I have several personal tools I’ve built and maintained.

It’s always more work than it looks. You can get to mostly usable tools quickly if your request isn’t too difficult, but every time I use them I run into another thing that needs to be fixed, changed, clarified, or cleaned up.

It’s fun at first, but over time you realize you’re spending more time building the tools than using the tools to build the thing you originally wanted to work on.

I think personal software is best for highly specific tools or for things you need to use repeatedly for a very long time.

For something like a SketchUp competitor, I wouldn’t want to try to maintain my own. The number of edge cases and features is bigger than you imagine up front, and the vibecoded version that might appear a few hours after your prompt is going to be very far from the version you want to use.

I really appreciate this sentiment, and at the same time there are real opportunity costs to building and maintaining your own tools. Even in the era of tokens.

I think it comes down to where you want to spend your time and attention.

https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

I think that could be true once you're experienced enough to know what you want.

Before that, though, I think you have to learn what the experts do and what can be done and what you should want. And then you can start to make your own opinions.

By then, unless the major players have done it really wrong, you're not going to make something better than what already exists.

Right now, it's different, because we have that experience prior to the ability to just wish up an app and have it happen.

> Use Claude or codex to build the 3D model first, then build the modeler around it as you iterate towards what you want to build

This is precisely what I'm doing.

I literally just had Claude build a 3D modeler slice of Blender that I wanted but that also works in VR [video: (https://www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev/s/q5Y6cskYb9)]

I think the value of adapting full tools to your own workflow far outweighs the maintenance costs nowadays. The tool above for instance took my agent a couple hours and it was good to go. It wasn’t a small slice by any means either: it supports edit/obj mode, extrude, loop cuts, modifiers like subdiv, save/load, undo/redo, bones, auto rig, posing, and more.

Mind you, this is a slice of an open source tool which was still outside of what I wanted from it. Cost wasn’t even part of the equation here.

> At the same time I wonder if we are entering an era in which it’s just better to build your own tools

I wonder if Claude Code and other similar tools start to maintain their own base apps that everyone keeps asking for? This would be like a "cache" that makes the requests cheaper/easier to deliver?

Then everyone's "own" apps is really just a customization layer on top of a solid base that already does all the heavy lifting.

So many people are building their own versions of:

- PDF editors

- Word processors

- 3D editors

- Video editors

- Pixel-based image editors

- Vector-based image editors

- CAD editors

etc.

In some of these there are a few flavors as well that are major architectural choices. But most of what people are doing is just playing around with UI and file formats. Much of the functionality is generally the same.

Skip the 3D modeler and have the agent do the operations directly instead.

A good visualizer might be useful thought! If that part of the work needs to be validated.

>every time I draw a rectangle it asks me to name the object;

yeah this seems insane. The push/pull also doesn't work the way I expect it to. Sketchups main selling point was how easy it was to use and pick up

export menu lists stl and obj.

I run it on Arch

Better rename it to “I Can’t Believe it’s Not Cat Soup 3D”

wow this is a really well-built application, it even comes with its own MCP server and LLM integrations, nice work.

Thank you for this link!

Pretty much all software is built using LLMs. That's a rather harsh filter.