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> Claude Code is brilliant for personal apps.

Agreed.

The clipboard manager I had been using on my Macs for many years started flaking out after an OS update. The similar apps in the App Store didn’t seem to have the functionality I was looking for. So inspired by a Simon Willison blog post [1] about vibe coding SwiftUI apps, I had Claude Code create one for me. It took a few iterations to get it working, but it is now living in the menu bar of my Mac, doing everything I wanted and more.

Particularly enlightening to me was the result of my asking CC for suggestions for additional features. It gave me a long list of ideas I hadn’t considered, I chose the ones I wanted, and it implemented them.

Two days ago, I decided I wanted a dedicated markdown editor for my own use—something like the new markdown editing component in LibreOffice [2] but smaller and lighter. I asked the new GPT 5.5 to prepare an outline of such a program, and I had CC implement it. After two vibe coding sessions, I now have a lightweight native Mac app that does nearly everything I want: open and create markdown files, edit them in a word-processing-like environment, and save them with canonical markdown formatting. It doesn’t handle markdown tables yet; I’ll try to get CC to implement that feature later today.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/27/vibe-coding-swiftui/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47298885

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Could you share the source to your Markdown editor? I'm always looking for new ones
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Absolutely. I love building things, but sometimes I want something built. LLM assistance is great for when I want a personal tool, code quality be damned, for a specific purpose, without it taking over a weekend.
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You don’t need to build an app. You can use the built in Shortcuts app.

create a shortcut that turns off all alarms. Can have it read your calendar or whatever as signal to determine if alarms should be on/off for a certain day/time and have it run at a regular schedule.

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I could, but what's the fun in that!?

(But in seriousness, I hadn't considered using shortcuts. It's not clear it's extensible enough to do exactly what I want, but I'll look into it)

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Where's the fun in purchasing an app from Anthropic?
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Co-working with AI is an important skill to learn these days. Similar to paying a bit for AWS for your personal projects as a good way to learn all the AWS tools for your career.
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Meh. That's fine if you really don't want to build things, and are mainly concerned about increasing your market value.

If you like creating, buying software from Anthropic is boring as hell.

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What is the skill that needs to be learned? I've been forced to vibe code everything at work, there's no skill required to ask Claude code to do something.
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I think there's a difference in using claude code at work to resolve issues or user stories which are patching existing software and already define what is trying to be solved and what the acceptance criteria is versus using claude code to build something from scratch, where you are acting as an architect.

It leaves more room for skill expression when you're making architectural decisions, defining scope, and designing the application.

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Keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better
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But I thought LLMs democratize development?! Now AI is a “skill” that you have to pay for? Shocking!
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They’re way more powerful than you except. I’ve recently rediscovered them and I really couldn’t find a use case for a custom iOS app that wasn’t covered by them.
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It’s tedious but likely possible.

If you really want to engage an LLM to help point it towards Cherri (https://github.com/electrikmilk/cherri) to help with implementation

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