What have you built with AI that only you use?
I recently built a small PDF editor for myself. I wanted something free that I could open in the browser whenever I needed it.
With AI, “I’ll just build my own” seems like a reasonable option for more of these small problems. Especially when you only need a few features and the tool only has to fit the way you work.
I suspect a lot of useful AI-built software will end up as something someone keeps in their bookmarks and uses every week, without ever trying to turn it into a business.
I’m hosting the editor on Inquir Compute, the platform I’m building for apps, databases and background jobs. We’re getting close to launch, and I’d like to hear about the things people are building for themselves.
What’s the most oddly specific tool you’ve built with AI that you still use?
Tell me what it does and what you used to do before you had it.
Replies
Toone
Interesting POV! I've been through this a lot lately, little scripts and internal tools that started because I got tired of copying the same things between places. What I ended up doing was keeping the first version almost embarrassingly small, one workflow and one clear outcome, otherwise AI makes it too easy to turn a personal tool into another project to maintain. The part that did not work was giving agents too much freedom around the edges, then I had to read and untangle more than I saved. Do you think people will keep these tools private, or will some become proper products?
Inquir Compute
@matheus_paranhos1
I think most of it will stay private, but overall number of public ones would grow.
Around 90% of startups already fail. With AI, that number might get closer to 99.9% — not because the software is worse, but simply because there will be so much more of it.
And it won’t only affect new startups. Some existing products may disappear too, because for certain use cases it’ll be cheaper and easier to build exactly what you need than to keep paying for another subscription.
Toone
@new_user___1132024007e8749605c4bb9 I get what you mean, thanks for your thoughts on it. I also believe more startups will be failing as the space gets even more crowded
mine's a basic invoice generator that pulls my hours from a spreadsheet and spits out a PDF. Before that I was copy pasting into a Word template every month and making mistakes every time lol
Inquir Compute
@alexander_wright6 in case you want it to go online, let me know, I'll help you to deploy it with Inquir
Mines a digital bouquet web app where you send flowers to a loved one. Fully built with Claude Opus 5.5 (that model is crazy). Also all the 3D flowers were made by Opus.
Inquir Compute
@spilstudios sounds cool, is it reachable? would like to check
@new_user___1132024007e8749605c4bb9 I misread the title! I didn't see the 'that only you use' part.
It's reachable through https://mybouquet.io/en
Love this topic! I built a small CLI script that parses my daily GitHub commits and Slack messages into a clean bulleted standup summary.
Inquir Compute
@michal_rachtan1 sounds helpful. It’s always hard to recall what I did yesterday.
Mine is small and boring: I write notes in markdown, and pasting them into Slack mangles everything — bullets collapse, the bold markers show up as literal asterisks. So I wrote a script bound to a keyboard shortcut that rewrites whatever's on my clipboard into something Slack won't break.
No interface, took an afternoon, nobody else will ever touch it. I hit it about ten times a day. That's exactly the category you're describing — too small to be a product, too annoying to keep doing by hand.