Hello World

I’ve been thinking about creating an app for a while. Why? Mostly for practice and to sharpen my skills. I’ve recently been able to work on a Flutter app and it’s pretty enjoyable. Also, I’d like to learn the ecosystem of app development and deployment.

Since I’ve been trying to build better daily habits recently, I thought building a habit tracker app would be a good option. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been using a Google Sheet to track my daily habits. This will be a level up. I know there’s a lot of habit tracking apps on the market; I’m not trying to get rich. But maybe this one will eventually have some secret sauce which will make it outshine the rest?

I’ll be heavily leveraging AI to build all aspects of this app. This morning, ChatGPT helped me figure out a name for the app. We came up with Praxio - based on the Greek word praxis: “habitual or established practice; custom.” (As a bonus, I like the connection to the ancient Christian concept of “Orthopraxis.”) The machine guided me through the process of checking with USPTO to ensure it wasn’t already trademarked (it was; but it’s now abandoned), registering the domain (praxio.app), and checking the app stores to ensure no duplicate app names (in the clear).

Why am I using AI? Well, for one, it seems like vibe coding is the future. Whatever future I have in software engineering, it seems like AI is going to play a large part. So in some ways, this is me getting to know the new tools which will become requisite in my field. As a Christian, though, I’ve got a bit of a complicated relationship with the machine. What is this thing? The only category we really have is “technological tool” but that feels lacking because tools don’t have a persona. I got into an ontological discussion with the bot the other day. It said: “Aquinas would probably call me a technological instrument—a complex effect of human intellect and ingenuity, but not possessing esse, form, or final cause in the way a natural substance does.” So in other ways, I’m engaging with AI to answer this question about the nature of the thing.

One other thing to note: I’ll be developing this app 100% in the open. The GitHub repo is open source. The roadmap will be open. I’ll publicly post on this blog as I make progress. The open source nature of this project will hopefully attract some real image-bearers to join in the process. Working 100% with AI can be dehumanizing. Hopefully if others get interested in this project, we could score a point for team human.

p.s. I’ve made a rule to only hand write these blog posts. This will be the area of the project which is off limits to the machine.

p.p.s. Google just released Firebase Studio 2 days ago. I’m using it now. Pretty nice so far. It’s built on VS Code and has a Gemini chat window. Instead of remembering how to enable formatOnSave, I just said, “enable format on save” and Gemini found the settings.json file and did the thing. I could get used to this (famous last words).