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Comment by coffeecoders | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been vibe-coding replacements for the tools I actually use every day. So far: a Notepad, a REST client, a snipping tool, a local gallery and lightweight notes for iPhone.

The motivation isn't novelty. It's control. I don't need ads, onboarding flows and popups, AI sidebars, bloated menus, unnecessary network calls , etc. A notepad should never touch the network. A REST client shouldn’t ship analytics or auto update itself mid-request.

No plugin system. No extensibility story. Just plain/simple software.

As I build these, I have been realizing how much cognitive overhead we’ve normalized in exchange for very little utility.

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Bespoke apps that would normally be too time‑consuming to justify building are a perfect use case for LLMs. A few that I've built already.

- Pre-AI Image Search – find images on the web with upload dates prior to 2022

- HN Notifier – a Mac menu bar app that shows toast notifications for Hacker News submissions containing topics of interest to me

- Comic Display – serves CBR/CBZ archives or image folders over LAN so they can be read on mobile devices

I think this is a huge use case for vibe coding, and something I’m excited to do more in 2026.

There are so many apps I want, that companies are not incentivised to build for me.

Starting from scratch or did you try to start from some open-source tools? I'm sure there are dozens of note-taking apps on f-droid for instance.

big fan of this and have been doing similar. i just got to a good state with my Linear clone app. im planning to do a REST client soon, how'd that go for you?

Nice, Linear is a perfect target for this mindset.

The REST client went surprisingly smoothly once I committed to keeping it boring.

I'm building Mac apps in Xcode, and I keep multiple small apps in a single Xcode project with a few shared libraries (basic UI components, buttons, layout helpers, etc. to keep all my apps similar).

The REST client is literally just another target + essentially one extra file on top of that. No workspaces, no collections, no sync, no plugins. Just method, URL, headers, body, hit send, show response. Requests are saved and loaded as plain local JSON.

What surprised me is how little code is actually required once you strip away "product features".

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