by 8organicbits on 6/18/25, 5:16 AM with 139 comments
by al_borland on 6/18/25, 11:14 AM
I typically end up using basic HTML/CSS/JS for stuff like this today. If I really need backend code, I'll use basic PHP (no frameworks or anything). But this ties me to a browser, which I'm not always a fan of. Some of these fairly scrappy little projects at work (done in the browser like this, and with AutoHotKey) have been going for 10+ years now, with very little maintenance. The AHK script I haven't touched in probably 8 years, since I moved to macOS at work, yet people still use it countless times per day. If AHK decides to stop operating, it's no big deal, the code that exists will still run. The same can't be said for these SaaS solution to this problem. People looking for scrappy solutions aren't looking to remake their solution every time a founder decides to move on to something else more interesting or profitable.
by RodgerTheGreat on 6/18/25, 6:29 AM
Decker[2] (which is also open-source) has answers to several of the things outlined on Scrappy’s roadmap, including facilities for representing and manipulating tabular data with its query language and grid widgets and the ability for users to abstract collections of parts into reusable "Contraptions".
by tokioyoyo on 6/18/25, 7:04 AM
OP is right, making simple apps for your friends for fun!
by simonw on 6/18/25, 12:45 PM
"A hand-sized touchscreen is too small for editing Scrapps comfortably"
I would encourage them not to underestimate the tenacity of mobile phone users!
For a lot of people these days their mobile phone is their only digital computing device. People write code on mobile phones. People write entire novels.
I think this tool's impact could be greatly increased by taking the time to figure out a mobile editing interface, even one that feels less comfortable than the desktop experience.
by nilirl on 6/18/25, 6:47 AM
by selcuka on 6/18/25, 6:31 AM
[1] https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/bb451732-9559-401a-8000-b...
by Peteragain on 6/18/25, 7:43 AM
by blips on 6/18/25, 9:20 AM
generic...
"with live updating — all for free. LLMs ar..." also see a fair few of these long dashes (18x) which is either a tell tail of you've used ChatGPT to generate the text or you've started writing like the AI.
I havn't thought about it that hard yet but i don't really like consuming AI generated content at all as soon as i see signs of it part of my brain turns off. And no slight to the creator, I have as much interest in writing this kind of copy as any developer would i'd imagine.
by riffraff on 6/18/25, 6:21 AM
I'm on mobile now but I'll try this on desktop ASAP.
But I think one thing missing on the analysis is: people want ease of share and zero cost.
It's surprisingly simple to build a minimal app in some environments but then you get to distribution (app store are a huge gatekeeper) and/or hosting and e.g. my wife or kids won't be bothered to pay 5$/momth for it (and neither will many professional devs).
by indyjo on 6/18/25, 9:08 AM
by feeley on 6/18/25, 9:51 AM
https://app.codeboot.org/5.3.1/?init=.fbWF0aF9wcmFjdGljZS5we...
For more complex UIs, CodeBoot provides an FFI for accessing the DOM directly from Python code. For example here is a dice throwing app with a button to roll the dice again. The text in the button has translations to multiple languages and will adjust to the browser's default.
https://app.codeboot.org/5.3.1/?init=.fZGljZS5weQ==~XQAAgADq...
by zupa-hu on 6/18/25, 12:26 PM
I also work in this space and the road ahead gets exponentially harder, unfortunately.
by hiAndrewQuinn on 6/18/25, 8:50 AM
Recently I made a diet checklist [1] that I've been following more or less to the letter 5 days out of the week. I have a little Android button that just opens right up to the web page. I click, click, click, then move on with my day. If I feel I need to change something I can copy a plain text screenshot of what's on there currently and chat with Gemini about it.
I'm really liking this new wave of technology.
by kakamiokatsu on 6/18/25, 12:54 PM
by Noelia- on 6/19/25, 6:44 AM
Scrappy feels like a digital sticky note. It is easy to make, easy to share, and kind of fun to use together. I am excited to try it out and see if it can become our little shared space for everyday stuff.
by failrate on 6/18/25, 12:39 PM
by account-5 on 6/18/25, 7:42 AM
Swap JavaScript with VBA and this is the MS Access workflow.
I'd only start using this if it became ooensource though, can find anything to suggest it is.
by iddan on 6/18/25, 9:03 PM
by lxe on 6/18/25, 7:28 PM
by lastdong on 6/18/25, 7:25 AM
In the future, optimised open models will enable more people to develop tools locally, and with an open source AIDE (does this term exist yet? Artificial Intelligence Development Environment) publish / share it in different ways.
by s_ting765 on 6/18/25, 6:47 AM
by ge96 on 6/18/25, 4:08 PM
I remember learning this thing called Touch Develop by MS
Then I realized that was a closed environment/learned to program with programming languages instead, dumped a few months into TD
by swyx on 6/18/25, 8:08 AM
ok where is the scrappy backend? what data do you see? where do i make an account? i wish that this was more transparent/discussed since obviously this software is not entirely local?
> LLMs are getting better and better, and while they are far from able to make a full-fledged app without a lot of help from a software engineer, they can make small apps pretty reliably.
mildly disagree. llm generated apps tend to look better + i dont have to learn or stick to your preset primitives. even nontechnical people run into this pretty quickly
otherwise, nice labor of love. good going OP.
by p2hari on 6/18/25, 3:43 PM
by jackgavigan on 6/18/25, 7:19 AM
Making it possible to lookup and store data in a spreadsheet (maybe using something like the Google Sheets API) could unlock a huge amount of use cases.
I'll be watching this project with interest!
by funnym0nk3y on 6/18/25, 11:10 AM
Most of the examples can easily be replaced by pen and paper which is faster than building a app. More complex use cases require more complex solutions which I'm not sure this provides.
One use case could have been an application to study functions in time and frequency space. But does it provide an fft?
by bowsamic on 6/18/25, 6:28 AM
by atemerev on 6/18/25, 6:36 AM
(I wonder if somebody ported Delphi / Lazarus to WASM)
by ilaksh on 6/18/25, 6:45 PM
by ceving on 6/18/25, 7:50 AM
by croniev on 6/18/25, 5:58 AM
by jayd16 on 6/18/25, 6:35 AM
by filcuk on 6/18/25, 8:01 AM
by knowitnone on 6/18/25, 3:28 PM
by mettamage on 6/18/25, 11:59 AM
by _joel on 6/18/25, 11:15 AM
by QuantumWanderer on 6/18/25, 1:12 PM
View your friend's apps, use your friend's apps, remix your friend's apps to suit your needs.
But it needs to be all-in on speech. End-to-end abstracts away the concept of code. Speech-to-App.
by sReinwald on 6/18/25, 10:17 AM
The target audience problem is immediately apparent: they're building a product for people who can write JavaScript event handlers but somehow can't 'npx create-react-app'. This demographic is approximately twenty-seven people.
More critically, they've confused the problem space, in my opinion. The barrier to personal software isn't the lack of drag-and-drop of JavaScript environments. It's that software, unlike a meal or a home-made sweater, comes with an implicit support contract that lasts forever. When I cook dinner for friends, I'm not on the hook when they're hungry again next Tuesday. When my grandma knits a home-made sweater, she's not expected to keep supporting it in case I want to add a hood.
When the attendance counter has a race condition and the venue goes over capacity, guess who's getting the angry call when the fire marshal shows up for an inspection?
The "redistributing the means of software production" rhetoric rings particularly hollow from what appears to be a proprietary SaaS in the making. You don't democratize software by creating another walled garden. And their claim about "owning your data" while simultaneously offering real-time sync is either technically naive or deliberately misleading. How is the attendee counter example's counter state shared between users, if the data lives in local storage? I don't see how you can have both without server infrastructure that they control.
The actual nearest thing to their vision already exists and has millions of users: Spreadsheets. Non-technical people build complex, business-critical "applications" in spreadsheets every day. No JS required, local-first, and everyone already knows how to use it. But "we made a worse Excel" doesn't sound as revolutionary, I suppose.
The real unsolved problem isn't making it easier to create small apps - I build small tools for myself all the time. It's making them sustainable without creating permanent maintenance burdens. And that is not something you can solve with a new framework or SaaS - it's at it's core, a social issue.
by mrafii on 6/18/25, 1:44 PM
by EZ-E on 6/18/25, 7:14 AM
by starvar on 6/18/25, 8:16 AM
_nice_
by Surac on 6/18/25, 8:10 AM
by carabiner on 6/18/25, 6:47 AM
by DustinEgg on 6/18/25, 9:21 AM
by threemux on 6/18/25, 9:35 AM
by jwblackwell on 6/18/25, 7:59 AM
by etchalon on 6/18/25, 2:12 PM
by richarlidad on 6/18/25, 6:11 AM
by Michael128 on 6/18/25, 2:00 PM
by demaga on 6/18/25, 7:48 AM
From time to time I come up with micro-projects that solve very particular issues my friends are facing. Ones that are not easily solved with existing apps on the market. When I see my friends use them, it brings me joy!
But! For this I had to use traditional software development tools I was already familiar with - IDE, source control, etc. Scrappy or similar tools would not help me at all. The tool is targeting someone like my non-developer friends, but I doubt they could come up with a design for a solution, implement it in scrappy and then maintain it when something changes in the outside world.
On a separate node, I had great success with spreadsheets as both Frontend and sometimes Backend in various personal projects. And I'm not the only one, my friend made an addon for Google Sheets that pulls data from my specific bank's API - I use it to track my expenses. That's the kind of stuff I wanted to see in the article.