It is the era of slop-coding personal apps. Every other day, d shows me a new interface of his latest optimizations.
Today he vibe-coded an exercise stats display¹ with just his phone’s GPS trackings, and manually logged hours and kilometers² on spreadsheets. “Why let third-party apps exploit your data when the bar to make your own is so low with AI?” I thought people tracked (and uploaded) their stats for social clout or to mask whatever personal crises behind PBs. For d, it’s about having control over the raw data to extract fully and analyze deeper, rather than relying on a third party’s dashboards or getting locked behind a subscription.
In fact, the first thing he did after our grueling 8+4-hour flight was to create a custom app for our AC controller, so we could theoretically voice-control it from bed.
“Hey G, set a 3-hour timer at 24 degrees for the AC.”
Our apartment has two AC units, which is plenty considering how quaint and tiny it is. Both are leveled near our bedside, but one is within two arm’s reaches; understandably, it is rarely turned on. The other is tricky to control. Normally, you’d operate it from a 60-degree angle below, but since the sleeping area is upstairs and parallel to the units, the infrared sensor isn’t positioned ideally.
In comes the the AC-Blaster which honestly has been fun to use. It has a fainted glow-in-the-dark hue display, showing the current temperature and pre-settings–a 3hr timer when turned on and can be cancelled with a “Timer off” button. The button design is minimal, rectangular and aligned by width and margins. Only the functional ones are kept: Fan, Swing, Sleep, +/ -.
It practically mirrors the physical control but with faster reactions, likely due to the bare chips and loose wires d taped straight to the table leg right underneath the unit’s sensor.
Footnotes
- He doesn't even own a Garmin or Apple Watch.
- He's already surpassed the distance I've biked all year, by just mostly skating and biking to work, while I insist biking only when the weather's nice and cool.