100% this, too. I am an IT professional - CTO for a large-ish enterprise (25-30bn yearly revenue). I am finding myself waking up at 4am every single day for the last 2 months to vibe code stuff i always wanted to build for myself, my family and friends, and never quite had the time for it. My sleep habits are definitely suffering but my happines is through the roof.

100% this. This is the new age of software - but it will be tiny little apps like this for each little user. They don't need to be mega apps, etc. Bespoke little apps that help your own little business or corner of the world.

I'm teaching my kid what I consider the AI dev stack: AI IDE (Antigravity for us), database (Supabase for us with a nice MCP server), and deployment (Github and Vercel for us). You can make wonderful little integrated apps with this in hours.

Out of all the apps you've worked on, what's one or two that you think came out really well?

The fleet task app has been really useful. I have my hired hands using it, tasks are shared and can be deferred so they don't show up until spring or midsummer when we have weather or time to work on them, or we're going to need that piece of equipment readied.

Honestly, I have so many features in it now it's hard to describe it, shared work calendar, parts shopping list, recurring maintenance, blah blah blah. It's very bespoke and I doubt anyone else would want to use it the way we do.

Is there any backend component? How do you know it's secure and you won't be hacked? Can you comment on the maintainability of the code?

Hi! Not the original commenter but I have similar bespoke apps for me and my household.

In my case I just don't expose them to network at all, any interaction happens through bots in IM or on a tablet at home (through wireguard).

Theoretically locking it down with OAuth on proxy level would also work, but I prefer to keep it off the internet (apart from the tunnel, obviously).

Did you start farming from scratch?

Did you take over a farm?

Family farm I came back to after working out for years and sold my IT company.

love to hear about what tech is like on farms today. do you run into the problems with fixing tractors and equipment and its all locked down with drm and you cant fix it without hacking the software?

That's all blown way out of proportion. I have a stack of 10k page manuals for diagnosing and repairing every piece of green iron on the place. Honestly, I've been considering training an LLM so I can make better use of the manuals, they're so incredibly detailed it's hard to find the thing you're looking for.

The only thing Deere "locks down" is that some of the parts have a CANbus address that you need to get a tech over to program the controller to recognize the part, and do the same if you replace a controller.

It's not some nefarious anti-farmer thing, it's because of the way the controller network works. In fact, I've used a CANbus sniffer on the bus and everything on there is in the clear, they don't even encrypt the messages.

The only things I've sent to town to get fixed was because I didn't have time to diagnose it, or it was an insurance claim and I wanted warranty. Blowing $80,000 worth of innards out the back of a combine wasn't a job I wanted to tackle right then (but I probably should have, I wasn't happy with the attention to detail in the repair).

So the upshot is, don't believe every terrible story about Deere you hear. Just the one where they charge too goddamn much for parts.

One of my mechanics friends saved up like 15-20k just to be able to service these things. He just goes farm-to-farm and works on their tractors. The work is local, but you got to be able to get the tools and knowledge to use them.