JustBuildApps

The site is live! (again)

For the past two years I’ve been vibe coding and building more projects and builds than I thought possible. Billions of tokens, millions of lines of code, dozens of git repositories, but only a handful of users. Am I disappointed? No! Because what I fell in love with was creating things for myself. Of the many projects I’ve worked on the ones that I’ve enjoyed the most and spent the most time on have always been those that meet my needs, and that scratch a personal itch. More than once I’ve gone through the trouble of planning a release post and DMing people who I’d hope would be interested in giving it a spin, but the whole exercise would turn the project into work and turn this personal creation into an impersonal product. What I found was that the most exciting and enjoyable part of building was to build for myself, not for others. And boy is it exciting. I’ve routinely spend weeks sleeping at 4am because I couldn’t stop tweaking and improving my builds. They were satisfying and I’d feel immense pride even if I had no intention of sharing it with someone else. It’s a joy that is hard to explain if you’ve never expressed yourself as you do in composing music or painting on canvas. In the past few months I’ve discovered I’m not alone. Dozens of fellow vibecoders have told me the same thing that they lose some of the magic once it becomes impersonal and targeted for mass scale. As Steve Jobs said: “You can please some of the people, some of the time.” I believe everyone has the right to self expression and should have the opportunity to use the technology of our age to do it. A place where people can just create what they want and feel satisfaction knowing it’s recognized and valued by someone who understands it, even if it doesn’t go viral. A place where you can just build apps.