Software for One
ajwaxman.com229 points by awaxman11 3 days ago
229 points by awaxman11 3 days ago
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?
As a new father, just using so many apps sounds exhausting, let alone building and maintaining them. I would have been very excited about these maybe 10-15 years ago. Now I just want the ability to do things with my phone when my hands are tied up holding the baby.
> maintaining them
In the agentic era, there is no need for maintenance - each artifact is immutable and just-in-time. In case you need a new version, spin up a new artifact.
I’m only half-joking.
As a father of two young children, LLMs have been kind of amazing. I’ve historically been someone who has project ideas and has fun building them. But for a few years now I just haven’t had the headspace for it — all I’ve wanted to do in the evening is relax for a bit.
In the past month I’ve completed a home dashboard idea I’ve had for years, I’ve built a house management system, a travel planning tool, a guitar chord annotator… it’s been very liberating. I’m not doing the coding, which was fun, but I am doing all of the system design and iteration, which I also really enjoy.
Similarly, I have giant list of ideas from the last 15 years that I’m now easily able to try or build out in ways I couldn’t before
That's an odd response, because fundamentally all I'm doing is making my computer work the way I want it to. It's the opposite of exhausting to me.
Nothing against what you are doing. That’s awesome and exactly the kind of thing I would nerd out about. I was just commenting on my current state of not having the mental bandwidth to do these things.
Most people want the convenience of things just working at the tap or click of a button. LLMs are not going to change that.
I was talking to my wife about this a little bit, that the promise of computers has never really been realized in the sense that we don't put power in the hands of the end user.
Like one of the most obvious things that a computer can do is run a task periodically at a time to go maybe fetch information and process it. And yet, the average computer user using any commercial operating system does not understand how to set up a recurring task. Operating systems don't really advertise it or talk about it as a feature. I think this is a good example of the disempowerment of end users by software companies.
LLMs have the potential to change this by allowing people to simply ask their LLM to invoke the right incantation to schedule the task or produce the program. That seems like a great change. I'd like to see more power in the hands of the end users rather than less.
For people that don't want to put in the effort, of course, this will change nothing. But for those that are willing to explore a little bit, I think it can be a big improvement over the software ecosystem that's emerged in the era of the app store.
The average user can and already does that. If they want to regularly fetch their emails and process them, they will install outlook or use the Gmail web app. If they want to regularly fetch and install updates for their games they will install steam.
The "run a task periodically" isn't the difficult part, it's processing the data that is.
And to be honest I don't think llms will empower that many people, the vast majority don't want to put the effort required (and it's definitely more effort than writing a one-shot prompt)
Those are just built in functions in the apps. I think we are more talking about custom automations like ”I want you to download the images on this site everyday and put them in this folder and send me a message on telegram with any new photos” or ”I wanna check this website for searches for X and when a match then message me”. An example I have seen is non-tech people before logging in to a saas app and manually copying numbers to a spreadsheet every single day forever. But with LLM:s they automated it to just work automatically in the background
Exactly. The users of e.g. autohotkey are in a vanishing minority. It's the kind of stuff I'd like to see advertised more in the OS, as though a product manager had on OKR to move that metric. Apps like Apple Music that emphasize consumption (and subscription revenue) get that treatment, but empowering apps that teach automation do not, since there's no (short term) business there.
I agree. It won't empower them because they've been trained to think they have no power.
I wasn't really talking about fetching email.
Most of the apps I've built take the form of "something I was doing with a long-running note in Notes.app that is now much simpler to deal with because there's a purpose-built program for it". That's what computer programs, like, are?
Tell me about it. Holding a 4mo old right now, nap trapped :-) Speaking of which - Claude Code wrote me a web proxy for HN that rewrites CSS for the dark mode - precisely for this situation. Written and deployed with Claude Code remote control too, also while nap trapped.
Make yourself a dashboard that pipes everything you want into the area reachable by one thumb. :)
Or with voice. Or even face movement control, like via the camera.
> 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".
how is AI (or a human for that matter) supposed to know what “woodworking-appropriate music is”? I had the same thoughts when spotify released their “let AI make a playlist for you”. Like, we already have recommender algorithms, why do we need to get a LLM involved?Maybe I just don’t understand woodworking and the connection it has to music though (I’m also the kind of person who’s had the same playlist for like the past 4 years)
But, I do want to say, personal app built just the way you like it, an alternative front end to a closed source ecosystem even, is super cool, and has been one of the things that AI coding has really enabled.
I’ve done a few project where I just give claude a har file and tell it to reverse engineer a cli from some web interface and it’s so powerful to be able to do stuff like that now
> how is AI (or a human for that matter) supposed to know what “woodworking-appropriate music is”?
It doesn't, but you'll believe it is because that's what you asked for. It's not like you have a solid test for what it is yourself
Guaranteed it would be unable to avoid searching for and selecting songs that specifically mention wood, woodworking, the shop, etc. It's like when you tell it to write something and give it a "vibe" or "mood" word wishing it could just give tone to the generated text, but instead it incorporates it literally.
Now, see, when AI does something like this, we call that "hallucination".
Thomas explained what he means in a sibling comment an hour before yours.
Because I played a bunch of music while doing woodworking stuff and asked for more like that. Things like this are easy with a simple agent loop. It's not picking random music out of the sky; it's working from my Apple Music library (and then expanding on it from the Apple Music catalog).
>I played a bunch of music while doing woodworking stuff and asked for more like that.
I would probably think about doing a little workspace sharing and ask for more live musicians to come in and do some serious woodshedding themselves ;)
I know some that are getting that buzz-saw sound out of their instruments fairly repetitively already, and there's no place to go but up :)
I'm a terrible woodworker (that's what makes it fun) and if I had a musician in our basement shop there is a very high likelihood I would kill them, or at least seriously fuck up their instrument, when I manage to shoot a wooden spear across the room because of miter saw kickback.
> Things like this are easy with a simple agent loop.
To be fair, they’re also easy (trivial, even) without one. It’s not like “play more music like this” is something we ever needed AI for.
> It’s not like “play more music like this” is something we ever needed AI for.
Borderline off-topic, but I love how fast the goal post moves. A decade or two ago "Similar music to this" was definitively in the realm of AI/ML, now it's some full-stack dev's afternoon to implement.
I don‘t think someone disputes that this is in the realm of AI/ML. I just think its questionable if this kind of usecase is genuinely something were an LLM is necessary or outshines the more traditional approaches
What are you even talking about? No, of course music recommendation systems had nothing to do with LLMs two decades ago (which is obviously the crux of the discussion), that is insane. And no one has said anything about a “full-stack dev's afternoon”, I’ll kindly ask that you don’t straw man. No goal posts are moving, that fallacy does not mean “argument I don’t like or understand”. What happened to good faith discussion? It’s ever more common on HN that someone will just invent some argument in their head, attack that, then act like they are the arbiter of reason when they couldn’t even understand the argument. That’s not interesting. Engage with what was said.
> What are you even talking about? No, of course music recommendation systems had nothing to do with LLMs two decades ago (which is obviously the crux of the discussion), that is insane.
Of course not, but just some years ago, when people talked about "AI" in ML circles, they weren't exclusively talking about LLMs, which you seemed to have automatically and exclusively associated "AI" with. It's much larger than just LLMs, although the ecosystem is flooded with LLMs at the moment. I thought this very movement, where tons of people, not just you, have this "AI === LLMs" association, when again, it used to not be so.
So, in other words, you read what one person (you’re not talking to some vague notion of “people” in the past) wrote, associated it with other arguments you’ve seen (and quite possibly misinterpreted) before and decided to lump everything together and answer those different arguments and be kind of snarky about it.
That attitude is exactly why online (and offline) discourse has gone in the gutter. Instead of addressing what was said and understanding nuance, you instead took the comment, labeled it in a preconceived box in your head, then attacked that group instead of engaging in good faith with the person you were talking to.
And by the way, I’m very much aware of the difference between AI and LLM, but whether you like it or not the terms are conflated today and being pedantic about it is a losing battle. In this case it was patently obvious what was meant. You’re (presumably) not an automaton and are thus (presumably) capable of understanding the difference, meaning you are definitely able to choose to steel man instead of straw manning.
> than attacked that group instead
What on earth are you on about?
Take a breath, I'm not arguing for/against anything at all, I conceded myself it's "borderline off-topic", you don't have to take it as I'm trying to challenge anyone's worldview or anything, it's basically an offhand observation.
> man instead of straw manning.
You may not actually understand what a "straw man" is, as I haven't even attempted to refute or engage in any argumentation at all.
Anyway, clearly a fruitless conversation to continue, I'm not sure who you're arguing against/for here, I didn't intended to even try to argue against/for anything here, so I'm just gonna peace out. Hope you enjoy the rest of your Saturday as much as I've enjoyed mine so far!