Personal apps are becoming my new favorite thing
I found the joy of building software at the scale of one
Two days ago, I stayed up until 4am building apps on my phone...as one does.
I had a 9:45am meeting and was exhausted out of my mind, but I was also drunk on a very specific kind of joy I thought I’d lost as a kid.
You see, I grew up a LEGO kid.
Wasn’t great, but I loved my LEGO blocks. Like most kids, I built everything with them: cars, tables, houses, more houses, and ofc some unidentifiable structures.
I loved building things simply because I could. Also, watching ideas in my head take form by my hands, LEGO block by LEGO block, gave me a needed sense of agency as a kid in an adult world.
The sense of play that comes from building on my own terms without the weight of perfection is something I’ve been trying to reconnect with, and I’ve made good progress the last few weeks thanks to some AI tools I’ve been playing with.
With AI, we’re living through a once-in-a-lifetime shift in how we experience technology as we go from personal computers to personal software—tools built not for millions of users, but for one.
AI is democratizing software development so fast that Stanford created a new course called ‘The Modern Software Developer‘ to teach no-code students how to build with AI and CS students how to 10x their capacity.
What’s fascinating about this shift is that for decades, we optimized for scale. One app for everyone, for everything. But AI lets us flip that model. Instead of us building for billions, we can build for one.
Our software can now become as personalized as our playlists, our feeds, our entire digital lives.
We’re not just consuming personalized experiences anymore, we’re creating them.
How a Stanford Class Tickled My Inner Tinkerer
One of the classes I’m taking in business school this quarter is called ‘AI for Human Flourishing‘, taught by the legendary Professor Jennifer Aaker, and it’s helped me a lot with reconnecting with my core craft of creation.
The class is as much a building class as it is a tech-philosophy class, but it isn’t about building the perfect product or the next unicorn. Instead, it’s about using AI however you see fit to reconnect with whatever makes you flourish (however you choose to define that for yourself).
For our ‘buildathon’ in class, imperfect prototypes were considered a success because improving was the point, not proving. That was refreshing.
Through that buildathon, we got early access to Wabi, a platform currently in invite-only private beta that’s already being hailed as “the YouTube of apps.”
Founded by Eugenia Kuyda (a founder I admire who previously built Replika, the pioneering AI companionship app), Wabi is a personal software platform where you can create mini apps using nothing but prompts. You don’t need to know how to code. You don’t need to understand databases or APIs or deployment pipelines.
On Wabi, you just describe what you want in a chat: “build me a mood tracker with energy logs morning, afternoon, evening, and night” or “build me plan my weekly meals based on what’s in my fridge”—and Wabi generates a fully functional app, complete with interface, logic, and even an icon.
Well, Wabi calls them “mini apps” as they live inside the Wabi app to solve specific problems rather than be everything to everyone.
To edit the app, you just need to chat with it in natural language about the changes you want made, it’ll give you a time estimate of the edit, and will ping you once the app’s been updated to your specifications.
But what I find special about Wabi is that it’s social. I can browse apps other people have built, ‘remix’ them for my own needs, comment on them, and even share them with friends. It’s kind of like if YouTube let you not just watch videos but also remix them, change the ending, add your own scenes.
Some of My Personal Apps
Before Wabi, my portfolio of personal apps was mostly limited to Claude artifacts like the Pomodoro timer I built to play Hedwig’s Theme when time runs out.
While it’s great, I was limited by it being web-based.
Since getting access to Wabi, I’ve become ‘Bob the Builder’ of Wabi mini-apps that live in one app on my phone saving me storage and giving me the agency to create my own versions of my app, as many as I want, whenever I want.
Some of my favorites personal apps are:
Guess the Word game: With this, I just wanted to scratch an itch for a game that let me practice both my vocabulary and recall, while reminding me to stay stocked on avocados. I had one of my friends play it with me and he loved it too, before sending an exhaustive list of things to improve with the gaming experience (such as more fruits than just avocados). To work, I went.
Meme Generator: My ‘Toasty Memes’ mini-app was to solve the paralysis that descends on me whenever I have to search for a meme to include in my broadcast to my class mailing list as ‘blast tax’ for spamming their inbox. Yup, that’s a real thing here. Now, I mostly use Toasty Memes to crack myself up at both really good and really bad memes.
Gamified Calendar: I made the ‘Calendar Go’ mini-app, where I win XP for completing tasks and events on my Google Calendar, as a more fun way of going through my day. I also wanted to use earning XP for tasks as a way to incentivize myself to time-block my daily to-do list. It worked...for a while. I lasted four days before I realized I’d gamified my life so hard I started over-scheduling just to farm XP. So I stopped.
Check my page on Wabi for my full list of apps.
I’m still not that good but Wabi lets me build and edit apps tailored to my exact needs with my furiously-typed prompts.
I’m excited about personal apps and how platforms like Wabi are helping make it easy for anyone with a smartphone to experience the joy of building digital tools for themselves and their loved ones.
No extra in-app purchases and ads, just a world of your own creation waiting for you to step in.
How many times have you thought “I wish there was an app for that“ but it was too niche for any app developer to care about? How many small annoyances in your daily routine could be solved with a tool built exactly for you?
That gap between what exists and what you ACTUALLY need is where personal apps live.
Filling that gap for myself has helped me create moments of ‘flourishing’ that has translated physiologically into extended periods of flow that my Ōura ring picked up as long periods of restoration.
Beyond the utility of personal apps, building them alone restores me.
Maybe it’s because they tickle the LEGO-building kid in me—the one who built things not for an audience, but simply because he could.
I’ve found that when I build out of curiosity, failure becomes interesting not devastating. When something doesn’t work, I tinker and tinker until I fix it. Not because I have to, but because I want to for no other reason than “just seeing where this goes”
I’m playing, in the truest sense of the word.
What could be more fun?
What would you build if you could make an app in five minutes? Tell me in the comments; I’m genuinely curious. Also, I have one Wabi access link for the first person who comments with an app idea.
P.S. If you’re on Wabi, add me @heyarinze or via this link.
Current Content Catalog
📖: ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt - I need to finish this omg
🎧: ‘BRITPOP (Deluxe Edition)’ - the new album by Robbie Williams
🎬: Bridgerton on Netflix - after leaving S3 in the dust for almost a full year
🔎: The Crustafarianism religion created by AI agents on Moltbook – wtf!?
Ooh I really love this - the personalization of an app- especially as I learn Igbo. I’ve been looking for an app that supplements how my weekly classes go. So the app obviously has to tailor to what I learn weekly
For example, I want to have a new word bank that I can add to and review regularly. But categorize those words into sentence segments like nouns, adjectives, pronouns, etc and then be prompted to make sentences based on those segments. Or as I think about everyday English sentences that I make, have those translated so I can review regularly.
awesome write up arinze - thx for taking the time. the coolest thing to me is the restorative, playful angle