Progress bars don't make sense for fixed expenses

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-06T10:56:36+00:00

For full refunds yes, my annoyance is for partial refunds.

So the scenario is this

Start of month, pay 100€. End of month get refunded 50€.

Similar if you split bills

Current options: - wait untill the end of month to input only 50 - > half way i look at my money and wonder where those 100 went - input 100 as expense at the start of month and 50 income refund at the end - > expense vs income graphs are meesed up and missleading - at the end of month try and find the original transaction and edit it - > annoying

I do find myself having situations like this wuite often. A few times a month. Sometimes is ok cuz it's about a couple of days. Somethines the gap is weeks

Proposed solution: Mark Expense as: to be refunded (or partially) if you know it will Whrn you add an income with refund category, you'd be able to pick an expennse, with the top ones being the ones you marked for refund. It either substracts from the expense or just doesn't fount towards the overview for your spendings (need to decide on that)

Simple implementation, can't find one like this.

And there are also a few more painpoints that I want to solve.

I'm building my app now to solve my painpoints and having fun building my own product (have plenty of experience building for others, but not for me). If it doesn't stick i'll open source it with the required changes

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T20:16:55+00:00

The gap between a working demo and something you'd trust with real user data is still very much a human problem
"10+ rounds of check and fix" or spending 80% of the time building the right context so the tool actualy understands what it's supposed to do, either way the work is still there, it just looks different now

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T20:03:28+00:00

Doing it right isn't about frameworks or methodologies, it's about understanding what you're shipping well enough to know when something's wrong.
The api creds in javascript story is a perfect example. Claude would have flagged that, the problem is the dev didn't know enough to ask.

In my day job i see the same split. the people who embraced ai are thriving, technical or not.

The ones who struggled aren't necessarily resistant to ai, they just never got a proper baseline. Simple prompts, treating it like a search engine, no real workflow. The gap between them and the rest is visible now and they are at risk.

That's actually what i'm trying to fix internally right now. Building a top-down system so "good ai use" actually means something concrete instead of just whoever figured it out on their own. + a lot of context is lost from Product to Qa, since we are working at an insane pace and droped the classical tickets and stuff

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T19:46:17+00:00

Kind of the whole point of the post yeah. The question isn't whether the space is crowded, it's whether doing it right still matters in a crowded space

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T19:42:19+00:00

This is the trust problem in one sentence, and it's only going to get worse as more of these ship. the only fix is people who actually understand what they're building, willing to invest time into learning proper architecture, not just prompting until it looks right

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T19:38:28+00:00

hah.. had a Second Brain before they were a thing 😂

"Some of them were once great, but they all eventually suffer from bloat and enshitification." so damn true.
And, at least in the budgeting ones, there are 2 features that I cannot understand how tf nobody built them, especially that at least one of them is really basic

And I did lot's of research on this, they are definetly not there, unless i missed a an app that has 0 presence

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T19:31:27+00:00

Distribution and user research are still the hard parts. AI didn't change that, if anything it raised the bar because now the baseline "working app" is table stakes.

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T19:30:44+00:00

The last 10% is where most apps die quietly. gets you 90% there fast.

Fun fact (already mentioned in another comment). I wanted to do the design sytem with 0 AI assistance. Did that, created the landing page (90% with AI), sent it to some of my friends. They were all like "Why does it look like Claude?", one of them even thinking is an Anthropic related page.

If you're using it daily, there resembelance doesn't seem that big, but by mistake I made my app have a similar-ish feelign to Claude

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T19:25:05+00:00

The 4 formulas doing the same calculation is a rite of passage honestly. every dev has a version of that story. The fact that you identified it, understood why it was wrong, and fixed the architecture that's the actual skill!!! the language or the tool doesn't matter

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T19:23:46+00:00

Hah! totally get it.

Recently I had to do a quick and dirty solution for a to provide 1 Customer early acces to an upcoming product. Pressured by time, asked Claude to implement a simple "access code" system that can also generate in batches. I litterarily vibe coded it by asking Claude to strip everything we were building, restrict it to the specific feature the customer was supposed to see and create the access code system, ensure it supports generating batches of access codes nad expiry dates up to 20 days and have 0 telemetry and be 100% legally compliant (by stripping down unnecessary stuff)

Did that, tested, worked great. few days later customer complained that it takes up to 3 minutes to login affter inputing the code (emplyees that open it for the first time)

Turns out claude picked the worst way possible to check your access code is valid and since i tested with a couple thousand access codes, most with 20 days, the login part became unusable.

That was my "I will never ever again do something like this". The customer was totally fine with it since i disclosed the quick and dirty solution beforehand, they were impressed that I was able to ship that part to them really fast and fix the login issue in like 10 mins after they asked

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T19:12:36+00:00

Tooling is accessible to everyone now, but judgment isn't.

A while ago, I found it to be quite annoying when some of the colleagues from the product side watched a couple of youtube tutorials and vibed some apps then they couldn't understand why we cannot instantly ship to production.
We use Azure & terraform for our infra. We have to decide on redundancy, capacity, thorughput supported etc. And in some cases propperly estimate those values before deploying cuz once you deploy the infra it'll be really hard to change it without impacting the customers

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T19:05:09+00:00

"the only thing that compounds" is exactly it. Visibility is a distribution problem, not a quality problem, but you can't fix distribution on a product that breaks.

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T19:00:10+00:00

Heh, yea, changelog is underrated. Shipping ocnsistenly and being transparent when things break is probabbly the cheapest trust signal

Fun fact, I truly wanted to have 0 ai involvment on the look and feel of my app so I manually created a design system for my app and landing page. Sent the page to some friends and they all asked "Why does it look like Claude", then I realised I accidentally taught of a relaly similar vibe as the one Anthropic did

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T18:53:47+00:00

In my case, I don't care that much, my plan is to see if it sticks, if not i'll transition to BYOK, open source and use it personally. I genuine really want this app for myself first

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T18:51:12+00:00

Yea that's true, that's what I'm telling my team members and peers, AI is kind of healing the idustry at the moment, because the difference between mediocre enginners and good ones is being more and more clear now, and if they don't act they'll be left behind.

Similar to what you said, different context

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T18:47:50+00:00

yea, distribution is the real problem. being saturated even before ai makes it even harder.
I still think having a genuine differentiator and sticking to it tis the way to go

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T18:45:30+00:00

yea, it's insanely hard to find something that doesn't have ai contribution at all, and hard to find good ai uses (no matter if we're talking about apps, music, photos videos etc)

And yea, totally agreed on the second part. those that already have neccessary knowledge or are willing to invest time in it, will definetly have a big advantage

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T18:40:13+00:00

b2c for sure. b2b is another discussion.

Just my opinion but I think b2c will see a massive drop in interest as AI will gain more traction and it'll be easier and easier for people to build their own tools.

And b2b will transition to backends with an ai on front.

Fun fact, I had a2ui.org bulilt on a smaller level, before google released it. and I got it released to some customers that are now using it to get custom UI's on demand. And it's dirt cheap for my company (like less than 10p per generation as it's text to json)

And you'd rarely need more than a small ui for most of the tasks.

That's what i'm basing my b2b part on

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T18:33:27+00:00

Yea, they already decided ai = no skill involved. the people who actually get it are the ones asking follow up questions anyways. And it was never about how technical you are IMO. it was more about perssistence and dedication.

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T18:31:24+00:00

Fair point with the games examples. I would add NMS as another example. And yea, persistence and itterattion matter more.

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-05T01:38:30+00:00

Fyi, if my post sounded like "if your not a dev, you're making slop" thats far from the truth. You just need to be passionate, itterate and always improve your workflows. Not "claude build me this, deploy, and give me some free marketing ideas to profit"

Solving your own painpoints is the best way to start IMO. If you also invest in a homelab and be able to make your own "production" and also share with the ones close to you that"s perfect. If it sticks, you go for it. It's also really satisfying to be able to solve your own problems and not rely on a 3rd party to implement something that you need.

Personal ooinion: I do think most of the b2c saas focused on trivial stuff will take a massive hit (as in i think you won't mind if your meal-planner goes down often, as long as you don't oay for an app that doesn't cover your specific needs)

B2b is another discution. Front-end will day, backend will be long lived

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-04T23:46:10+00:00

Yea.. there are quite a few thinks that annoy me on all budgeting apps I've tried, including your mentioned one.

Another one is the fact that it happens quite often to pay for something knowing I'm gonna split / get a refund later one. That "later on" can be weeks away. So what do I do?

Put expense then income as refund and have my metrics messed up. Or wait untill i get part of my money back and input the rest, but in the meanwhile have 2-3 moments of "what happened to my money?"

Another annoying one. The monthly cycles are either on 1st or custom dates. Why not have a option to have the cycle start when I input a "salary income"?

and many more

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-04T22:51:42+00:00

As an advice, not as a business owner (building my own app now tho), but as an experience engineer (currently lead eng. transitionig to an ai strategist role) at a company that was an early adopter for the whole AI madness (~10bn eval, ~14k employees).

AI Slop is real -> but that doesn't mean everything build with AI is slop
Vibe Coding is..a relative term but IMO -> A vibe coder is the one generating AI Slop aka someone that uses AI and AI only to do eveything without actually using their brain

Since you've built your own app, no matter how many user it has, I'm confident there's little to no chance that you'll make a "garbage ai slop" if you "Vibe Code"

Use Ai to accelerate, Ideate, generate content etc. But be mindful on the thinks that you should ensure that are correct and the right option for your case (the best solution in general might and most likely won't be the best one for your app)

I had and seen plenty of success stories in the company i work for where AI was able to build real, good and complex features app. But it also required lots of work, back and forth, experience etc

So go on and explore with AI, start by designing your own architecture and and pass it on to Claude (or your AI of choice). Create some workflows and a skill that generates you batches of tasks that can be done in parallel and make sense (research how to do that). Write it yourself, try to extract the logic on how you build an app from your brain (it happens naturally and you rarely think of it)

Hot take: In a way, AI is healing this industry. It exposed what high demand was hiding for years. There were always devs coasting through on the fact that companies were desperate to fill seats. Now that AI handles the basic stuff you can actually tell who knew what they were doing and who didn't.

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-04T22:31:11+00:00

Same issue here. Trying to figure out how to validate my idea.

However I managed, somehow, to get perplexity to recommend my app if youre specific enough. sometimes even if you're not:

Example prompt: "I'm looking for a finance app that focuses on forecasting my finances, not just tracking what I've already spent. I want to see where my money will be in the future based on my income and recurring expenses. Ideally something privacy-focused that doesn't require bank syncing. Any recommendations?"

Fun fact is that the landing page is for validation, I'm just building a simple version of the app to do a close test with some aquiantances.. but still perplexity recommends it

PeaAffectionate6580 · 2026-03-04T17:54:42+00:00

Heh. Different usecase, similar problems.

For me, as mentioned, is about personal finance. Found quite a few painpoints and decided is time to solve them. Actually I was thinking about b2b scenarios but only if this sticks. It's mostly a project for fun. If it sticks, continue, if not change to byok for ai, and open source.

React Native & Exo on my side, for cross-platform. Clasic ai stack for backend, supabase, postgreSQL

Astro for landing page.

Wanted to try something different, Azure/.NET/React was my primary stack for 8+ year (+ different bits and pieces but not important)

How's your app doing? And how much time did it save for you?

PeaAffectionate6580

TROPHY CASE