If you’re a developer and haven’t yet used AI to build stuff for yourself, then take a weekend and give it a try. We are entering an age of personally generated applications. It’s truly amazing what you can build using the latest generation of AI models.
Why use Trello when you could generate a version of the Kanban board with just the set of features that you like, fully open-sourced, private, locally hosted, and offline-ready? That’s precisely what I’m doing while writing this blog post. After just a few conversations with Gemini 3, I had a very usable Kanban board.
With a few more conversations, I had working imports from Trello, markdown support, dark mode, and an enjoyable application for myself. Instead of storing all of the cards in a database, I decided to stick with a flat file approach. Each card generates a local markdown file and a JSON file for a local first approach.
In fact, this entire post was written in markdown and published to WordPress as a draft using Beckon.
Skilled developers will have an advantage
AI is a great accelerator. If you can make applications today, AI can accelerate your development time. If you’ve never built anything using code, then AI can act as a teacher and help level up your skills. The more skills you have, the more AI can accelerate. AI is not a replacement for developers. In fact, just the opposite seems to be true. It seems that expert-level developers are best positioned to use AI and run fast. At the end of the day, every developer has access to the same AI models. So in a competitive landscape, those who continue to invest in themselves and learn will be the ones who win.
Start with local first, expand later on if needed
Most complexity of applications is tied to user authentication and authorization. However, if you can quickly build something useful for yourself, do you really need to add that functionality? If the application only runs locally, then keep it simple. Only worry about extending when necessary. If you’re just building something to be used by you, then no need to overcomplicate. My Trello-like app, Beckon, is a single PHP file with no login. That means anyone can do anything. I would never upload it to a web server in its current state. However, for local use, it’s all I need.
WordPress as a distribution channel
The power of WordPress comes when you consider it as a distribution channel. How many generated solutions could be packaged up as a WordPress plugin and distributed to a wider audience? Most code can easily be wrapped in some PHP and released as a WordPress theme or plugin. Interactions from the backend can be converted to proper REST API endpoints. Any code can be written or rewritten in any language. While I don’t have plans to release Beckon as a WordPress plugin, it could easily be converted using Google Gemini.
Meet Beckon, one of my personally generated applications
A few fun things about Beckon:
- Created a workable prototype version in about an hour while sitting at the beach with Google Gemini 3 Pro.
- Generated the logo based on code using ChatGPT ImageGen via T3 Chat: https://t3.chat/share/vqxcwxxks6.
- The entire landing page was generated by feeding the code, logo, and tagline into Google Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/share/d323439eb677
- I use WordPress to power the landing page website; however, I was lazy and didn’t want to convert the generated landing.html to a WordPress theme, so I generated a WordPress plugin to map a static file to a page.
- Thanks to Dustin Hyle for the name idea.
What kinds of tools do you want for yourself? Give yourself a weekend and try building them with Google Gemini. You’ll likely get further along than you think.
