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Software for One

ajwaxman.com

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Re: Software for One

#11

Post by pornel »

fny wrote: post #2

This is such a romantic idea, but unfortunately Apple and Google are hostile to this model. Of the two, iOS is /worst/ for running vibe coded apps. You need to pay $99 a year to be an Apple developer if you want your app to live on your phone for more than a a week. Distribution is a also pain in the ass even for personal use alone (you can't just toss around an IPA). Finally, so many useful APIs are totally locked u…

App Store will be the place to download apps you can't avoid, like your bank's client.

For personal apps, the locked down stores are making themselves irrelevant. When you have software for one person, you don't want to publish it there. You want to bypass the gatekeepers.

Re: Software for One

#12

Post by rvz »

fny wrote: post #2

This is such a romantic idea, but unfortunately Apple and Google are hostile to this model. Of the two, iOS is /worst/ for running vibe coded apps. You need to pay $99 a year to be an Apple developer if you want your app to live on your phone for more than a a week. Distribution is a also pain in the ass even for personal use alone (you can't just toss around an IPA). Finally, so many useful APIs are totally locked u…

> You need to pay $99 a year to be an Apple developer if you want your app to live on your phone for more than a a week.

No complaints over paying more than >$100 a month in subscriptions with coding agents but $99 a year is some how too much?

Yet another reason why “developers” are just consumers that are selective complainers that want their tools to cost $0.00.

Clearly as already stated in the article, hosting and distribution is not free.

Re: Software for One

#13

Post by pornel »

This mitigates problems with LLMs' low quality code. For a single user, the bar is much lower. The app doesn't have to have all the features that work for everyone's edge cases, implemented in a way that other devs can maintain. It only needs to be good enough for one user, and can be discarded and recreated when it gets too messy.

Re: Software for One

#14

Post by Georgelemental »

fny wrote: post #2

This is such a romantic idea, but unfortunately Apple and Google are hostile to this model. Of the two, iOS is /worst/ for running vibe coded apps. You need to pay $99 a year to be an Apple developer if you want your app to live on your phone for more than a a week. Distribution is a also pain in the ass even for personal use alone (you can't just toss around an IPA). Finally, so many useful APIs are totally locked u…

> rooting a Pixel at my age

Don't do that, that's a PITA. Put GrapheneOS on it instead—simple, no hassle, works great

Re: Software for One

#15

Post by tptacek »

Things I've built in the last month or so:

* A personal music player for Apple Music with an embedded agent loop, so I can say things like "I'm going to work in the wood shop, play woodworking-appropriate music and keep the playlist full and non-repeating indefinitely".

* A calorie/protein tracker that takes 1-liner summaries of meals, resolves them to macros with GPT5 calls, and tracks them in SQLite.

* A macOS menubar combined Apple TV and Roku TV remote control.

* A calculator front-end to SageMath that renders Latex math notation and has point/click shortcut affordances for linear algebra and MVC.

* A "self driving wiki" macOS desktop llmwiki that imports and digests PDFs.

* A menubar tracker for the little temperature sensors I have scattered all throughout the house so I can click my menubar and instantly see the temps in the different rooms of the house.

* A layout tool for designing picture frames to get cut lists and rabbet depths and stuff.

That's just the desktop stuff. These applications are generally better than what I'd get from the App Store. The calorie tracker is one of the better-designed apps on my dock.

I feel like I'm not doing this enough yet, it hasn't fully sunk in, and I'm going to be building a lot more stuff when it does sink in. I haven't yet gotten to the point of writing my own note-taking application (still Bear.app for that), but how long can that last?

Re: Software for One

#16

Post by epihelix »

fny wrote: post #2

This is such a romantic idea, but unfortunately Apple and Google are hostile to this model. Of the two, iOS is /worst/ for running vibe coded apps. You need to pay $99 a year to be an Apple developer if you want your app to live on your phone for more than a a week. Distribution is a also pain in the ass even for personal use alone (you can't just toss around an IPA). Finally, so many useful APIs are totally locked u…

It still holds for the desktop, though. LLMs have helped me quickly code new software for lab equipment (total users ~6), a research tool for my partner, and for several desktop apps I just use for me.

Two apps fill niches that I've wanted to code myself (one, I've wanted to code for the last twenty years on and off), but have never had the time to do so. Now, the speed from thought to working prototype is insane (less than an hour); it then takes a few days of occasional work to turn that prototype into something architecturally sound and half-decent.

And after that... well, I just keep improving, refactoring, refining, because it's so much fun.

Re: Software for One

#17

Post by matheusmoreira »

pornel wrote: post #13

This mitigates problems with LLMs' low quality code. For a single user, the bar is much lower. The app doesn't have to have all the features that work for everyone's edge cases, implemented in a way that other devs can maintain. It only needs to be good enough for one user, and can be discarded and recreated when it gets too messy.

Resolves the copyright nonsense too.

Programmers want you to review and own the code or they'll dismiss it as slop. Then the lawyers come in and say that doesn't give you copyright over the result. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Maybe it's better to just stop publishing stuff. If everything is uncopyrightable slop, the rational move is to just keep it to ourselves. So much for the free and open source software commons.

Re: Software for One

#18

Post by matheusmoreira »

fny wrote: post #2

This is such a romantic idea, but unfortunately Apple and Google are hostile to this model. Of the two, iOS is /worst/ for running vibe coded apps. You need to pay $99 a year to be an Apple developer if you want your app to live on your phone for more than a a week. Distribution is a also pain in the ass even for personal use alone (you can't just toss around an IPA). Finally, so many useful APIs are totally locked u…

Which is why computer freedom is so important it needs to be enshrined into law. Stuff like remote attestation, locked down boot loaders and "app stores" need to be made literally illegal. Ownership of the computer should be a constitutional right.

Re: Software for One

#19

Post by raajg »

the post on BoopSnoop was very impactful for me too! As a software engineer, it's drilled into your brain that you have to think about high scalability and user facing products. I used to have a lot of ideas, but the first instinct was always to build a paid user facing product. None ever got built. But after reading that post a few years ago, my mindset was completely flipped. Since then I've built umpteen tools, services, macOS menubar apps, tail scale services .. just for myself. And I love it!

Re: Software for One

#20

Post by botiomez »

Yup! Can confirm, I wanted to blog, but I wanted it to work in a certain way to let me focusing on writing that no single system had, or cost too much.

Now I'm actually doing it.

I've had an idea for how I want to be social with friends and family (a website, but setup within my vision). Now it's done

Could I have done all of these things on my own or just paid for existing services? Yes

But now AI can do it for me while I watch TV. I just show up to test.

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