AI Usage

Namida is made by human, not vibe coded. AI usage is minimal and very selective.
Every design choice comes after thoughtful decisions and series of refining, down to every pixel.
Parts built with AI have a disclaimer, see here for more info.

Why AI at all (rant)

I always felt passionate about turning code into something with life, seeing my work bloom makes me happy.
I worked on Namida daily since January 2023, almost 4 years non stop. The learning was hard but the outcome was satisfying. Every time I built a feature, took my time with it, fixed bugs all night and then saw everything work, it brought me joy. Each challenge felt rewarded.

Recently (since v6.5.0) I realized there were far more features to build than I could finish in reasonable time, or even learn in time. The challenges became easy and boring, a small feature or a small change was no challenge anymore, and the big ones needed big time. What was left was bugs, the worst and most exhausting time thief.

That’s where AI came in clutch. We don’t tell it to vibe code, we ask it to do the work that costs time and effort. The codebase already has its foundation and its style, and AI follows them, so Namida stays human made in the first place. It brings isolated features, does the scary big work, and fixes the annoying bugs that cost sanity and steal time that could go into something new.

AI was always a good company. It helped me learn a lot and improved many things along the way, but I still wrote every line by hand because I have this perfectionism thing. I didn’t want to use AI generated code at all because I love this app and want everything under control. Then I tried a good one and realized it can write exactly like me, and even better. That is when it became an opportunity, let AI do the hard work, and let me focus on which features and changes should come to Namida instead of how hard the feature is.

Keeping up alone with demanding features and annoying bugs would take another 4 years for what AI can do in a few months. The code is still ours, the vision is still ours. AI does the part it excels at, the hard work, writing good code that would take us years to perfect and probably never to optimize. There is so much it can do better and faster, and things I would have never known were possible.

Most decisions used to be weighed by their effort cost, sometimes more than by the feature itself. Now the only question left is how cool and useful the feature is…