July 15, My Self-Imposed Ship Date - How Did I Do?
“Real artists ship.”
When Steve Jobs said that phrase, he was talking about literal artists like Picasso and Matisse, but his point extended to anyone being creative. For someone developing their creative ideas, whether a painting, sketch, or software, Jobs felt the whole point was not to keep their creations to themselves, but to share them with others.
Since June 27, I have conducted an AI experiment born out of apathy, using my 15 years-long side project, which is an app for superfans of the TV show Big Brother. When I first created this app in 2008, I was as big a fan of the TV show as anyone could be. The iPhone had launched the year before, and the App Store opened that summer. As a senior software engineer at Webmaster, Inc, I was working on our mobile app for DriveShare, an enterprise-grade file encryption product similar to DropBox. Our software made it possible to securely access your files from anywhere, including your mobile phone – which was a novelty at that time.
That was cool, but when I looked around for an app to keep up with Big Brother while I was working, pursuing my college degree, or coaching one of my kids’ little league teams, there wasn’t an app for that. Like so many software ideas, Hamster Soup came about because its creator needed it. The name was a mishmash of the hamsters nickname we superfans had for the houseguests, and my fictional, long-time personal software brand Mutant Soup. (With influence from Talk Soup, which was still big at the time, probably.)
That first version showed the cast bios, live updates from JokersUpdates, and a kind of newsletter I started writing called The Daily Dish.
Who knew you could pack so much in a 3.5” screen! It was like a tiny little tabloid in your pocket, and I loved it – so did a pretty large number of users in those early App Store days. I sold this app for $1.99 – a bargain given that I was doing a ton of work writing those daily dishes, which could sometimes go as much as 2,000 words! Along with just the general upkeep of it all.
That first version synced to an xml file on my server that contained everything but the live updates from JokersUpdates, which is like a micro-blog written by the live feeders who watch the online feeds and take shifts writing down the details. Jokers gave me a special data feed in exchange for promotion and some traffic. All these years later, the Jokers Updates feed still anchors the app. There’s nothing else like it out there.
Every year I would add a little something new, and every two or three I rewrote the app completely from scratch. It’s fun to go back through these old screenshots and see how the app evolved over time. But it also kind of stole my excitement for the game, little by little each year too. It became too much like a job, and writing those articles would just burn me out.
This year should have been a rewrite year, as it was overdue, but I just wasn’t much into it. Tiny little secret, I didn’t watch a single minute of Big Brother 25. Not an episode. Not the live feeds, either. I know Jag won, but I couldn’t tell you the first thing about who he is or how he did it. It’s just a mystery to me.
I’ve always used this app to explore ideas in technology and design that were interesting to me, and right now, like many people I am all about Artificial Intelligence. It’s a year too soon to incorporate AI into this app (* maybe), as those features won’t ship to the public until this fall. But I thought maybe a neat idea would be to see how much of this rewrite I could do with AI instead. Turns out, quite a lot!
I started on June 27, and gave myself a July 15 ship date (today) for whatever I had, because the new season premieres on July 17. My goal was to let ChatGPT write as much of the app as possible – all of it if it could (it couldn’t), and just guide it along. By the time it was shippable, I estimate it wrote at least 90%, but not more than 95%. I had to do 5-10% of direct writing, along with a lot of my own expertise to correct and guide it to the solutions for ideas.
However on July 8, less than 2 weeks after I started this experiment, we had a shippable iPhone and iPad app! That gave me a whole week to try to add more features, and I ended up shipping the first build with even more features on July 11. Since then, I’ve shipped two more updates, and have one cued up to go out tomorrow. These aren’t bug fixes; each build adds a few more features.
The speed with which I’ve been able use AI to go from an idea for a feature, to completing it with a git commit has surprised even me, an AI optimist. And I’m having more fun creating this app than I’ve had in years!
* I might actually add real artificial intelligence features into the app, but it will likely require some kind of monetization to cover the costs. Either ad-supported (blech!) or a tip-jar, both of which I’ve used in the past. If you see a tip-jar show up in an upcoming build of the app, look for an AI feature or two to arrive soon.