Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

12 years ago I tried to make a simple app for myself. It would display bars that got smaller as the day/week/month got shorter, and would show the weather as a set of bars between max temp and min, cloud cover, etc.

I got it working well enough to display what I wanted in text and ascii, but I could never get the interface good enough to want to use it daily, and certainly couldn't get the graphical interface working. I threw it a Claude Code, told it what I wanted the graphical interface to look like, and let it run.

It got an app exactly what I wanted, and even found a bug in the date parser that I hadn't noticed. I now have it running in the corner of my screen at all times.

The next app I'm going to build is an iPhone app that turns off all my morning alarms when the kids' don't have school. Something I've wanted forever, but never could build because I know nothing about making iPhone apps and don't have time to learn (because of the aforementioned children).

Claude Code is brilliant for personal apps. The code quality doesn't really matter, so you can just take what it gives you and use it.

> Claude Code is brilliant for personal apps.

Agreed.

The clipboard manager I had been using on my Macs for many years started flaking out after an OS update. The similar apps in the App Store didn’t seem to have the functionality I was looking for. So inspired by a Simon Willison blog post [1] about vibe coding SwiftUI apps, I had Claude Code create one for me. It took a few iterations to get it working, but it is now living in the menu bar of my Mac, doing everything I wanted and more.

Particularly enlightening to me was the result of my asking CC for suggestions for additional features. It gave me a long list of ideas I hadn’t considered, I chose the ones I wanted, and it implemented them.

Two days ago, I decided I wanted a dedicated markdown editor for my own use—something like the new markdown editing component in LibreOffice [2] but smaller and lighter. I asked the new GPT 5.5 to prepare an outline of such a program, and I had CC implement it. After two vibe coding sessions, I now have a lightweight native Mac app that does nearly everything I want: open and create markdown files, edit them in a word-processing-like environment, and save them with canonical markdown formatting. It doesn’t handle markdown tables yet; I’ll try to get CC to implement that feature later today.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/27/vibe-coding-swiftui/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47298885

Could you share the source to your Markdown editor? I'm always looking for new ones

Drop me an email; I’ll be happy share the code privately. My contact information is on my website, which is linked from my HN profile.

Absolutely. I love building things, but sometimes I want something built. LLM assistance is great for when I want a personal tool, code quality be damned, for a specific purpose, without it taking over a weekend.

You don’t need to build an app. You can use the built in Shortcuts app.

create a shortcut that turns off all alarms. Can have it read your calendar or whatever as signal to determine if alarms should be on/off for a certain day/time and have it run at a regular schedule.

I could, but what's the fun in that!?

(But in seriousness, I hadn't considered using shortcuts. It's not clear it's extensible enough to do exactly what I want, but I'll look into it)

It’s tedious but likely possible.

If you really want to engage an LLM to help point it towards Cherri (https://github.com/electrikmilk/cherri) to help with implementation

Where's the fun in purchasing an app from Anthropic?

Co-working with AI is an important skill to learn these days. Similar to paying a bit for AWS for your personal projects as a good way to learn all the AWS tools for your career.

Meh. That's fine if you really don't want to build things, and are mainly concerned about increasing your market value.

If you like creating, buying software from Anthropic is boring as hell.

What is the skill that needs to be learned? I've been forced to vibe code everything at work, there's no skill required to ask Claude code to do something.

I think there's a difference in using claude code at work to resolve issues or user stories which are patching existing software and already define what is trying to be solved and what the acceptance criteria is versus using claude code to build something from scratch, where you are acting as an architect.

It leaves more room for skill expression when you're making architectural decisions, defining scope, and designing the application.

Keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better

I've found that adapting my thinking to how LLMs work best is a real friction point. If you're not doing that, it spits out junk. Your job just has low standards, get used to it.

Yes, realizing the fact that most jobs have low standards, and adapting to LLMs being good enough for these low standards is certainly a friction point. Giving up caring is hard.

But I thought LLMs democratize development?! Now AI is a “skill” that you have to pay for? Shocking!

They’re way more powerful than you except. I’ve recently rediscovered them and I really couldn’t find a use case for a custom iOS app that wasn’t covered by them.

Or, you know, you can just build an app. It's far easier and faster to make such an app with claude today than learning a so-called no-code tool.

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