Software for One

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?

This was really interesting, but I admit I bumped on this throwaway detail:

> Our sleep consultant's plan arrived as a PDF full of conditional logic: wake windows, nap caps, what to do when a nap fails

Every so often, you get a glimpse into a whole world you never knew existed.

I thought the opinion of this article was widely known by now, as every thread about AI here talks about personalized software built with vibe coding.

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.

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.

I'm building a podcast app just for me, because the podcast app I typically use (PocketCasts) is really good but there's just a couple of features I'd like and they don't bring out a lot of new features since it's not a monthly SaaS.

LLMs are a good help here because side projects typically slow down for me when I run into bugs / troubleshooting. So while I genuinely believe struggle is necessary for learning, being able to get over that hump to build something I need makes a big difference.

I'm not vibe coding the app though, since I actually want to know what it does. But I can see it being helpful for people who just need something and don't care about how it works.

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!

Can confirm. I spent maybe 5-6 hours rebuilding an app I did in WinForms (originally Java… I forget the framework, Swing or something?) as a web app for a small business. Nothing fancy, basic CRM with existing database ported to SQLite and hosted on a cheapo VPS. Pure Codex CLI play none of that Cursor Orca rubbish. They’re very happy with it. Responsive, dark mode, works even without JavaScript. Nice unit test suite, simple server-side rendered. The traditional way. It’s the cats ass. Additional 2 hours for a couple of new requested features. Whatever! Easy peasy.

At work the team is leaning be heavily into internal tooling. Doesn’t need heavy support. Doesn’t need a fancy designer. Duct tape glue and liquid wrench are more than enough. It’s quick enough that it’s throw away and so if need be we can always write a v2 without losing months or years of work. Just enough to be useful, and then back to actual work.

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 up. The fact that I cannot in 2026 extend Siri, for example, us infuriating.

Android is far more promising but Google recently shot themselves in the foot with their verified APK nonsense. Google's privacy posture is infamously nonexistent as well, and I have little interest in rooting a Pixel at my age.

Hopefully now that enough people can vibe code, these walls will crumble a bit.

"building personal software won't require a developer's stack for much longer."

I will if you are building anything good. What even is this statement?