For the past 2.5~3 months I've been working on a 2D/3D VFX (visual effects) editor dedicated to mac and iPhone/iPad, it was on my never ending list of fun projects to build and a perfect excuse to learn agentic coding on a domain of expertise (written in Swift/SwiftUI and Metal).
Honestly not a bad theory. There’s definitely a huge disparity between actual productivity gained by using agentic coding done somewhat properly… and a non-stop wave of vibe coded work causing outages and churn. Pre-Covid hiring coupled with the high enterprise pricing for AI plans, it would make sense.
This is why I'm building free "spite apps" in homage to Larry David's spite stores [0]. The goal being to push back on enshitification of tech and dark patterns like mandatory subscriptions, ads and user data tracking.
As a solo indie-dev, writing free software (as in you don't need to pay anything) is fine, but I usually do not make the project (entirely) open source due to the added churn & maintenance.
In my experience, setting expectations early in my apps ("I'm a solo indie dev", "this is a free app", "you can reach out to me through email but don't expect super quick responses") helped reduce entitled users and - quite the opposite - people were super happy to get replies from me solving their problems.
That’s funny, I’ve actually used the same algorithm but with taxis in general, for having the same exact issue as the person in this article… but with a real driver.
(All of this assuming it’s safe to keep a door open!)
I’ve also started publishing a small collection of what I call “spite apps” (a reference to Larry David’s spite store when he makes his own coffee shop to go against mocha joe).
These apps are super simple in terms of privacy policy:
- we don’t track you (no telemetry)
- we don’t show you ads
- no account
- free with optional tip
Sure I don’t make much money with them but I feel like I’m pushing back on making humanity worse.
Same here. I was a fervent Claude code user at $200/mo until Opus4.7.
Freezing your IDE version is now a thing of the past, the new reality is that we can't expect agentic dev workflows to be consistent and I see too many people (including myself) getting burned by going the single-provider route.
On one hand I’m glad to finally see anthropic communicate on this but at this point all I have to say is… time to diversify?
Ironically, I’d be surprised if this wasn’t already the case before? I recall vividly employment contracts with meta in 201X with a clear mention that employees were giving up any sense of privacy while using meta provided devices or entering meta’s premises…
This is great! I found myself asking my AI agents to generate those icons every so often (esp. for websites), so thank you for taking the time to build this.
Quick question, are you also planning on supporting animations?
Thanks! I'm not sure how animations would translate into these exported formats. SF Symbols animations are typically state driven, and that doesn't really translate to a standalone SVG/PNG/PDF. You'd get something that autoplays on loop, or fires once. Let me know if you had something else in mind.
Though I do agree with you, I just came back from a trip to China (Shanghai more specifically) and while attending a couple AI events, the overwhelming majority of people there were using VPNs to access Claude code and codex :-/
I wrote a blog post about my process: https://sxp.studio/blog/subjective-building-a-native-vfx-edi...
...and you can download the app here if you're curious (the app is free!): https://subjectivedesigner.com
Next project is going to be a pivot of that project into something related to creative coding and agentic :-)
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