I think I'm going to build my own personal software rather than pay for things.

I have the Claude Max Plan, and honestly I can't let this stuff go to waste. I can't let the sheer amount of tokens lie dormant while I pay $150 a month, which is absurd. So I need to put these tokens to good use. I'm trying to think of all the things that I currently pay for and use on a daily or weekly basis. By using these tokens and since I have my own infrastructure set up to host applications to the internet, I am in the perfect Venn diagram of situations here.

I've been looking for applications that I wish I could use without paying $18 a month to feed the conglomerate that is Adobe so you can use Lightroom. Every other app wants you to pay for certain features, which is fine…welcome to the world.

But I have the tokens, so why not make my own Lightroom replacement? I like to edit photos, so I could create my own implementation and show it on the internet. Then someone else who isn’t a developer could use it, because if you’re a developer and a photographer, you could just do it yourself too.

So that's what I'm doing. Right now, I'm rebuilding Lightroom—my version of Lightroom that has the same features and everything, but looks better, hopefully functions better, and is not Adobe. The fact that it's not Adobe is amazing; I would buy it.

But really, what is building in public anymore? Before, it used to be you got on YouTube or Twitch, started streaming and making videos of the product you were building, the fun you were having, and the things you were learning along the way.

Now, building in public is literally firing up a stream and saying, “Yo, let’s chill out as I prompt Claude.” It doesn’t have the same effect as it used to. You’re no longer sharing the building process, but the end product.

You’re talking about the product after it already exists because the time it takes to go from idea to conception is really fast. So there’s nothing to post about, nothing to share, really, until you’re done.

Unless it’s a huge project, then maybe you share milestones and the different things you’ve overcome along the way.

Recently, I started thinking about whether I could replace my podcast host, platformmbecause I'm paying for it. I don't want to, because I want to save money, but I'm not sure I want to deal with the bandwidth.

With the incoming and outgoing bandwidth of such a thing, maybe I'll leave that up to them. But I am looking for software that I would either like to use or that I currently use and have to pay for, and literally just making my own implementation that works for me. That's kind of scary when you think about it.