I’m not a developer, but I work around a lot of them — enough to know that devs build things for fun, for curiosity, for frustration relief, and sometimes just because the idea wouldn’t leave their brain alone.
And honestly?
I think that’s one of the coolest parts of tech culture.
Because while companies talk about roadmaps, features, and customer needs…
developers quietly build things that solve their own problems first.
- Tools no one asked for.
- Tools no one paid for.
- Tools that make life easier in a small, personal way.
- Tools that probably have three users max — the dev, their laptop, and sheer chaos.
- And those tiny personal inventions?
- They fascinate me.
🔧 Everyone builds something for themselves at some point
Over the years, I’ve heard devs casually mention things like:
- a script that renames 200 files in one go
- a personal dashboard to track mood + sleep + caffeine
- a tiny AI bot that generates commit messages
- an automation that rearranges Google Drive
- a CLI tool that reminds them to drink water
- a mini database because existing ones felt “annoying”
- an internal tool that became… half of their company later
Some of these tools are brilliant.
Some are chaotic.
Some should honestly be illegal.
But every single one is a window into how developers think.
🤝 Meanwhile, I build… frameworks in my head
Since I don’t code, my “personal tools” look different:
- systems for evaluating ideas
- questions I ask before I let myself get excited
- ways to check if something can scale into an actual business
- templates for positioning + messaging > “is this useful or just cool?” filters
and mental models that save me from chasing unrealistic ideas
Developers debug code.
I debug ideas.
Different tools.
Same energy.
💬 Now I’m curious: what have you built for yourself?
Tell me about the thing you built:
- just because you wanted to
- just because it made your life easier
- just because existing tools annoyed you
- or just because you could
It doesn’t matter if it’s tiny, messy, half-finished, or completely ridiculous.
I’d genuinely love to know what personal tools devs create when no one is watching.
Drop yours below — I’ll be reading every single one. 👀✨
Top comments (47)
I can never stick to building for myself and not thinking about distributing 😭
Honestly that’s a great problem to have — the “accidental entrepreneur” instinct :)
I built Piper, a tool that allows me to map and migrate no-relational data to Postgres with an okay-looking UI.
It was strictly made for my former company's usage because during that time, they were painfully and manually migrating data from dynamoDB to Postgres.
but now I'm trying to re-write it to give it more flexibility, allowing a wide range of migration not limited to just Postgres.
It’s always fun seeing an internal tool evolve into something way more flexible.
Good luck with the rewrite — sounds like it’s going to be a powerful one!
bad_BANANA is the pet project I always return to — a personal adversarial-ML framework I’ve built up over time. It runs controlled experiments (evasion, poisoning, transferability), generates synthetic datasets, and produces reproducible reports. Every few months I revisit it, upgrade something, or add a new idea. It’s the tool that’s grown alongside my own learning.
I’ve always been drawn to tools like Airgeddon and Angry Oxide — the ones with badass banners, ASCII art, and that old-school hacker personality baked right into the CLI. Same with reading Phrack articles back in the day — they had this mix of technical depth and underground creativity that stuck with me.
That vibe made me want to build something of my own with that same energy. bad_BANANA grew directly out of that inspiration: a tool that’s technical, useful, but also has style and character. It's a way to express art with code.
This is such a beautiful way to describe it — “art with code” really hits. I love how much personality and history you’re pulling into bad_BANANA. Do you feel like that old-school hacker aesthetic is missing in modern tooling?
Yeah, honestly everything kind of feels the same these days when it comes to UI, look, and overall feel. So yes — the aesthetic soul is definitely missing in a lot of modern tools. Not many people are building things that truly stand out… something with personality, something that grabs your attention and isn’t afraid to be different.
I’ve never been to DEFCON, so I’m sure there are people there who still create and invest in that kind of energy — but what I’m saying is that it’s not common from what I can see. Everything has to appeal to everyone at once, and that pressure kind of destroys originality.
I feel this. There’s a whole generation of tools that look polished but feel hollow — almost like they were designed by consensus instead of by a person with a point of view. That’s why I love seeing projects where someone clearly built it for themselves first, without worrying about mass appeal.
This is seriously impressive. A personal ML framework that evolves with you? That’s the kind of project I love hearing about.
I built Textideo simply because I was too lazy to open Premiere Pro for every single blog post update. I just wanted to turn my text into a quick video automatically. It started as a personal automation script to save my weekends, and eventually grew into a full product!
That’s such a relatable reason to build something!
I love when a small personal shortcut turns into an actual product — that’s usually when the best ideas happen.
Textideo sounds super handy! 🙌
For fun a friend and I built a Pomodoro Timer as a Progressive Web Application.
I worked on a library management Software and I built myself a small script that analyzes a backup file and checks for all sorts of constraints and pulls a lot of stats. Like how many Users lent a book that month and stuff like that.
An app that monitors my sitting habits while I work and reminds me to get up and move, it uses my mac camera and tracks how long I've been seated and sends me alerts via telegram to get up. I used @vladmandic/face-api
Oh wow, that’s actually such a thoughtful tool!
I love that you built something to protect your health instead of just… sitting till your back gives up 😅
Using the camera to nudge yourself to move is genius — more people need this!
What a fantastic question! 👏 I think the most interesting tools are the ones we build for ourselves—they don’t have to be polished or “product‑ready.”
For me personally, I made a small CLI script that scans my local project folders, looks for TODO comments, and generates a list of all pending tasks (grouped by file). I know there are big issue trackers out there, but this simple script helps me stay on top of my own little code‑cleanup goals without opening Jira or Trello every time.
It’s not the prettiest, but it serves exactly what I need. And honestly, every time I run it, it feels like a little win.
Wait this is genius 😄
Do you feel like these small personal scripts help you stay more organized than big tools like Jira/Trello? Because honestly I’d use something like this if I could code.
I built TabFolio for myself, super ugly at start 😅
But I thought other people may find it useful too, so I tried to make a decent design and publish it 😁
Something messy and personal that slowly turns into something others can use.
Love that you polished it up and shared it — that’s super generous and inspiring! 🙌
I built a very basic CRM type of web app to track my freelance job applications so that I don't forget github.com/reyesvicente/job_tracker
This is awesome — when you’re juggling tons of applications and replies take forever, having your own little CRM is a lifesaver.
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