Software that mutates with you (zero friction dev)


 

Since coding agents started there is a big shift in the way I work. Instead of thinking about the problem in terms of algorithms, I try to design an "islands" based architecture where each "island" can be filled with pure garbage but the full software stays solid by strict apis and data boundaries.

A month ago our first boy was born (a bit ahead of time) and we needed to monitor his eating/pooping habits for health reasons. We looked for an off the shelf baby logging app - there were a few good options but none of them was a perfect fit.

So I built one!

Setup:

Dev — Opencode connected to openrouter, using DeepSeek V4 Flash latest

Server — Raspberry Pi

Reachability — Tailscale

The main "garbage islands" where:

  • Whatsapp chat parsing
  • Analysis page generator
  • Measurement addition page
  • Web server
Each of these islands is pure AI slop but since the design is extremely simple, it holds pretty well.

It's remarkable how fast (and cheap) software development has become. After one hour I had a working prototype that was usable by me, my spouse and our parents. After the initial "release", every day my "users" would send me feature requests, I translated them to an actual prompt with the desired design and opencode made the magic happen.

one particularly interesting thing I've noticed is that unlike traditional software, we were adding and removing features based on what we needed at that moment. It means that there is no one best software version, instead, the software mutated to fit our needs as they changed. Once you think about it, it makes perfect sense but it's just not how we are used to consume software products.

Link for anyone who want to fork:

https://github.com/barakh/BabyStats

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