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Comment by brink | Hacker News Reader

> I'm gradually replacing most of the software I use with software I conjure myself

Why?

I haven't done this for a notes app but I have for diet and Todo apps. It's nice to have exactly the features I want and nothing more.

I've written about this a bunch before and wasn't looking to take the thread off on a tangent; I'm really just saying how much I like Bear. Bear is great. I don't think I could come up with many ways to make it suit me better, which is not something I can say about a lot of other software.

Why not? Its 2026 you can waive a hand and have bespoke opinionated FREE apps that do what you want and keep your data where you want.

Compare that to being forced to use someone else's highly opinionated software that might have paid pro features you need or don't need.

What a strange question to ask.

“why pay to go see a movie that someone else made, when I can see a movie I made for free?”

I'm not looking to be surprised by the tools I want to use for my specific purposes. Apples and oranges.

Fair! But the point was: it’s 90% likely the thing you build has been built better by someone else already.

See, I could not in fact make a good movie. But I'm very sure there are apps I can do a good job with; I am in fact a professional software developer. So that comparison doesn't seem super on-point.

People wrote tools for themselves before AI, too. Were you confused about it back then, too?

I think you meant to say “skeptical.”

In which case, yes.

I'd rather buy (if it's actually some semblance of ownership) a very good app made by people who spend their time keeping it good, then attempt to think I'm the best one to make all of my software. If it's a subscription for something that's not necessarily great and it can be remade cheaply and maintained with low overhead, then the answer is clearer.

I see people vibing out markdown apps like they take their morning shit, while I just paid Bear a small amount of money and have gleefully used it every day for 10 years, and I hope to continue to use it for at least the next 5.

Part of maturity for me over the years has been picking my battles carefully and reducing the things I feel I need to be opinionated about or responsible for. Not every piece of software needs to be perfectly customizable for my workflow or the fastest or embody some esoteric philosophical ideal. Being forced to do anything is a rarity unless your job requires you to use SharePoint or Notion or whatever

As a hobby go nuts, watch birds, collect rocks or make dwarf landscapes.

Saying the ones vibe coded are better than any product for the similar cost as presumably the LLM subscription is hard to internalize

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