2024 Summer: I made a shitty app

Ways latenthomer.com (dead link) was shitty: 

  • http, not https

  • crashed more than once a week

  • the whole thing was an ec2 container. I don't know why I didn't think to use vercel or something. I basically just ported my local fastAPI + react set up into an EC2, then manually figured out nginx + dns + other stuff I don't remember with lots of copy/paste from claude web interface

  • it cost $20+ a month! Used load balancers.

  • it was a wholly unoriginal embedding project inspired by this blog post: https://blog.bawolf.com/p/embeddings-are-a-good-starting-point (FWIW...I do think embeddings are a good intro into LLM-land and I did learn a lot from the project) 

I shared my shitty web app & accompanying blog post on a Maine-based tech forum/slack instance. Multiple people said something along the lines of, "Cool!"/"That's neat!" and it felt good. I felt seen. It closed the loop of:

  • work hard on something

  • share it

  • get the validation of your effort being appreciated. 

I even used the app to then create some benchmarking scripts to compare different embedding models. And that got me a job interview with a company that made of the embeddings I used! It was pretty funny...10 PM my time a very polite ex-Googler asked me a few question and we kind of realized together that...I was not a cracked embeddings researcher. But we connected on linkedin afterwards!

That world is gone. 

Winter 2026: funny moment at a meet up

Recently at a meet up a guy shared his web app. Https. Full backend. So many bells and whistles. Appearing (if you squinted hard enough) to be the kind of web software companies pay tens of thousands of dollars for. If I had met this guy with that app in summer of 2024, I really would have thought something along the lines of: "Omg I am in the presence of a computer genius. I do not understand some of the choices they made, but that must be because I am not a genius" 

Winter of 2026, what I thought as this guy shared his thing: "This guy is a total moron. He seems nice though. I should try to think of something nice to say about his stupid fucking app"

And reader, I did think of something nice to say. It took a bit of effort, but I found a choice he had made that I genuinely did like, and I told him so. He then immediately told me I didn't understand his app, and went back to explaining the insanely ambitious ( & kinda ridiculously implemented) features. 

New bottlenecks

Summer of 2024 building my web app was a social act: building something to share with my community, and maybe even find new community. Even just building something that had its own domain was enough to feel worth sharing. And I felt appreciated/seen for what I did.

Winter of 2026, building apps is so dang easy. There's also more shit out there being shared. My own projects feel less valuable and more like noise even to me.

There are probably more bottlenecks, but one that feels like it's screaming out to me is just...other people's eyeballs. Other people's uncompensated time trying your thing. The tension of "If I used AI does it still count?" "The world is burning and I made another stupid web app?"

I wish there were a Vibe Clearing House zoom event. Fifteen minute slots. You share the stupid thing you made. No apologizing as you do it, "Oh I vibe coded this, it's probably trash, there's probably bugs." Just show your stuff.