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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

#151

Post by beoberha »

3D30497420 wrote: post #34

I'm doing something very similar (creating my own apps for personal use), but I'm creating iOS apps primarily. Here's what bugs me: I cannot permanently install my apps to my iPhone because of Apple's walled garden. I need to reinstall every 7 days and constantly re-confirm that I am a "Trusted" developer. I know I can pay Apple 100 USD a year for a developer account, but I bought this phone outright 7 years ago , I…

I had never written an iOS app until a couple months ago and was initially very put off when I hit the same wall. The alternative is to host on a cheap VPS and find some way to prevent other people from using your app. When you cost it out, it's close enough to the 100 bucks a year for the Apple account. However, the kicker for me is the side loading process. Way too much headache compared to a deploy script that has my changes running nearly instantly.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#152

Post by mcgrath_sh »

ed_mercer wrote: post #113

> I would never sell it as a product I wonder why people still hold a lot of stigma against something that was built assisted by an LLM.

I don't think it is "a stigma against something that was built assisted by an LLM." I think the author is coming at it in the same way I do with some similar tools: "this is good enough for me, I am the end user, and I don't have the time or desire to iron out a bunch of edge cases or make things for more than one user."

I am rewriting my website. I was using a converted Pelican template. I started the rewrite using variables similar to the template, then about halfway through, I realized, "this is dumb. I am the only user. I care about nobody else. I can hardcode nearly all of this, and if I want a change, change the hardcoded name." An example of this was various social media names.

I have scripts that convert color themes for applications from more popular themes to a theme I particularly like. I hard-coded the input colors and output colors. I could have made a config file, etc, but, that adds complexity and, more importantly *I do not care about other users.*

There is a huge leap between "good enough for me to use for exactly my use case" and release or sell as a product.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#154

Post by 3rodents »

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…

dimator captured the point I was hoping to make, more eloquently than I could hope to. I defer to their comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46725512

That said, to address your broader point: me, personally, I am thrilled that the barrier to entry for building software has been all but eliminated. The joy of creation belongs to us all.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#155

Post by carlosjobim »

throwup238 wrote: post #150
carlosjobim wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's the standard of value other SaaS companies have to beat and very few do. Of course it isn't. Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value. They can be anything from good value, to average value to low value. And products / services are of course not comparable just because they are subscription based, or used on a digital device. Gas has a fantastic value, one…

> Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value. Sorry, but no. If they're worse value than my email and password providers which my digital life revolves around and who only charge me $5/mo each, then yes those products are a bad value. I pay $3,000/yr for Altium, $200/mo for Claude Max, $60+/mo for ad-free streaming, and begrudgingly $50/mo for Adobe so I'm not agains…

Then you cannot ever buy a cup of coffee, because it's also very bad value compared to Fastmail. Or a beer.

> The vast majority of SaaS I look at are hardly worth two bucks a month, let alone tens.

Then why are you looking at them,

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#156

Post by [deleted] »

izzylan wrote: post #145
pixl97 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Didn’t see you all halting as you decimated travel agent jobs, retail jobs, etc etc. You have to remember that SWE's are the same group that screams "communism" the first moment you mention the word union and they should have the right to make as much money as possible with no restrictions. This of course leads to the obvious lack of self reflection in their responses when something threatens their future income.

Labor unions align themselves well with Marxist thought and both are pretty based. I'm not a SWE because I like money. I'm an SWE because I love programming.

[deleted]

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#157

Post by gbear605 »

ThatMedicIsASpy wrote: post #127
quest88 wrote: post #108

Excellent! I've done the same thing. Five prompts to have a working iOS app that solves my problem.

As a non iOS user wouldn't be the hard part getting it on the phone? The last time I checked you would still need apple hardware and 100$ per year for the developer license or something like that.

Technically you can upload it to your phone for free, but you have to re-upload it every seven days, which makes it pretty frustrating.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#158

Post by pixl97 »

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.

For most OSS code there is no responsibility to share your changes when you're not distributing them to other people. More so there are plenty of OSS licences that simply allow other people to do just this.
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