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Ask HN: How's your home-cooked software revolution going?

Article news.ycombinator.com

Ask HN: How's your home-cooked software revolution going?

I know the title is glib, but there is a genuine question behind it. With LLMs getting better, and services like sprites, deno sandboxes, exe.dev, and now lambda web functions making it cheaper to deploy very small scale-to-zero apps, I wanted to ask a question that I haven't seen asked on here recently.

How has your relationship with technology changed in your 'regular' life in the past year or two? How about for the (possibly less-technical) people around you? Have you found that access to better LLMs is inducing you to create more 'home-cooked' software for just you and your close friends and family? Are you feeling like you have more autonomy/control when it comes to the software/hardware that you interact with daily? What does your stack look like?

The reason I ask is that I'm very bullish on the idea of [home-cooked software](https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/) and have noticed a personal uptick in the scope and efficacy of LLM-assisted coding. For me, the big benefit recently has been feeling like I can take on the dozens of small annoyances that I previously would have just tolerated because fixing them is high cost/low reward.

The psychological benefit of getting a handle on these has been surprising for me. The analogy I've been using with my friends and family is it feels like learning to lucid dream (insofar as software isn't 'real' and suddenly being much more in control of it). Because of that, I'm putting together a little course in my local village to help others get some of this same benefit. I'd love to hear about others' experience and start a conversation about home cooked software as well. In particular, I want to hear what others think we should be doing to increase the likelihood of a future where home-cooked software can continue to be a thing, and isn't completely hobbled (see e.g. the recent reverse engineering restrictions).

I'll start with a couple examples of the small sorts of things I've been building with the help of LLMs recently. I've been blow away by how much I'm able to get done in my home with Opus 5.5 and an ethernet/USB cable. Nothing here is particularly hard or interesting on its own, but I think it's probably a very big deal that I was able to do it all with very minimal input from myself. If we really get to the point where my mom can do the same things with all the tech papercuts that plague her life then we're going to be in a very different reality than today.

1. My Google TV remote doesn't have a profile for my Hisense TV (running vidaa) that allows me to change the input/source. I side-loaded an app that intercepts a button press on my remote and uses MQTT to change the input. I can also navigate all of the settings and menus with my laptop (lost the original remote)

2. Generally replacing every piece of small adware in my life. For example, a sleep timer for my phone that pauses any media after 15 minutes. Or a static website that lets me print to my old Brother LaserJet from my phone.

3. Resurrected an abandonware smart frame and put a custom smart-frame app on it that lets my siblings send my mom video-grams as well as adding photos to a family album / slideshow

4. Pointed my phone (and a bespoke android app) at my dumb electricity meter to jerry rig a realtime utilisation dashboard and help me identify that an old lamp in my home was drawing a crazy ~400W

5. An absurd jerry-rigged Minecraft setup that lets my kids easily play split-screen minecraft offline on my living room TV (Steam deck Moonlight Client -> Sunshine server on my Wake-on-LAN PC running a custom minecraft launcher capable of launching / managing multiple Java Minecraft instances including arranging windows for splitscreen as players join / leave)

6. A custom smart nightlight (with custom 3d printed case) for my kids. I'm not experienced with hardware, but I'm finding that I can do a lote more with less here when the stakes are low.

7. Offline route map app for walks/hikes with GPS and GPS tracks

Would love to hear others' stories like this.

Discussion 3 comments · 3 points · nihakue · 23h
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