8 comments

  • DreaminDani10 hours ago
    Great writeup and also a great example of where LLMs can step in to help fill the gaps in areas where you don&#x27;t have as much skill or interest. For instance, your wife used ChatGPT to come up with a name and you used AI to generate the admin flows that you weren&#x27;t interested in building.<p>Sounds like Flutter was a good technology choice too, given its flexibility across platforms. As a designer, I know how frustrating it can be that the Google and Apple interface guidelines aren&#x27;t too prescriptive but patterns vary so much across domains, that it&#x27;s better to do what you did and evaluate what others do to solve similar problems. Great work!
    • avicado0o31 minutes ago
      Flutter was good, but now with Liquid Glass™ I find react native (specifically expo) using expo-ui far far better at designing apps that match their native look and feel.
  • fmajid1 hour ago
    Manual data entry is just too unreliable and time-consuming. I don&#x27;t see how this could work short of integrating OBD-II fuel consumption data combined with some sort of presence tracking.
  • nottorp3 hours ago
    Hmm an app where you can count the users on your fingers, and where it&#x27;s not a big deal if it&#x27;s slightly wrong.<p>Safe to LLM generate it, unless you want to learn something in the process, in which case do whatever parts you want to learn about manually.<p>Had an 100% generated app with one user - me - on my phone&#x27;s home screen since some time last year.
    • avicado0o29 minutes ago
      im curious, what did your app do?
      • nottorp1 minute ago
        It has a button, records button presses for the last 7 days, saves them to local storage. Then it presents totals per day and detailed timestamps for today&#x27;s button presses.<p>This is how I described it to the LLM (which wasn&#x27;t even one of the coding assistants, just Gemini free). Not the exact prompt, that was more detailed, but that&#x27;s the idea. I did like 3 iterations just to add features, because everything worked the first time.<p>It&#x27;s a javascript app configured to work as a PWA on my phone&#x27;s home screen. I don&#x27;t know javascript or what a PWA is :)<p>The goal is to record when I smoke in hope that seeing the totals will help me cut down. Unfortunately what a LLM can&#x27;t solve is me remembering to open the damn app and press the button every time I light one, but at least I&#x27;m trying...
  • ottomanbob1 hour ago
    Interesting, was actually planning on setting up a carshare for our cul-de-sac in Honolulu. This is a great reference, thanks for sharing.
  • utopiah3 hours ago
    wow... so much yak shaving, including priceless bits like &quot;sat with ChatGPT for a bit [...] we came up with OurCar&quot; (I mean... how original is that, clearly powerful datacenters computing over a dump of the Internet was needed), I&#x27;m impressed.<p>All this to avoid doing one subtraction (km before, km now) then multiplication (result times average litter&#x2F;km) in your head.<p>That&#x27;s a LOT of effort to be lazy.
    • jeroenhd41 minutes ago
      The log for &quot;who took the car for how long when and did they fill it up&quot; seems to be much more relevant.<p>Nothing a notebook and a pencil can&#x27;t fix, of course, but an app is more fun.<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s laziness, I think it&#x27;s an excuse to do a personal hobby project. Makes perfect sense to me.
    • utopiah3 hours ago
      FWIW if I were to do this I&#x27;d do<p>echo &lt;input id=kmbefore&gt;&lt;input id=kmafter onleave=&#x27;alert( (kmafter.value - kmbefore.value) * priceperlitterperkm )&#x27;&gt;<p>&gt; index.html to make it available to anyone, Worldwide, for free!<p>For the fancy version I&#x27;d make priceperlitterperkm URL parameter to make it work not just for my area. But that&#x27;s like an entire additional like of code.<p>My point being... I&#x27;d make a Web page, on app, no deployment, no tracking.
      • utopiah1 hour ago
        PS : echo &quot;blabla&quot; &gt; index.html is actually becoming my new World reaching publishing method. I do have a home server with a Web server. I connect to it via ssh keys... so<p>ssh homeserver &#x27;echo hi &gt;&gt; &#x2F;var&#x2F;www&#x2F;self-published&#x2F;index.html&#x27; and voila. I&#x27;ll probably share my gist this way from the CLI.<p>ssh homeserver &quot;echo &#x27;$(ls)&#x27; &gt;&gt; &#x2F;var&#x2F;www&#x2F;self-published&#x2F;index.html&quot; if I want to run a command locally first, not on homeserver (notice the &quot; vs &#x27;).
  • koala-news1 hour ago
    Honestly, this is kind of the sweet spot for LLM-built apps.<p>Small thing, used by a few people, solves one annoying problem, and nobody really cares if it’s not “proper software”.
    • mettamage9 minutes ago
      It&#x27;s family software, haha
  • fragmede1 hour ago
    Integrate an OBDii dongle with Bluetooth and have the app read it from there.
  • throwy988884 hours ago
    Cool, glad you had fun building it.<p>Notably, the only parts of this that could not have been done by a well configured agent in a weekend with SOTA today is the futzing with app stores and the UX iterations.