Code is cheap. Personal software is next. — Blog

TL;DR. Code got cheap. Personal apps and open source seem to benefit most. One person can now cover the whole stack for a niche they actually care about.

Drew Breunig’s post about agentic coding helped me name the question: what should we do when code is cheap? His last lesson stuck with me: code is cheap, but maintenance, support, and security are not. That fits well with the idea of perfect software for an audience of one — if software is cheap enough, it does not need to serve a giant market. It can just fit one person, one team, or one friend group very well.<br>The trap is that the agent will type almost anything you ask for, even if it fights an earlier request or physics itself. So the real craft is understanding the problem well enough that the cheap code goes somewhere useful. Four small examples, starting with the least sensible one.<br>Hobby: a stupid app becomes real software<br>In my friend group we wanted to push ourselves to do more fitness, especially push-ups. At the same time we were playing too many casino-like games: Scritchy Scratchy, CloverPit, and even Schedule 1, which has a very profitable casino inside it.<br>So the obvious healthy decision was to build a fake gambling app for push-ups.<br>You post our catchphrase in the group chat. A Telegram bot sees it, reacts with a symbol, and stores the push-ups in a database. Later we can spend those push-ups together with items and daily cards to gamble for a weekly crown.<br>The boring part that makes the silly part possible: tracking what people actually did.Push-ups become currency. This is a very serious product, clearly.Items, cards, and charges gave the app just enough game shape to keep people checking in.The silly app became a real workflow once bugs and changes had to be handled safely.<br>- 100% +<br>Close

This is my favorite example because it crossed the line from “I built a toy” to “people actually use this”. Once that happens, the code is no longer cheap in the same way. If something breaks, someone complains. If the database changes, old data matters. If an agent edits the app, I need to know what it did.<br>So I added a small agentic development loop around it, built on GitHub Agentic Workflows. The app has a report button. Pressing it creates a GitHub issue with useful diagnostics. A coding agent picks that up, creates a pull request, and deploys a preview with a copy of the production database. Then a human reviews it before anything ships. That direct flow feels okay here because my friends helped shape the app, and they are developers too. The review is still done by people who understand the joke, the data, and the failure modes. The agent runs inside a guarded workflow instead of freestyling directly on production.<br>That is the part I did not expect to care about so much. The app is dumb. The workflow around it is not. Cheap code made the app possible. Care made it usable.<br>Art(ish): making my website feel more mine<br>I watched this great Sebastian Lague video about complex particle behavior and wanted to try something similar on my website. But shaders and particle systems are their own world. I like watching fire-like behavior, from Conway’s Game of Life to this amazing Particle Life demo, more than I like building every small detail by hand.<br>So I used agents to help me add small paper airplanes to the background of my personal website. They follow rules inspired by particle life and boids. Close airplanes pull together, each one has a different view radius, and they do not like being in too large a group. It is not a copy of the video. It is the same kind of idea, tuned until it felt like mine.<br>A small background detail, but exactly the kind of thing I would normally leave for later forever.<br>- 100% +<br>Close

This is where cheap code feels fun. The feature does not need a business case. It just makes the site more personal. It also has an easter egg if you stay long enough, because of course it does.<br>The hard part was not asking for “particle animation”. That is too vague. The hard part was taste: slower, less busy, more like paper planes, less like a screensaver. I had to keep saying what felt wrong.<br>The lesson: cheap code lets you try silly details. But taste is still manual.<br>Educational: showing people what their ETF really contains<br>I am very afraid of losing my hard-earned savings to the market gods. So I keep thinking about diversification: countries, industries, asset types, all of it. When I talk to friends, I often hear some version of “just buy S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, or MSCI World”. That may have worked well in the past, but it can hide a lot of concentration.<br>This is not investment advice. I just wanted a tool that makes the hidden allocation visible.<br>The idea became Build Your ETF: you describe the country and industry allocation you want, and the app tries to find an ETF mix that gets close to it. I had worked with Operations Research before, especially OR-Tools, so this looked like a...