Weekend projects with AI

The recent advances in AI programming tools have allowed many creators and builders to tackle projects that were earlier left in the idea stage. I think this is a big step forward with regards to democratizing and de-centralizing software. Even if the foundation models are still based on the “big 3” (Claude, Gemini, and Codex), there is also a big push when it comes to open source programming models, which are completely free to run on you own hardware. There are even hybrid approaches where you leave the grunt work to more basic, open, models and the planning and reviewing to more expensive, cloud-based models. Altough actually buying the required hardware to run local models today is a different question entirely…

As someone who is trying to wean themselves off of big-tech services, opting for self-hosted, privacy respecting, or local alternatives, the building-boost that AI gives you is very welcome. I built a personal gym-tracking web app that I use on mobile instead of tracking my workouts in a Google Sheet. I deployed this app on a cheap Hetzner VPS. Sure, it costs a certain amout for renting the VPS but I can migrate it to a Tailscale + Homelab setup whenever I like. The app was built by Claude under my supervision. It is a fairly standard webapp with a modern stack:

• Frontend: React 19, Vite, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, React Query, Recharts
• Backend: Hono, Drizzle ORM, PostgreSQL, better-auth

And since it’s standard there is a huge amount of precedent in the training data, meaning Claude will certainly be able to perform well on this task.

Being able to build tools that you personally benefit from is very liberating. I remember in the days before AI I spent some evenings building an android app from scratch that allowed the user to select pictures fetched from Google for their Anki cards. The app worked and I learned a lot, but at the end of the day what I was after in that case was a tool to aid my japanese learning experience, not improving as a Java/Android developer. I’d rather have invested that time learning japanese.

I am now working on a personal web-app to learn Hindi, since I am not impressed by the current resources available online as a learner. Duolingo is downright terrible for Hindi, and otherwise there is no enganing material from what I could find. For japanese there is manga, which is entertaining and easy to adapt to your level, but for hindi there is no good alternative. People recommend youtubers and bollywood movies, but there are also downsides to learning with that kind of media. For one: it’s not very interactive. So what I am going for with my app is more of an interactive as well as entertaining approach. An endless stream of on-demand generated written stories, made to slowly increase comprehension, while not being a drag to get through.