There's 10 Apps For That??

I suffer from a condition many of us know all too well: spending more time researching tools that help you do things than actually doing the things you want to do. I’m not sure if there’s an official diagnosis for this, but I’ve self-diagnosed it with alarming accuracy.

Take personal knowledge management apps, for example. This entire category of software promises to help you organize your notes, connect ideas, and essentially build your own Wikipedia for life. It’s a fascinating concept.

The problem is that as software development gets easier and barriers to entry fall, these tools multiply. New apps pop up constantly, each with a shiny feature or a fresh spin on an old idea. And so begins the cycle: a new app gets hyped on social media, praised by productivity gurus, and suddenly you’re deep in the rabbit hole of comparisons and reviews. Hours vanish. Dinner goes cold. You forget to shower or kiss your baby goodnight.

And then, if you decide to switch, the real fun begins: migrating your data, learning the new system, and adapting to its quirks. Even when modern tools make it easier to export and import data, the process is never seamless. Plus, there’s the psychological weight of sunk costs—all the time and effort you’ve already invested in the previous app.

But it doesn’t stop there. Just when you’ve settled into the new system, the app you abandoned rolls out the very feature you switched for—or worse, an even shinier one. And suddenly, you’re tempted to switch back. Rinse, repeat.

At some point, you realize you’ve spent far more time testing apps than actually using them. This must be how app reviewers stumbled into their careers.

The irony is that most of these tools share the same core functionality. Yes, there are differences, but any one of them would probably get the job done. Yet with so many options claiming to ‘unlock your productivity,’ the real challenge becomes resisting the urge to chase perfection. Discipline, not another app, is often the answer.

This is where AI could change the game. Imagine needing a personal knowledge management app and having AI build one tailored precisely to your needs. Or sticking with an existing app but letting AI seamlessly add missing features or speed up developer turnaround for feature requests. The endgame? A world where AI can design and generate software—complete with a customized UI—on the fly. You’d essentially have your own virtual development team, building tools exactly how you want them.

How amazing would that be? And as the cost of programming trends toward zero, this future doesn’t seem far-fetched at all.

Now, it’s entirely possible I’d waste just as much time tinkering with AI-generated features I don’t need as I do comparing apps. But hey, that’s a bridge I’ll cross when I get to it.

Here is the original post I wrote

I suffer from a malady known as spending too much time researching tools that help you do things instead of doing the actual things that you want to do. This is something that probably has a clinical diagnosis, but I'm only self-diagnosed (with great accuracy I believe). A great example is personal knowledge management apps. There's a whole category of apps and programs designed to help you record your data, write things down, keep them safe, make them easy to recall, and link them together to create relationships between different pieces of information. It's a really cool idea to have your own sort of Wikipedia-like thing.

The thing is, as software gets better and it gets easier to code, the barrier to creating apps like these goes down. You tend to get lots and lots of them. You fall into this trap of needing to try out the newest thing because it has a new feature or a new take on a feature that the one you use doesn't have.

Two things happen here that aren't great from a productivity standpoint. One, whenever something comes out, it gets hyped on social media and by all the folks who write about this type of thing. Then you spend a lot of time looking into it and doing comparisons. It takes a lot of time. Hours and hours can go by before you realize you forgot to take a shower or eat dinner or kiss your baby.

Then if you decide to switch, there's the actual switching cost of getting all your data over, of trying to learn this new system. Because when you're on a system, then you have a sunk cost of all the stuff that you've collected there. Most systems now are good at helping you get your data out, but still, it's a process.

Then what will actually happen is you'll switch a system and then the app that you switch from comes out with a new feature that the app you're now on doesn't have. Or it'll add the feature that was missing. So then you might switch back. This goes on forever until you spend all your time testing apps and not writing anything. This is probably how app reviewers fell into their careers.

As it gets easier to code things like this, it becomes worse for consumers who end up spending lots of time trying to figure out what to use.

And at the end of the day, a lot of these apps are very similar. There are differences, but the core functionality is very similar across all these apps. We can probably get by with any of them, but when there are so many options that promise to 'unlock your productivity', its hard to show the necessary discipline.

This is where AI can just build stuff for us. If you need a personal knowledge management app, AI can build it for you. Or you can use an existing app and maybe the developers make it easy for you to add an existing feature via AI, or maybe they have a way to use AI turn around feature requests much, much faster.

The end game, I believe, is some version of the world where the AI builds apps for you in a very customized way, and can generate these apps and the UI for them virtually on the fly. Then you basically have your own development team building the exact custom version of an app that you want. How amazing would that be. As the cost of programming goes to zero, this doesn't seem very far fetched at all.

Now its possible that I'd waste just as much time tinkering the super-cool AI to build new features I don't really need instead of comparing different apps, but lets just cross that bridge when we get to it.