i made a fun little mac app

👉 aliahmed.ai/journal

Pauline Kress (who disclaimer I’ve never talked to but she seems pretty awesome!) said something in one of my grad school classes that I still think about:

“An idea is only as good as it is communicated”

So here’s my crack at it:

I built a journaling app. It’s a Mac app.

You write things, then click the reflect button and ChatGPT deconstructs those thoughts and speaks back to you.

It’s helpful for complex thoughts. Ramblings. Also big emotions.

Here’s a video if you’re still not quite sure what I mean:

why did i do this?

1. Warming up

It’s been awhile since i did an end to end product build. truly. so i thought i’d warm up by going through the motions – down to the screen studio video and the vibey explainer piece (both the website link above and the first file that opens when you open up the app).

2. Learning

I spoke to a bunch of developer friends, all of whom talk about workflow issues newly introduced with AI. My biggest L at current is I’ve only ever worked on codebases that I deeply understand (because I made them from scratch).

Taking someone else’s repo (creds to farza, forked freewrite to make this), and using the latest of developer tooling and setups (s/o @KleistLeo for this one by @mitsuhiko) to build this proved to bring a lot of learning.

Took me 2 days, 3rd day to create these quick “GTM” assets, and came out with this.

3. Inputs » Outputs

At the earliest of stages, you can’t really create goals. You can only create inputs. You must rush as fast as you can to those inputs.

At the end of every two weeks in YC, our partners would ask us two questions: What was your goal? What did you learn?

The goal doesn’t really matter. It never did. It simply provides a direction for your output that you test in order to learn. It is a way to bring forth inputs.

The current input I’m on is “ship one thing every week (at minimum!)” and “learn one thing everyday”. A sort of speedrun.

So this is my one thing for this week. And I learned a lot about the current state of developer tooling and workflow / collaboration problems when building. Enjoy :)

PS Friday I’ll send my first week roundup. Have already been reminded of quite a few things from my past life which I now have better words to describe.