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