how to make single-use software
i've got a bunch of off-the-shelf selfhosted stuff running here at the house. navidrome. jellyfin. actual. paperless-ngx. all of these are good to great.
but every once in a while i want something that just does one thing and does it well.
previously it was difficult to summon the motivation and attention and time to understand the domain and then engineer a solution and troubleshoot along the way--remembering that often this involves techniques i'm not familiar with in domains i don't typically work in.
well it turns out that for writing simple services and the like an llm is actually pretty good. so this weekend i had it produce two related applications: one to download podcasts via rss and another to download videos via rss.
i didn't get all this in-home infrastructure setup (nas! dynamic dns! dmz! server! apps!) just so i could keep using someone else's cloud.
so now my podcasts and videos live in a directory and are provided by navidrome & jellyfin respectively.
also if i may: rss is one of the most remarkable technologies ever invented and the web really missed a trick by going all in on it.