Software for One

In Precious Little Sleep the writer says some half of babies sleep well and some half require help. We must have had the former and so there’s no advice to give. If you were in that set it’s possible that your actions changed something or it’s possible it’s just what it is.

Many people build calorie / macro tracker like OP but they don't build maintenance calorie tracker.

Your app tracks calorie intake, doesn't keep track of total calorie burn of the day (maintenance calorie tracking)

And no, calorie burn from watch is not good enough!

>A 2020 systematic review by Fuller et al. found that consumer wearables often perform poorly at estimating energy expenditure, even when they measure steps and heart rate reasonably well. Across brands like Apple, Garmin, Polar, and Withings, calorie burn estimates frequently showed substantial error, often in the 15–40% range and sometimes exceeding 50%. Wearables can still be useful for tracking trends, but not for precise calorie calculations.

Here's completely free one i built, https://macrocodex.app/ 16,000+ users already.

I ran across WebXDC this past weekend, and I'm intrigued. I've built a few apps on it already, and I'm very pleasantly surprised by how cleverly inverted the whole model is (in combination with ChatMail). Delta Chat is available on iOS, I believe. I use Arcanechat on Android.

https://webxdc.org/

https://chatmail.at/

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/delta-chat/id1459523234

https://arcanechat.me/

The beauty of the ecosystem is that apps are just zips of a webapp that is self-contained, and uses the webxdc api to message other copies of itself running on other folks' phones that are part of that chat group. Basically, the app communicates (and is distributed over!) the group chat (it's otherwise insulated from the internet). And because apps are just zipped webapps, they can be pulled apart, hacked on, and reassembled as needed for your group.

ChatMail relays tend not to retain info - they aren't hosts, they just relay encrypted messages (the platform mandates encryption). This sidesteps all the approval/review processes, and there is no app store or developer fee or even SDK. It's just folks trading apps and running them together.

It can't solve a lot of cases, but it solves some use cases (like a shared grocery list, or real-time card games, or games with leaderboards) really well.

A typical (in fact, the modal) line from the database, which goes back to April, is "oyakadon 1/2c rice, 2 thighs, 1/2 breast, 2 eggs, bunch broccolini, std oyakadon broth", and the model works out for itself that these are average-sized thighs and breast (boneless and skinless, because it's oyakadon). "std oyakadon broth" is a reference to a "house recipe", of which there's a side database, each costed by GPT5. There's a low/med/high adjuster on every entry; sometimes the thighs are bigger or smaller, for instance.

I've:

* Checked these against all three major frontier models and gotten the same macros breakdown within relatively tight bands

* Manually researched a couple of the most common recipes

* Run this system over many months against my most likely TDEE and reconciled against scale weight loss (which has been profound).

My confidence in frontier model's ability to generate "good enough, probably more than good enough" from this level of meal description is quite high.

Key simplifying assumption (for the model): I'm cooking most of my meals. I cook. I virtually never order out or eat packaged food of any sort. This would be a harder problem and the answers less reliable if I was giving it, like, "1/2 JP Graziano muffaletta, extra hot giardiniera".

You don't need to pay Apple $99.

You can make perfectly good apps that run great with a free account. They expire in a week instead of 3 months (for TestFlight builds). That's it. You can redeploy with minimal effort. You have to reauth with Apple every ~30 days. The reauth is the only part of that you can't have a cron job run (you need to authenticate the keychain).

For normie folks, the hoops here are mildly annoying. But if you're someone making vibe-coded apps, we're talking about two scripts and a cron job, here. Or just run Sideloadly, which I hear works pretty well.

There exist reasons to be annoyed by Apple's iOS security posture, but "I can't run my vibecoded apps" isn't an especially good one.