AI & The Age of Transient Apps (Ep. 165)

Welcome to Never Rewrites. I'm Isaac Askew. And I'm Jeff Sherman. And today, we're going to talk about the future of transient software. Uh so, before we kicked off the show, Isaac was telling me how he's in a band and he needed software to track their performances and how much they suck. And Hey, [laughter] I didn't word it that way. Uh you did not, but I needed to liven it up. Mhm. Uh no, they practice, as you all should if you want to get good at something, and they need to keep track of how they're doing with their songs. And so, he Mhm.

vibe coded a piece of software with a single prompt and it solves this single thing. And now he's going to use it with his prac band practice band for their practices, but it's not a business, right, Isaac? Mhm. Yeah, there's not much of a reason to make it a business because it's like a single prompt created it. So, anybody who wanted to be my competitor would [laughter] just prompt it themselves, you know?

When you described it, here here is how I in my mind I would build such a thing if I was going to build it manually in the old-school way, right? I'd probably use Google Forms to input my data, and then I would have See, then you'd have to have some kind of visualization. So, okay. Well, I'm back I'm immediately back to I need a, you know, a three-tier Yeah. uh CRUD app where there's a database of songs and how many times we performed them and how we feel about them, and a a dashboard that says, "These are the songs.

This is how we feel about them." And then some kind of input page that says, you know, "This is the practice date, and this is the times we recorded them, and this is how we feel about them." It would still take you a day to build all those things. Yeah. You know, over time, and you'd probably have to spend $10 a a to keep all those services running on the cloud. So, how what is what under the covers, right? So, you you prompted it and it wrote all the code, how does it work?

Like, where's the Well, let me let me first start with the problem, I guess. What we had done is we had like a a Word doc and I just shared the Word doc with everybody and we we would all go on the Word doc and like add song ideas that we wanted to cover and then we'd like kind of I found out like there is a voting feature for people like you can suggest something and people can vote on that. But, it's like sold on a particular type of Google Doc account, like the education account versus the business account.

And I had access to the business account, but not access to voting through that. And I realized they were like, Google has done some kind of thing where they've hidden some really useful thing that would be nice to vote on an idea or like emoji thumb respond to suggestion or something like that. Um so, I I got kind of annoyed with them. I'm like, man, they're like I'm trying to nickel and dime for all these little things. [snorts] Um so, we would just go in there and update it with like a number next to it or just put our initials next to it.

Like, this is very manual. Like, we like the song and then we'd have another tab and the tab would be here are the songs that we're ready that we're going to have in our full set list and some other songs that we just added and some things that we, you know, we we might have like a little note here and there or a comment that's like we're not, you know, the drummer doesn't have this one down yet or uh one of the guitarists hasn't learned the solo for this one yet, something like that. Um and so, not ready to perform.

Not ready to perform and I would just I would send everybody a group text, "Hey, can you go in there and add some songs or is everyone good with this?" And sometimes people would do it and sometimes people wouldn't, so I couldn't really tell. And then uh you know, after a while I was like, you know, I think I can just write code in an app for this cuz I, you know, it didn't it wasn't until it become until like this friction point of like, "Okay, I'm not getting feedback from some people.

I don't know where everyone's at on the new ones." It wasn't until we really added a whole new series of songs. We actually got invited to play a full set, so we don't suck, Jeffrey. Um and so we didn't have enough songs to fill the set. And so we're like, let's add a bunch of songs and then that's when we really needed to start tracking the progress because we're like, we want to fill up an hour as soon as we can. Where are we at? Um so I took a very small prompt.

Actually, I took the the word doc and I like command A, you know, selected everything, copied and pasted it into the prompt. It was like, this is how I'm managing my band currently. These are the songs. Can you make an app that shows our set list? Oh, also the full set list time, like how many how many minutes have we covered with the songs that we've got so far, which would be useful to track. And a way people can check in and give status updates. That's it. I I didn't give it any details.

I just thought, let me just let it run with it and figure out what it thinks that it I might like from this. And it like one-shotted it. It was excellent. It did everything we needed. Um [snorts] there was only one bit of feedback that the bands had, which was like the rating was one through five to begin with, and they wanted the zero, which is I haven't started to learn this one yet. Whereas one was like, it's not coming along. I'm like, okay, whatever, easy enough, I can add a zero, you know.

Um and yeah, so I can see when everyone's checked in, which songs they've said are coming along, which aren't. And then it ranks them like has like a, you know, either green to red and the red ones are the ones that are, you know, some people are struggling on. The number of times we practice them and it floats the ones up to the top that people have the most disagreement on, essentially. And then we used it on Monday for our first practice on which ones to prioritize, uh very successfully.

And then later on and then added some bells and whistles. I was able to add like for the songs that we're learning, you can click and it'll take you to Ultimate Guitar for the tabs or click and it'll take you to YouTube for the actual song. You know, if you wanted to listen to the live song again and play around with it. So, little things like that. But yeah, there's not a reason to sell it because again, like a single prompt made it. I don't really have a moat to defend. And it's it's it's very personalized software for our band.

Like I don't Right. You know, it solves our problem and that might not be a problem other bands have or there could be some other software people use. But I certainly don't need to pay for the Google education version to get voting or pay for any of these other things to text people to let them, "Hey, check in here." You know, I don't want to pay for for these little things. I'm already annoyed by all the subscriptions I've gotten. [clears throat] All the Netflix and HBO. I don't want to pay for another thing.

So, I assume, right, you've got your own consultancy, so you kind of stole your own office supplies and put the tokens You use the tokens on No. the plans. No. No, um I'm not stealing my own. [laughter] Here. I but I do have two different plans. I've got um for for YGG, my consultancy, I've got Codex, which is like the 20X plan. It's $200 a month. I have the exact same or the analogous one for um Oh, sorry, that's Claude. And for Codex, I have the same one, which is like the $200 a month one. It's like essentially the same thing.

And so, I just use one for my personal stuff and then one for the my work stuff. And it lets me also compare the models too, so I can see which one. Cuz they each one releases new models and they're all fighting each other and everyone's like, "Oh, Opus is great and Fables great." And some people are like, "Oh, you know, the new Soul and Lunar are great." And then it lets me test out how much Fable burns token-wise cuz I can feel it rather than just hear people complain about it. Um so, I use both.

And in this case for This is a personal project that I'm not using, so I just to use my personal account for that one. That's good cuz I as soon as I said I'm like, "Oh, but then I bet your So, I'm that it creates a gap so that your personal stuff doesn't bleed into your work stuff and vice versa. Yeah, because also it your customer stuff bleeds into your personal, yeah. It it'll learn from what you're doing. Like from my personal one like I mentioned uh what did I mention the other day? Just something random and then it pulled for it.

You know, and this will also pair well with the basement studio you have set up. And I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I talked to you about my basement studio in a different thread." You're right. So, it'll it'll still even if it's not related unless like an archived thread, it'll still remember some stuff that I've told it. So, I try to keep everything separate so that it doesn't bleed in and start mixing suggestions in cuz it does some weird magic behind the scenes. Okay. So, you've got your own uh personal um account for the tokens.

And then how infrastructure-wise, how does this app work? Is it actually like an iOS app or is it a webpage? How does this thing like run? It's a webpage. Yeah, uh it uh built it Honestly, I don't even know if it was React. I didn't really care, but I gave it the ability to deploy via um Cloudflare Pages. Uh I already had it connected for I I ported our old site separately on the work [clears throat] account um for Never Rewrite and for YGG, which was using Squarespace at the time and I had it port that site to uh Cloudflare.

And so, I had the new one do a similar setup where it ports to Cloudflare uh or just or connects to GitHub. And so, anytime you push to GitHub, it'll automatically deploy the site. Uh so, the other ones, I think they're built something some flavor of React. I forget. Uh but it does all the config for you if you have connector set up or client set up. So, once you actually establish that, you can just be hands-off. It'll push to main and then it gets deployed automatically.

Um and then the key-value store, at first it was trying to use Superbase, but I'm like, I don't want to use Superbase for this. So, I ended up using some other kind of key-value store that was a lot cheaper to manage, but I even I forgot about that, which kind of leads us back into this other concept of it iterating and building stuff that we don't even know how it works, which is fine for me cuz I don't really care how it works as long as it solves my problem.

The the I guess the worst thing that could possibly happen uh if you get hacked is that somebody could mess with your proposed setlist for your next gig. And Yeah, and it is password protected. I just gave the band like the actual password to get to the webpage. Um but yeah, if they hacked it, they would hack with the number of times we ran through a setlist. It doesn't need to be, you know, anything special anyway. So, again, it's it's it's transient software that I'm using just to solve the problem. And I I came up with that.

I'm sure that maybe it already exists as a thing, but I'm just calling it transient just cuz it's like this temporary floaty kind of software. And if the band dissolves, no one uses the app, I'll just spin the app down. And right. You know, it doesn't matter. Like so, software but things that might have taken a long time to build and you care more about and care about the deploy and the cost. And this Cloudflare is the Pages thing is it's free for the the amount of traffic we've got.

So, it's like every part of this thing and I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm under the $200 a month plan for that for um Codex. And I haven't used my tokens you know, for this month. So, I'm like, from from my perspective, since I've already used it for other things, then it's somewhat free for me to to build this on the side cuz I've got this thing I've already paid for monthly fee, generating some code, hosting in a thing that doesn't cost me any money. No harm, no foul.

And I can see this being especially because I I Technically, I didn't I mean, other than like some knowledge of what how what Git is and what Cloudflare pages is, which I guess is a little bit of a learning curve for somebody who's not into tech. Other than that, like this required nothing for me. Like I said, I don't even know really how it's built. I just know that it built it it ran it locally. It looked good to me. I said, "Yeah, go ahead, launch it." I don't care how it's built. I don't I don't feel bad that I don't know how it's built.

I just know that it works. And I feel like anybody else who gets to build software like this, they can actually like I could give this to any of my friends uh and say, "Hey, this is what I did." and say, "Here's this tool." And I'm sure they could walk through and discuss and I could tell them how to set up Git, how to set up all this stuff and they could do the same thing. Right.

I was just thinking like as soon we said, "Oh, I could give it to any of my friends." I'm like, "I bet you couldn't." Like I bet if you tried to say, "Oh, I've got a friend who's got a band." and I explained it to him and he thought it sounded cool. I bet setting up to have it have two instances would be a disaster. Uh where it it would require some rework and I bet you would spend up more time than you expect so that you could have multiple instances deployed off of wouldn't try to do multiple instances. There's no point.

You know, I I don't need to copy my software. All I got to do is let him know, "Hey, talk to ChatGPT to understand how to set up Cloudflare and how to set up Git." And then just ask it to make an app for you. And maybe it builds it in a completely different technology. Hmm. Who cares? You know, like I don't need to duplicate my code anymore. And then or or cuz it also duplicates my solutions to problems that I have. He could have a whole separate set. You know, so the it is you I mean this also like is part of the whole AI slop thing, right?

Where you have a ton of apps on the App Store. They're very hyper-personalized. I'm sure like the number of workout apps has quadrupled or more because everyone's like, I don't want to pay for this dumb thing cuz I think we talked about this in one of the prior episodes where you can make like I had this one called Strong and I could log my workouts but I couldn't get like a history like a report of how it worked over time unless I paid. That's how they got me. I'm like, I'm just going to make my own app.

[laughter] All all it is is logging the reps and then let me to track over time. I could make that. You know, and then you can see how like if everyone's publishing their own thing and they're going, "Ooh, I wonder how I can make money off this." Then you're back in the same loop. [laughter] Right, it's an interesting thing cuz because the software is so cheap and it now that it's transient right, it one, the stakes are much so much lower that you don't have it's not the security becomes unimportant.

It's just the if somebody hacks you, it's not the end of the world. It's like uh Yeah. In the old days and I'm talking 90s where eventually your hard drive would die and you would lose everything. Mhm. And so you would make sure that you had some kind of backup and then you you'd go over to your friend's house and say, "Look, my hard drive is making a different noise. It's going to die soon. Let's go back up all the things." And you get out the floppies. And Mhm. that's fine.

But then eventually it would die and you'd be like, "All right, you know, be like inbox zero. I've just deleted everything." And he's like, "It would take you a day to set up a the computer new computer and you'd be back in business." And it's just kind of like that where it's like, "Well, I don't have to pay anybody. It's what I got Yep. along." Yeah, just the fact that it's so easy to spin it up and generate this code. I I almost think you don't want to commit it to get like I did. You're just adding more crap.

You know, this one actually can live on my hard drive and if I lost it, I would go, "Oh man, back Hey, can you You that again?" Like find the archived process and say, "Hey, can you make that again? I lost it." Because it's that easy. Now, it's expensive now, and I'm sure that's not, you know, Well, I say expensive again. I'm I'm under I'm I'm underneath my monthly plan, so I don't really know how much I've spent technically cuz I don't pay by token in that sense. Pay by the weekly usage or whatever in the model that I've chosen.

Um but I could even see us I mean, I have played around with like a locally hosted LLM, too, and I imagine at some point those will be good enough, too, to where I could just host my own locally, ask it to build it, and then really it's just whatever the cost of my electricity is to produce the thing, right? Right.

And in this it kind of goes to a problem that's the problem of bloatware, where if you've got a SaaS and you've got a subscription, and they feel like they need to put ever they need to continually give you new stuff to justify the cost. Also, so you know, so becomes this a lot of software trips over into bloatware, where the cost is rising because they keep hiring developers to add features you don't care about so that they can justify the rising costs.

And in this case it's like, "Look, I I want a specific piece of software, and you'd pay 20 bucks for it, but any more than that you'll just vibe code it because you you want to pay once, and then you're done. And it doesn't need to be updated all the time." Right. Not paying $20 a month for anything anymore. Right. I will find an engineer I will find a way to Like I have so many crons running locally now doing things cuz I'm trying to avoid paying for these $5 a month here, $10 a month here services.

I'm like, if I pay 200 a month [laughter] for this maxed out plan, I am creating all kinds of software that's going to solve my problems here. Then I'll just cancel that for 1 month and or like go to the thing there, the $10 a month plan or whatever, the $20 one. Something cheap once I've I've most of my stuff vibe coded. Yes. It makes sense. So yeah, that's the future. Get out of the software business again. Well, unless cuz we did an episode of this as well of it software can become transient but reputation cannot.

And this goes you know where we talk about things like mail servers where it's not about the software it's about the reputation. Yeah, I can't vibe code that. I can only vibe I'm vibe coding simple things. In fact it anytime I come across dumb stuff like oh Google built a feature where they can thumbs up a comment in Google Docs but they removed it for everybody who doesn't pay for the education plan. That's not going to go hmm Screw you. [laughter] I'm going to fight. I'm going to use my tokens to make my own version of this. I hate this.

So I'm hoping that makes Google change their mind about what they're stingy about. [laughter] I think they'll lose them money over time. We'll see. Awesome. Well, thank you all for listening. I'm Jeffrey Sherman. And I'm Isaac Askiw and this is Never Rewrite.