Is this a golden era of itch scratching?

For tech-oriented people, the AI LLMs we're all playing with are a bonanza of itch scratching. Things that previously would have been too big an undertaking to tackle are suddenly easy.

I build iOS and Android apps for FBi radio and had a ball making them. Still iterating on them and making really quite incredible apps. I'm impressed myself.

Just last week I built a script to identify recordings of ABC Newsradio that actually contain the news bulletin.

This weekend, on a whim, I'm looking at improving the Android app for Subsurface. It's a diving log app that's Open Source and open. Linus built it while he was taking a break from the Linux kernel because there weren't any good Linux apps.

Subsurface does a lot very well, but it's got that "Open Source app" feel. Unstyled input fields. Weird UI choices. It's just a bit shit. Plus weird pauses and freezes, a long delay on first opening. But it supports a huge swathe of dive computers: my new Shearwater Peregrine worked straight out of the box.

So I've started working on a fork of the Android app to fix some of this stuff up in native Kotlin rather than Qt mobile. No idea if I'll bother getting it to releasable state. I might just end up using it myself. We'll see.

But the point of this post is it's really become easy to kick off little itch scratching projects. I've got hundreds of these under my belt done the old way but most didn't get much beyond the "little script that works in my environment" level. Now I'm willing to take on vastly more complex projects and act as Product Manager and Software Architect. It's fun, cheap and produces interesting outputs.