I might have accidentally built the world's greatest family planning app

Hi everybody! (Hi Dr. Nick!)

Yes, it’s still me. Believe it or not, I actually prefer to write these myself, leaving AI in the dust with apt metaphors, stirring my glorious cauldron of human-generated thoughts and ideas, bubbling with astute cerebral insight, boiling over into a stew of wonderfully salubrious word soup du jour, ensuring that I never lose my precious perspicacity (don’t worry - it’s always in the last place you look). By the way, +100 points to anyone who spots the classic mid-90s TV show references.

Beat that, ChatGPT. Now, where was I?

Roughly 0 score and several weeks ago, I didn’t set out to do much, except experiment with AI by building a basic Vue sandbox app to test out feature ideas for my consulting clients. I used Vue, mainly, since I was sick of React and wanted to try a front end framework that wasn’t in a never ending competition to defy all forms of logic and common sense.

I wrote a simple financial planner for my family, since (a) I don’t like giving away my personal finance info to random apps, and (b) I don’t actually know my true net worth, since all my finance data happens to be in a spreadsheet I last updated in march 2009 with formulas that have been broken for about 17 years.

800 commits, several hundred cups of coffee, and roughly 89,000 gloriously vibe-coded lines later (I won’t even mention how many lines of code we deleted), sitting in the dark with moonlight shining off my dreary-eyed face, I found myself gazing proudly at a nano banana generated image of my actual family in beanie form, and everything I always wanted to see about my personal, family, and financial life laid out in a way that didn’t actually make me want to cry.

Even in its infancy, beanies has helped me organize my family life to a point where I legitimately feel calmer, less stressed, and more energized. The ability to capture my thoughts, family activities, finances, travel plans, and other critical, precious personal info in a clean and secure way gives me a genuine feeling of relief and control. No jokes or silly old school TV references here - it’s a game changer for me.

Keeping in mind, vibe coding by yourself at 3am can potentially impact your judgement of how good an app is.

my real, live, actual beanies.family nook view right now. well, not right now, but right now as of when i wrote this. roughly.

Beanies started as a throwaway project (in fact, it wasn’t even called beanies at first - it actually had a way, way more boring name which I will never divulge) and morphed, through a combined 20 years of parental and financial pain and suffering, into an app I genuinely enjoy using. And there’s not too many apps (whether built by me or not) I can say that about.

Beanies sits at the intersection of family, finance, and data security, unlike many apps built by major software corporations or VC-backed startups, who have this pesky obsession with making money, harvesting your data, or both.

I’ll be writing small notes and updates here about cool new features, or things I’m thinking of building, or just whatever. As a former (and now, I guess, in a way, current) founder, we live in a crazy new world of SaaS. A place where founders can build as fast as they can think, which, in my case perhaps, is a truly scary thought.

I’ll keep a lid (don’t worry I’m not jumping back into that cauldron metaphor) on my craziest ideas, but even whittling things down, there’s more to build than ever. Don’t worry, builders will keep on building, cuz that’s what builders do. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I’ll leave the judging to others.

If you have a crazy family like me and haven’t tried beanies yet, give it a shot at beanies.family and let me know what you think. Yes, it’s still free. Probably not forever.

Speak soon my beans. Wishing you peace.

greg 🫘