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If You Can Imagine It, Do It

English Ai Software Feed Rss Apps

I recently read Kevin’s post about building his own client for reading RSS feeds. Like him, I follow a lot of them, and I consider my feeds the one great source of information besides podcasts. If a site has no feed, chances are I never visit it.

Like Kevin, I built1 my own RSS client. I put in the font I like, the actions I find most convenient, the FreshRSS front-end, the ability to manage sources and folders, and a few features like Kevin’s, plus others I don’t know about but that he’d implement in 3 minutes – translating posts that aren’t in my language, or a structured summary of an article, for instance.

And I’ve noticed that, like Kevin and like me, from reading Reddit now and then, dozens of apps like ours are popping up. Today, for these small tools, there really is no market anymore: if the solutions are aimed at a more or less nerdy audience, the odds of making something that is in any way sellable keep getting lower. AI, from this point of view, has been a great help to consumers and has killed off yet more markets.

Unlike Kevin, though, I won’t publish my client on GitHub. There are plenty of them, it would be just one more. But I’m glad to have shared the same idea he had.

I’ve put together several tools like this: a bot to talk to an AI and keep all my memory “sandboxed” regardless of the LLM I’m talking to; a tool that converts YouTube videos into mp3s for my podcast feeds; another one that downloads podcasts from a news site – which I subscribe to – and creates a public feed I can add to my client, and so on. In short, thanks to Claude I’ve developed2 lots of tools that have improved the quality of my digital life. It’s undeniable.

So, if you can imagine it, do it!3 Take it for granted. All you need is 20 dollars a month and a bit of creativity. For all the bad that can be said about it – and there’s plenty – I believe it’s the greatest opportunity to create4 that human beings have ever had in history.

  1. And I, like Kevin, made mine through prompts. ↩︎

  2. It took me a long time to use AI for development. I’ve been programming since 1998, over the years I’ve built frameworks and software, fought with errors, queries, security and browsers. In short, for me software development was the work of many years. Before approaching AI as a development tool – meanwhile I was doing other things with it, at work I use it as my one and undisputed assistant –, it took me longer because I had a reverential awe of producing software that was hard to shake. Then I decided to jump in. Can it still be called development? Maybe so. Also because, quite simply, development as it used to be done, as I did it and as you, reading this, probably did it, already today but even more in the future, won’t be done anymore. Maybe it’s the word that will change meaning. ↩︎

  3. As Disney said, but with Nike’s conviction. ↩︎

  4. Yes, creating something using a tool that was trained by stealing from others who created things in the past. That’s true, but let’s not get into that subplot right now. ↩︎