building random small things
At this point we all know that AI lets us build whatever we want when we want it. It’s especially nice when I have small things I want for myseelf and I wouldn’t have otherwise spent the time bootstrapping and polishing them to the point that they’re daily-drivable.
The reason I frequently feel the need for such tiny apps is that most things available at the top of whatever SEO optimized search are pretty bloated. For example, a fitness/macro tracker:
- MacroFactor
- 250MB! AI recognition of pictures of entire meals. Calculators I don’t want.
- MyFitnessPal
- Even bigger at 280MB! Ads, subscriptions, social features I don’t want.
- Stupid Simple Macro Tracker
- 130MB is better. I like that the premium version is a one time purchase. The UI is pretty crowded compared to what I need, but this actually seems decent.
Not that these apps are necessarily bad, they aren’t what I want. I jsut want a glorified notebook that would automatically sum some things up, and MAYBE automatically import data from a barcode or OCR the Nutrition Facts. This is something any AI coding agent could whip up in the background while I focus on something else.
local first
I really like local-first software. It is insanely responsive, it works in airplane mode and has better privacy. This is how I built Bookchoy and this is how I would build ~any mini app. sqlite runs everywheere and is fast.
what I made
- File based TODO/kanban board
- RSS reader with a localstorage based store for tracking what I read or bookmarked.
- Neovim plugin for doing Chinese-English dictionary lookups using LSP hover
Try them out yourself:
https://stevenctl.github.io/mini-apps/ https://github.com/stevenctl/bookchoy.nvim
or
# git clone git@github.com:stevenctl/mini-apps
git clone https://github.com/stevenctl/mini-apps
# try opening $pwd/index.html in your browser
# or for some apps, you need to run a webserver:
python -m http.server 9999
# then open http://localhost:9999 in your browser