The Rebirth of Lopery

I've been building budgeting software since about 2013. First in Vue, then Svelte, then in React, then in Capacitor/iOS/Android.

About three years ago, I started a company that never got off the ground because nobody really wants budgeting software in the way that I want to budget (and I'm not good at convincing them). I spent a lot of money to find that out and learned some pretty important lessons, hopefully.

The most interesting thing is that spending 15 years on a project, especially 3 years of hardcore focus, allows me to know exactly what I want. I was able to describe my project, including wished-for updates and unrealized features, to Claude. It took me 3 days. I iterated with three coding agents in Claude Code on simultaneous feature development. I had an extremely opinionated architectural plan. I understood exactly why each piece needed to exist, and we had done a good job of slicing out almost everything that didn't need to be in the product to get us to MVP.

The amount of work that it took was trivial. I spent a long time on refining look-and-feel designs, but the data structure, the component structure, the rollout process, the delivery process, and the experience are all significantly better than they were before I rearchitected.

I have no delusions that anybody really wants to pay for my product, but it's something that I use every day. This is the future of software development. The hardest part is knowing what you want, but for the things that you know you want, you are minutes away from realizing that vision, then iterating on it until it is exactly what you want, and then rebuilding it so that it is perfect from the beginning.