Yesterday's projects

One of the most amazing things about coding LLMs is the rate at which I’m able to build new utilities and tools. I’m not talking about full-on projects or products that have to be polished and nice and sold to people. I’m talking about things that I make for myself.

In the last two days I’ve built three tools:

• Listen to Me is a little Rust CLI that records audio notes, transcribes them using Mistral’s Voxtral Transcribe 2 model, and stores them in a Git-backed folder. The idea was actually for work, recording notes so that later when I have to write I get Claude to generate my self-review it will have access to richer context than just what I have in my PRs and docs, but I actually haven’t started using it for that and am using it to record personal notes instead.
• Talk to Text is an even simpler utility that records speech, transcribes it, and dumps to stdout. It’s basically the meat of Listen to Me without all of the structure.
• Flashc is a super-simple flashcard app. Not even really flashcards (there is no back to flip to), just a note repeater with a very simple (not spaced repetition, but still showing less-seeon stuff more frequently) algorithm for scheduling cards. I’m not 100% sold on the idea, but I think it might be useful.

All of them in Rust, all with tests, all with documentation. All built on the side (literally, my personal laptop sitting on the corner of my desk) while doing $day_job (which is also increasingly just writing documentation for machines to consume and turn into functioning software). I think they meet the definition of vibe-coding, but at the same time, I’m able to guide the machine toward the exact thing I want, with exactly the affordances I need to do the job. They’re composable and they’re easily accessible to agents, so with each one I slightly extend my agent’s abilities.

I’ve built more things with software in the last few months than I had in years before, while writing far less code. It’s a somewhat scary time to be a professional software engineer, but it’s a very exciting time to be a builder.