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Re:What I Learned Making an App for My Family by nottorp on Thursday May 07, 2026 @02:48AM (#48046227)
Hmm an app where you can count the users on your fingers, and where it's not a big deal if it's slightly wrong.

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.

Had an 100% generated app with one user - me - on my phone's home screen since some time last year.

Re:What I Learned Making an App for My Family by avicado0o on Thursday May 07, 2026 @05:35AM (#48047325)
im curious, what did your app do?
Re:What I Learned Making an App for My Family by nottorp on Thursday May 07, 2026 @06:02AM (#48047511)
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's button presses.

This is how I described it to the LLM (which wasn't even one of the coding assistants, just Gemini free). Not the exact prompt, that was more detailed, but that's the idea. I did like 3 iterations just to add features, because everything worked the first time.

It's a javascript app configured to work as a PWA on my phone's home screen. I don't know javascript or what a PWA is, I just told the LLM make it into a PWA and it generated the extra files and told me how to set them up on my web server.

The goal is to record when I smoke in hope that seeing the totals will help me cut down. Unfortunately what a LLM can't solve is me remembering to open the damn app and press the button every time I light one, but at least I'm trying...

Edit: and just for the record, in spite of the above I still think 95% of the "AI" evangelism is lies, bullshit and stuff like that.

Re:What I Learned Making an App for My Family by avicado0o on Thursday May 07, 2026 @06:16AM (#48047598)
Oh nice! kinda funny story : I wanted the exact same thing as you a while ago so I used 'inhaler usage' on apple health app as a proxy for cigarette counter.

Also i know cigarettes & vapers do not always mix, but man I do always dream of creating a vape that can be set to a limited number of puffs/hour. It's probably the only way of actually controlling it or at least warning you, like you mentioned.

But still, fun that we can make these apps so easily now!

Re:What I Learned Making an App for My Family by nkrisc on Thursday May 07, 2026 @06:14AM (#48047591)
Every time you finish a pack, save it. Seeing the empty packs will be more impactful. And they’ll take up space as an additional consequence of smoking more.
Re:What I Learned Making an App for My Family by nottorp on Thursday May 07, 2026 @06:27AM (#48047692)
I'll try any advice but that doesn't really work for me because I already save them.

One day I'll run into something that works for me...

Re:What I Learned Making an App for My Family by chabad360 on Thursday May 07, 2026 @07:11AM (#48047993)
I don't strictly disagree, but as I mentioned in the article, those weren't really an option at the time. Claude code was nascent and not very reliable, and I actually like writing code sometimes, heck, I'm currently rewriting this site by hand.