Tools Made In the Past Week
Loved the Lex On Tech post about the apps people vibe-coded to solve their own needs. Building for an audience of one has been a train I’ve been on for a long while, before the concept of AI coding agents came about. Their presence now has just made it easier, and made it feel less spending time of these things was time wasted.
This is a roundabout excuse to write about the tools I asked agents to build for me over the last week. They were:
- A CLI tool which takes a Markdown document, and converts it into a HTML preview assuming the house style used for technical documentation. There is also a sister tool which renders it as a PDF. Yes, this is essentially Marked, but I wasn’t aware that project at the time (HT @JohnPhilpin).
- A GUI tool used to fetch multiple records from DynamoDB. The user supplies a bunch of partition keys, the tool fetches all the records with those partition keys, and renders it in a table. For anyone that knows DynamoDB, it’s almost like a wrapper around BatchGet instead you’re not required to supply a sort key.
- Another GUI tool which would take two Markdown files, produce a diff, and renders the result like Word document in markup mode, with additions in green underline, and removals in red strikeout. This ended up being quite pricy to make, and I ended up not needing it in the end. I still have it around though so it could be useful in the future? 🤷
Also, being away hasn’t stopped me either. A few days ago, I made a small web-app to upload photos and videos from Google Photos into Micro.blog without the need to download them locally. Slow hotel Wifi speeds makes video uploads impossible, but this skips that completely. I select what I want to upload using Google’s picker and the backend does it in the background, complete with a proper data-centre internet connection.
The hardest part was faffing about with Google’s OAuth and API settings (I’m simply using a test mode with a single email enrolled, myself).
So yeah. A big week for vibe-coded tools built for one.