One of the few benefits of generative AI is that you can use it to build simple tools that are hyper-personalized to suit your needs.
For those of us lacking the skills to design beautiful UI's and complex front-end logic, we find ourselves in an age where that matters less and less.
I'm not talking about building the UI of Facebook or Gmail. I'm talking about shitty little apps we used to pay indie hackers for. A subscription app to create beautiful banners for your links? A link-in-bio tool to list all of your...links?
These can all be built to suit your personal needs. And if it breaks? So what, you're the only user.
This is of course not sustainable if you're running a business. I would not touch AI if I needed to maintain the code myself. Then I'd have to actually like understand what the code is doing. Ewwwww gross.
Anyway, this is the first thing I whipped up:
Pretty Code
In my Python newsletter, I use quite a lot of code examples, and Substack famously does not include syntax highlighting natively. So code looks pretty uninspiring for those of us who live in the IDE.
Initially I used Carbon.sh, which did the job, but I wanted more features:
- Generate gradients and other patterns for backgrounds
- Use uploaded images as backgrounds
- Customizable syntax highlighting, supporting more languages
- Render code diffs
- Customizable fonts
I built this using v0 for the initial design (heavily inspired by carbon.sh). Then Cursor to polish if off.
So go on, embrace the slop (until like, you have to touch it).