The Build, Ep. 5: Nine Days, Nineteen Apps

ByDevin

The Build is the story of one guy, two Macs and too many agents, told as it happens. Episodes 1–6 catch up from May to tonight. After that it’s one entry a night.

On 30 September at 16:19 I made the first commit of an app called Shitshow: one board for every parcel I’m waiting on. Nine days later there were nineteen apps.

apps

What got built

  • Shitshow: every parcel in one place, and now groceries too.
  • Built to Last: an app for the two of us.
  • Mindfuck: a daily meditation written for that day.
  • Forge HQ: the factory floor that tracks all the other apps.
  • PuP fest: the library of AI songs my agent writes every day.
  • Earshot: podcasts, cut down to what’s worth hearing.
  • Floopify: family photo books that go to a real printer.
  • Meat Night: for the lads’ Tuesday meat night, with a butcher bot.
  • Wormy: a book scout.
  • Smoke Show: an AI video studio.
  • Anchorman: news from sources I actually trust, plus a 21:00 evening edition.
  • Vibe: a weekend planner for the family.
  • Compound: an investing tracker.
  • Pillemer Inc.: a flat hunt for a friend.
  • The Beast: a checkup for my iPhone.
  • Plus four I’m keeping private.

The kit every app gets on day one

  • It updates itself on the iPhone home screen, so I never have to re-add an app after a deploy.
  • No “+” button. A bot floats bottom-right and does every add: “add a song”, “add a book”.
  • Four tabs at most, a clear-chat button, and no field that pops the keyboard by itself.
  • Every bot runs on Sonnet 5.5. On 6 Oct Kimi K3 rose to $3/$15 per million tokens, Sonnet 5.5 was $2/$10, so I switched every bot.

Design whiplash, in four acts

  • 4 Oct: Forge HQ’s look was rejected three times, so everything moved onto one shared family stylesheet.
  • 6 Oct: app icons. All of them in one sci-fi style looked like “a total mess”, so each app now gets its own icon look.
  • 7 Oct: the pastel family look read as “juvenile”, so I switched to a grown-up SaaS look: one typeface, greys and one accent colour.
  • 8 Oct: final answer: each app copies the best app in its genre. Songs look like Spotify, meditation like Headspace, podcasts like Apple Podcasts, the factory like Linear. Twelve redesigns landed in 34 minutes.

The one that felt like the future

  • 8 Oct: I tell Shitshow’s bot “we need milk, eggs, and the good hummus”. The home Mac fills a real supermarket cart, and I tap pay. That’s an agentic cart, live in my house.

Lessons

  • After you’ve built the third app, a new one stops being the hard part. Taste is the hard part.
  • Don’t invent a look. Copy the best app in the genre, then make it yours.
  • Write every lesson down as a rule the next session will read. I’m up to 25 of them.

The Build: catch-up series

From Ep. 7 it’s one short entry a night.

Similar Posts