Pesonal Apps

Despite being silent about AI on this blog, I’ve been using it for a while now. And not, it doesn’t write posts here instead of me. But I do use it in programming.

Many software engineers worry that AI is going to replace them. To some extent it might be true, we’ve seen impressive results in the past few years. Many models are now capable of generating basic applications, landing pages, or simple games. But there will be a lot of demand for more complex applications, for critical thinking, and architectural decisions.

However, if we take a look at it from a different perspective, AI also opens up a whole new world of possibilities for everyone. Here’s an example.

Pinentry

I’ve been using a Yubikey for my GPG keys for a long time now. But I never really liked the GnuPG’s pinentry-mac password dialog used to unlock my key. It is outdated.

It became even more apparent on macOS Tahoe with Liquid Glass. But even before that, I couldn’t stand it and quickly hacked my own alternative. I spent a few hours in total to make it work.

And then some more hours to update it to work with the latest macOS. It worked great and I was happy with it.

Vibe Coding

But today, I decided to task an AI agent to reimplement it. I started with the following prompt on an empty directory:

Create a macOS native popup that will implement Assuan protocol (at least partially) and act as replacement for pinentry program. It should follow Liquid Glass guidelines and present a simple and clean UI.

And it came up with this while I was brewing a cup of tea. Wow, just wow!

Well, it didn’t work perfectly from the very first try, but I needed to follow up just twice with a few minor tweaks. Overall, it took me about two minutes of active involvement (and 20 minutes in the background) to get it working.

And AI also implemented the given task in many ways much better than I did. For example, it has better organized I/O and tweaked the UI using properties I’ve never seen before.

What’s next?

We are no longer limited by the current tools. It is now absolutely possible to tailor an application to anyone’s needs. It takes just a few minutes and a handful of AI tokens.

I don’t think the profession of software engineer will ever be obsolete. Instead, AI will enable us to create applications that we wouldn’t be able to make otherwise.

Yes, I spent just a day hacking my own solution for a simple task. But I have many more similar ideas, which I wasn’t able to implement yet because of time constraints and priorities. And now I can!

And I’m not alone. Some are replacing paid services spending the same 20 minutes. Others creating an app that they always needed. These are just two I stumbled upon last week. And I’m sure there are and will be many more.

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