This aligns with the hypothesis that we should see and lots lots of "personalized" or single purpose software if vibe coding works. This particular project is one example. Are there a ton more out there?
I always wanted a dedicated binary anyway, so 1 hour later I got: https://github.com/emilburzo/pushbulleter (10 minutes vibe coding with Claude, 50 minutes reviewing code/small changes, adding CI and so on). And that's just one where I put in the effort of making it open source, as others might benefit, nevermind the many small scripts/tools that I needed just for myself.
So I share the author's sentiments, before I would have considered the "startup cost" too high in an ever busy day to even attempt it. Now after 80% of what I wanted was done for me, the fine tuning didn't feel like much effort.
So yes there is a ton but why bother publishing and maintaining them now that anyone can produce them? Your project is not special or worthwhile anymore.
These are all things I could do myself but the trade off typically is not worth it. I would spend too much time learning details and messing about getting it to work smoothly. Now it is just a prompt or two away.
Last weekend I had a free hour and built two things while sat in a cafe:
- https://yourpolice.events, that creates a nice automated ICS feed for upcoming events from your local policing team.
- https://github.com/AndreasThinks/obsidian-timed-posts, an Obsidian plugin for "timed posts" (finish it in X minutes or it auto-deletes itself)
This is currently the vibe on consulting, possible ways to reduce headcount, pun intended.
Just an hour ago I "made" one in 2 minutes to iterate through some files, extract metadata, and convert to CSV.
I'm convinced that hypothesis is true. The activation energy (with a subscription to one of the big 3, in the current pre-enshittification phase) is approximately 0.
Edit: I also wouldn't even want to publish these one-off, AI-generated scripts, because for one they're for specific niches, and for two they're AI generated so, even though they fulfilled their purpose, I don't really stand behind them.
Okay but lots of us have been crapping out one off python scripts for processing things for decades. It's literally one of the main ways people learned python in the 2000s
What "activation energy" was there before? Open a text file, write a couple lines, run.
Sometimes I do it just from the interactive shell!
Like, it's not even worth it to prompt an AI for these things, because it's quicker to just do it.
A significant amount of my workflow right now is a python script that takes a CSV, pumps it into a JSON document, and hits a couple endpoints with it, and graphs some stats.
All the non-specific stuff the AI could possibly help with are single lines or function calls.
The hardest part was teasing out python's awful semantics around some typing stuff. Why is python unwilling to parse an int out of "2.7" I don't know, but I wouldn't even had known to prompt an AI for that requirement, so no way it could have gotten that right.
It's like ten minutes to build a tool like this even without AI. Why weren't you before? Most scientists I know build these kind of microscripts all the time.
Example: I rebuilt my homelab in a weekend last week with claude.
Setup terraform / ansible / docker for everything, and this was possible because I let claude all the arguments / details. I used to not bothered because I thought it was tedious.