Mike Masnick spent some time using an AI tool to build himself a personal task management app:

Intend got me 65% of the way there. L’il Alex is already at 85% and climbing. More importantly: when my needs change, the tool adapts. I’m not locked into someone else’s vision.

This is exactly what vibe coding is for: solving personal friction points without waiting for permission from product managers whose incentives don’t align with yours.

So, for all the folks who are concerned about centralized control and losing agency over their digital lives: there are now more options beyond just yelling at tech companies or hoping for better government regulation. For personal productivity tools, workflow automation, and small community projects, you can actually build what you need, no coding skills needed. The tools exist, they’re accessible, and they work. Sometimes the best way to escape someone else’s control is to just stop asking, and just take charge.

I have tried this same approach, and like Mike, I have found it to be fairly easy. A weekend’s worth of work on Lovable.dev’s $25/month plan seems to have a gotten me at least two-thirds of the way to something I have wanted for years: a web app that lets me suck in RSS feeds, read the posts, and then author my own blog posts based on those posts. I think it would probably not be a ton more work to make it so I could publish to Mastodon, Hugo, and other platforms directly from this app. It’s all stuff I currently do by stringing together a few different apps and scripts, but this is a lot easier.

So that’s the good part. The bad part is that I have no idea what the architecture or code looks like under the hood, because I am not a developer. My guess is that if I were to look at any of it, it would be a mess—terribly inefficient and likely insecure.

And I think the claim that these sorts of tools—build an app with AI—return power and control to the individual is overly optimistic.

The suggestion is that now we will not have to pay big companies to create software that only sort of work for us. Maybe that’s true at some level, but it seems like what we’re actually doing is moving the layer of control down to the actual creation of software, which effectively destroys the already shaky market for independent developers. So now I have to either pay a big company for software they’ve built, or I have to pay some big company for the platform that lets me build software.

And if we think the end goal of something like Lovable (or any of the other fleet of platforms entering this market) is to just let users build and share apps for a monthly subscription, we are kidding ourselves. Companies build these platforms so that they can control the market and extract money and data from users to sell to other platforms; that is the business model that every single one of these companies gets sucked into like black hole.