't even one of the coding assistants, just Gemini free). Not the exact prompt, that was more detailed, but that's the idea. I did like 3 iterations just to add features, because everything worked t…

Oh nice! kinda funny story : I wanted the exact same thing as you a while ago so I used 'inhaler usage' on apple health app as a proxy for cigarette counter.

Also i know cigarettes & vapers do not always mix, but man I do always dream of creating a vape that can be set to a limited number of puffs/hour. It's probably the only way of actually controlling it or at least warning you, like you mentioned.

But still, fun that we can make these apps so easily now!

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