I’ve been doing a lot of AI-assisted coding both at work and at home lately, and am noticing what I think is a positive trend. I’m working on projects that I’ve wanted to do for a while, years in some cases, but never did. The reason I never did them was because they just didn’t seem like they were worth the effort. But now, as I become a better vibe coder, that effort has dropped rapidly, while the value remains the same. Even further, the value might actually be more, because I can take it even beyond MVP levels and get it to be really useful.
Case in point: I do a lot of DIY renovation work and woodworking (though not enough of the latter). I use a lot of screws and other hardware, and it can be very disruptive to run out. I try to stay organized and restock pre-emptively, but it’s easy to run out. What if there was an app that was purpose-built for tracking this, that made checking and updating inventory as simple as possible, and made it easy to restock? Even better, what if it was written exactly how I track my screws, and had all of the defaults set to the best values for me? Better still, what if it felt like the person who wrote it really understood my workflow and removed every unnecessary click or delay?
Anyone familiar with app development knows that once you get into the domain-specific details and UX polish necessary to take something from good to great, the time really skyrockets. Screws have different attributes than nails, or hinges, or braces, or lumber. People do things in different ways, and if you miss one use case, they won’t use it. If you cover everything, it’s hard to use and doesn’t feel magical for anyone. You could knock out a very basic version in a few nights, maybe 10 hours, but this wouldn’t do much more than a spreadsheet, which is probably what you’ll go back to as soon as you find some bug or realize you need to refactor something. To make this thing delightful you’re likely in the 50-100 hour range, which is maybe in the embarrassing range when you tell your friends you just spent a month of free time writing an app to keep track of how many screws you have in your basement.
With the current crop of tools like Claude Code and Gemini CLI, that MVP takes 20 minutes, and you can do it while watching the Red Sox. Another hour and it’s in production, and starting to accrue some nice-to-have features, even if the Rays played spoiler and beat the Sox. It works great on desktop and mobile, it safely fits on the free tiers of services like Firebase and Vercel so it’s basically maintenance-free. One more hour while you’re poking around YouTube and you’ve got a fairly polished tool you’re going to use for a while.
I think most people probably have a deep well of things they’d like to have, that never made any financial sense, and probably aren’t interesting to anyone else. We’ve probably even self-censored a lot of these things so we’re not even coming up with as many ideas as we could. But when the time/cost drops by 90% or more, and you can take something from good to great, and have it tailored exactly to you, it’s a whole new experience.
The term “personal computing” went out of style decades ago, and now it feels like we’re all doing the same things in the same way with the same apps, but maybe it’s time to start thinking for ourselves again?