Building personal apps with open source and AI

There’s something magical about a tool that does exactly what you need, no matter how small the task. In my work on the GitHub Developer Advocacy team (and honestly just in life), I’ve found that the best solutions are often the simplest ones.

It doesn’t need to be a Swiss Army knife. It could be just like a really good scissors or paring knife.

Sometimes, it’s just taking a manual task and automating it. For example, my cohost Cassidy Williams shares a technical interview question with her newsletter subscribers each week. People submit answers in all sorts of formats — GitHub links, CodePen snippets, tweets, you name it. Gathering all those responses and formatting them for publishing used to be a tedious, manual slog. So she wrote a tiny script that converts these answers into a Markdown list.

I’ve also built a tool to convert CSV to Markdown. It’s not fancy, but it’s saved countless hours and so much mental energy.

These little tools may seem mundane. But their impact is huge. They free us from repetitive tasks, help us focus on what matters, and make our days a little brighter.

Listen to our full discussion on the GitHub Podcast 👇

Open source as a playground

One of the best things about being part of the open source community is knowing you’re never alone in your needs. Chances are, if you have a problem, someone else has faced it too — and maybe even built a solution!

I love browsing GitHub for those “just right” little tools. Sometimes, someone has already built exactly what I need. Other times, I find something close, fork it, and tweak it to fit my workflow. That’s the beauty of open source: It’s a playground for experimentation and sharing.

And when you open source your own creations, you’re not just helping yourself. You’re potentially helping countless others, maybe even inspiring contributions and new features. For example, my to-do app started as a personal project, but once I put it out there, people suggested new ideas, like a resume button for paused tasks. Some, I’ve added. Others, I encourage folks to fork and make their own.

That’s where open source comes in… fork it and use it.

AI as a force multiplier

If open source is the foundation, AI has become the rocket fuel for personal software. Building something just for yourself used to mean wrestling with unfamiliar frameworks or spending hours debugging arcane errors. Now? AI can help you scaffold a project, troubleshoot issues, or even just explain a tricky codebase.

I’ve seen friends who swore off frontend development, intimidated by the learning curve, turn around and build working dashboards in a single evening (with a little help from tools like GitHub Copilot). AI isn’t a replacement for learning, but it’s a facilitator for unblocking ideas and accelerating progress.

Watch me build an app in the demo below 👇

Reducing mental overhead and increasing joy

For me, the biggest benefit of building my own tools isn’t just the time saved, it’s the reduction in mental overhead. When you know that a part of your workflow is handled, you’re free to focus your mind on more creative or meaningful work.

I find it so much more fun to build now because I have my AI sidekick that will tell me where I went wrong or how to fix something that is incorrect. I’m no longer toiling over software that I want to build and crying because I can’t figure out the bugs.

Building personal software and using open source and AI have made building software more enjoyable.

Security, sharing, and growing your tools

Of course, when a tool is just for me, I don’t worry about making it bulletproof. But the moment I open source it and others start using it, security and maintainability become part of the conversation. That’s where community shines! Others may notice issues, suggest improvements, or even take the project in new directions.

I try to be clear in my contributing guidelines: If you want to add a feature that’s not on my personal roadmap, go ahead and fork it! That’s the beauty of open source — it enables everyone to shape software to their own needs.

Building personal tools, sharing them, and watching them grow is one of the most rewarding parts of being a developer. With open source and AI at our fingertips, there’s never been a better time to create the exact solutions you need — and maybe help someone else along the way.

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