alt Hacker NewsI have several personal tools I’ve built and maintained.
It’s always more work than it looks. You can get to mostly usable tools quickly if your request isn’t too difficult, but every time I use them I run into another thing that needs to be fixed, changed, clarified, or cleaned up.
It’s fun at first, but over time you realize you’re spending more time building the tools than using the tools to build the thing you originally wanted to work on.
I think personal software is best for highly specific tools or for things you need to use repeatedly for a very long time.
For something like a SketchUp competitor, I wouldn’t want to try to maintain my own. The number of edge cases and features is bigger than you imagine up front, and the vibecoded version that might appear a few hours after your prompt is going to be very far from the version you want to use.
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and when it works on your machine, but fail when exporting on an old macos 14, you only realize when someone tell you...
Why do you even maintain it if it's for you?
I have lot of tools that work for me.
When externalities break them, it's usually one prompt to fix them.
My experience has been the opposite. I have two vibe coded tools that I use frequently and I spent a few weeks of occasional prompting and now they are basically done. I haven't touched the code for one of them for a month and I use it most days.
To be fair neither is quite as complex as a whole 3D modeller.
Isn't the whole argument that ai-driven code will reduce the time spent building because AI can do it now? And a SketchUp competitor by defintion will not be personal software just like SketchUp is not.
I’ve been using the vibecoded Lightroom clone and it’s 5000 commits and around 20 releases in yet still has countless issues and missing features. I feel like it will get there eventually but the idea that you should just vibe up your own Lightroom rather than using an existing one is absurd with today’s tech. It’s still a massive amount of work even if it is way faster than ever before.
The vibecoded apps all rely on an army of users exploring the program and reporting all the bugs and edge cases. You don’t want to be doing that on your own.