krunkworx

So most AI companion apps have ridiculous privacy policies.

heres Replika's actual privacy policy (replika.com/legal/privacy):

"In your conversations with your AI companion, you may choose to provide information about your religious views, sexual orientation, political views, health, racial or ethnic origin, philosophical beliefs..."

and:

"...that information will be processed as part of your conversation data, including by third-party AI language model providers"

So your sexual orientation, mental health stuff, political views, the late-night spiral at 2am aree all sitting on Replika's servers, plus whatever third-party LLM provider they pipe it through, plus their contractors, plus whoever does trust & safety review. and thats the company being relatively transparent about it. Character.AI's chat logs are already showing up in subpoenas.

People dont talk to these apps the way they talk to ChatGPT. they tell them things they wouldnt tell their therapist. and that data is sitting in like 4 different companies infrastructure indefinitely.

wWats weird is the technical excuse is gone. Apples Foundation Models + Image Playground + on-device vision mean you can ship a companion app with memory and images that runs entirely locally on a recent iPhone. "models too big for on-device" was true 2 yrs ago, not really anymore.

So there's clearly a gap in the market. I built friendAI (friendai.pro) which I think is the safest AI companion out there.

Shilling is one piece of this post. The more interesting discussion is what this means. What does competition look like now? What will software look like in 1, 2, 5 years?

I'll walk you through what I did:

1. Codex setup the skeleton xcode project

2. I prompted it to add a sound for every keystroke and leave placeholder names for the audio

3. I recorded the audio of keystrokes and added to the folder codex told me to add to.

4. I then asked it to review the xcode project from the perspective of apple's app store policies. And then asked it to rectify them all.

5. I ensured there's no API calls or logging of keystrokes (this is arguable the main value add I had during the build)

6. Submitted to the app store. Passed review.

7. Codex for landing page and asked for placeholder images.

8. Submit to HN and have a beer giving a toast to the career I once had

This is a shill post. I don't care. I'm genuinely worried.

With codex gpt 5.2, I basically automated the entire pipeline for creating a mac app. From ideation, to build, to test to deploying and even responding to apple support.

Let me repeat. I didn't do anything.

Yet I created: www.thock.pro

Ridiculous.