Ask HN: How much software do you build for yourself these days?

4 points by lellow 16 days ago | 10 comments

With the cost of building software continuing to drop, what have you found yourself doing more: using other people's software, or building it yourself?

I was thinking about this... I've built our family's financial system (it started as a simple budgeting tool, but now it tracks everything), a Mac app to create and edit videos, quite a few developer tools for personal use, a bunch of apps for my kids, some games, and so forth.

All of these already have plenty of commercial offerings in the market, and some have open-source alternatives, but the level of personalization I get by building them myself beats any argument (IMHO)!

Interested to see what others are doing. :)

PS: I've been writing software for 8 years (5 of them professionally).

boveyking 16 days ago |

I have built software for about 20 years, but most for customers. At that time, stackoverflow was our go to place. I did not visit stackoverflow for years now.

It is really possible to build software by one person. I have built 2 software recently. One is debate platform for high schooler. One is essay inspiration web app. Both for my son.

It was impossible to built with IDE manually in such short time.

We usually love OOP( Object Oriented Programming), now, we are almost becomes YOP( Yes Oriented Programming.)

markmatsushima 15 days ago |

I made a tool that extracts text from PDFs and translates it into Japanese with an LLM, mainly to help me study English documents.

A tiny frustration can now be enough motivation to build software, because you can just tell an LLM what you want.

In my case, I was frustrated with repeatedly asking chat AIs to “translate the next part” or “continue” when translating long documents. I also wanted almost word-by-word translation rather than completely smooth Japanese, because my purpose was to understand the original English.

Paid software probably has more features and works better, but using software I made for myself is more fun.

fullstick 16 days ago |

So many, probably pumping out 2-3 apps per month. I sometimes I'll make one that serves a purpose for one weekend. Or answers one question. Others I use every day.

Calorie tracker. Orienteering map generator. Help me track different loops for a 12 hour endurance race. A photo pixel location to paper canvas location in cm tool. Finding the geographic center of countries to settle a debate. Password generator. P2P webrtc texting app. Games. Ways to interact with my art. My personal website and more

softwaredoug 16 days ago |

In some ways I'm building too much software. It's too easy to get distracted by vibe coding a replacement for some SaaS I rely on. Only to have it be an 80% solution, without polish, and weeks later I'm back to just using the SaaS.

It's never been easier to get nerdsniped into silly work.

kypro 15 days ago |

While everyone is building more, I've found the amount of software I build now has dropped off a cliff. I haven't produced this little code since I was a young teen 25 something years ago.

I used to love building software which required solving difficult algorithmic problems then presenting it in a nice UX.

All the things I used to enjoy doing has become trivial for modern LLMs to the point where it's a pointless pursuit. I used to like spending days doing intense research and learning, then weeks working on challenging algorithmic problems, then at the end I could wrap it all in a fun UI.

I guess I could still do the UI bit, but there's just so many other creative, difficult and rewarding stuff I could be doing with my time now...

theflyinghorse 16 days ago |

I built a screen recorder for myself with LLMs. A calorie tracker. Now building this everything-webframework in Odin that's inspired heavily by BEAM's ideas (its a creative process for me, I don't have an end goal in mind)

boveyking 16 days ago | |

what is BEAM's ideas?

theflyinghorse 15 days ago | | |

The big ones for me are the actor processes sending each other messages, distributed processes where you can connect several nodes to each other very seamlessly and the processes within them communicate seemlessly! I’m not looking to rebuild OTP, I’m simply exploring ideas I couldn’t before

fco356pal 16 days ago |

Been writing code for 15 years. Now, I spent all my time defining specs, creating tests, and validating Claude’s/ChatGPT code (not reviewing, but validating with tests). The speed of development and quality of code is just amazing.

Doesn’t mean I don’t use existing code. In fact, LLMs tend to be great at finding existing libraries and reviewing potential sources should always be part of your prompt. Writing code from scratch is good for prototyping, but existing libraries tend to be much more robust and battle tested

drakonka 15 days ago |

Last year I built a currency conversion assistant for my company accounting, and this year I built a self-hypnosis app for myself. They were both fun projects, and the hypnosis one was a good lesson in releasing my first Android app as well even if I haven't bothered trying to actually market it.