In 2005 I was going to school to become a network engineer, and took some programming courses along the way. The introduction to object-oriented programming hooked me. I loved the idea of breaking something down into smaller pieces and then recreating each aspect through logic. Taking things apart and learning how they work has always been a strong, core, driving interest of mine and this sang that same song. And so after gaining enough understanding over the language to bumblefuck things together and eventually get them working, I went home and feverishly started working on my first program, Personal Library Manger.

It took about two weeks of non-stop, bleary-eyed coding sessions. Every day I would wake up and go straight to the computer with fresh ideas and new solutions to lingering problems. And go to sleep with a new set of problems. When I was finished with my program, I felt a sense of accomplishment; I was proud of it.

Archive.org > thebottle.org > Personal Library Manager

I put it on my website for $10, listed it on software sites like cnet.com and softonic.com and people actually found it and bought it. However, I mentally abandoned it almost as soon as I finished it… I supported it for about 10 years but I had lost interest in maintaining it. Eventually I put the full version out for free, and then sometime later, fully abandoned it.

But around 2015 I regained interest in making an Android version. Phones have a built in camera that can be used as a scanner, it’s perfect! And I tried, but I got about 25% into it, and gave up. I didn’t have the time like I did in my early 20s, or maybe, more likely, I just didn’t have the passion of my early 20s. I put the idea on a shelf behind a stack of books, where I couldn’t see it and be reminded of my failure. Until now.

I absolutely detest so many aspects of AI… mainly the way it is being abused to manipulate, track, and control society. That is a whole other post in and of itself, and I want to stay on topic. But I say that to say, I’ve been adverse to using it in any way outside of LLMs that I can control locally for basic things like object detection. However, a few days ago, I decided to give it a shot to make my program. I figured, if it can even help me with 50% of the code and get pointed in the right direction, I could finally finish making an Android version. But I was so far off in my assumption of it’s capabilities… it quite literally, did everything.

I gave it my feature set, and it began working. It agreeably broke down the program into sections to work on in a logical manner. It caught things that I wouldn’t have caught, and when I told it to do something, it actually did the right things and it seemed effortless. With every change I made it gave me an updated Android project .zip that I could download and open in Android Studio to build and run. I would test it, tell it to correct things, and it did it. It took 4 hours to produce the finished app… and in all honestly, it was better than anything I could have done by myself which would have in all likelihood taken me months. I was dumbfounded, I looked at my finished app, and I was happy. I had a program that looked and functioned exactly how I envisioned back in 2015. But… something was missing. There was no sense of accomplishment, there was no sense of pride. I finally have the app that I always wanted, but I didn’t make it.

So with that I present to you, Library Owl.