Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by guessbest 50 days ago
But who will buy it? No knocks against building old projects, but the market will be flooded with extremely speciality projects. I miss when every app had a spec on the box. I think we need something like that for usage. A new modeling language or something.
3 comments
roncesvalles 50 days ago
>the market will be flooded with extremely speciality projects

All the personal tools described in this thread are duct tape and bubblegum under the hood and nowhere near productionizable. That's what Claude Code makes for you.

The whole point is that for personal tools, code quality never really mattered since it's never going to be exposed to the public or be iterated upon by a revolving door team of devs like real software products. These are all highly overfitted tools that shave off like 15 seconds of time in the day for some particular person.

It's almost exactly like having a 3D printer for software, with exactly the kind of quality that a present-day 3D printer gives you.

link
zormino 49 days ago
I really like the 3d printer analogy. You can still make some pretty cool stuff, you can make some pretty complex things if you carefully design the whole system and put in the effort to print each part individually, and quality depends both on how good of a 3d printer you have and on the proper use of it. "3d print me a new house" is still a pipe-dream: you'll get some miniature facsimile of a house, sure, but a proper house requires proper tools and expertise.
link
zormino 50 days ago
Who cares? Nothing wrong with trying to make a product to sell, but projects dont have to be to sell. I've been having a blast lately working on an old game engine I started during covid and getting sidetracked into some new projects. None of them will ever make me a dime but I'm learning a ton and having fun.
link
tarr1124 50 days ago
Selling would be nice, but a lot of solo builders are mainly in it for the building. The note app I wanted didn't exist anywhere. I was close to hiring a contractor to build it, so it's already worth tens of thousands of dollars to me. I want to make a bit off it but not run a real business. No VC, no employees. If it earns enough to pay my own salary, I get to keep building it as my job, which beats most startup exit math. Reaching maybe 100 people with the same problem is the target.
link
guessbest 49 days ago
Do you have a link to the note app? Just curious what could make it unique, not criticizing anyone.
link
tarr1124 49 days ago
Honestly, "note app" is a stretch. What I wanted was a knowledge system modeled on PoIC, a Japanese index-card method that predated Evernote. I tried building it on Obsidian and other markdown tools for years and structured notes never stuck for me. I just wanted to talk into my phone and dump quick fragments, then have something extract knowledge and tasks out of them. LLMs and Claude Code closed most of the gap. Now journals, web clips, and daily deep-think sessions all land in it, and Claude Code semi-solves the tasks it pulls out. I'm probably ADHD and it seems to hit for that crowd. Most people would look at it and say "why not Obsidian" lol.

OSS, with the skill + CLI layer built around Claude Code: https://github.com/rillmd/rill

Mac app at https://rill.md/. Still very much in development. If you give it a spin, I'd love feedback either as a GitHub issue or right here.

link