Another weekend spent building personal apps
Introducing rssGate - AI powered news reader
October 04, 2026
One of the things AI has unlocked for me was a return to building personal or hobby apps. I used to love writing little apps to do various personal tasks or solving problems. Life got in the way: we all get busier, and frankly once I'd finished spending 40-60 hours a week thinking about software... I didn't want to think about software. Now with AI if I want a hobby app I exchange some messages with an agent and go about my day.
My hobby dev setup is pretty solid at this point. I've got a dedicated docker container running herdr running on a litlte mini PC Ubuntu Server. Pi.dev does the work with an ongoing set of skills I am building separately from the Origin ones at work. Qwen 3.8 Flash Next running on the DGX Spark pair has proven a reliable way to build software without having to turn to OpenRouter for "smarter models". I will say where Qwen is hitting its limit is typically missing bugs you haven't explicitly told it to check for. I am solving this with the intent project that every agent has as its seed. A good example in this project was it kept delivering UI bugs until I realized I had never told it to install headless Chrome on this box and build browser automation. Once we did that the quality went way up.
So introducing rssGate! My dream news reader. I've been an RSS user since the early days of the spec. I know a lot of folks kind of abandoned RSS when Google Reader died, but I had always used standalone apps. For me RSS became less enjoyable once click bait titles with no post content in the feed became the norm. I get it, people want eyeballs on their pages themselves to serve ads. But now 20 years into the click bait era we've got a bit too far.
The good news is an LLM (with reasoning disabled in this case) you can efficiently summarize articles to figure out if you want to read them. It's token efficient and has already made my time spent reading my news feed more enjoyable. I have it as a "website app" on my iPhone, served over Wireguard. Not the most accessible setup, but its a pattern I am really enjoying for quick personal apps.
And remember to support sites that provide good RSS feeds! Turn off your adblocker on those sites, support them on Patreon or by whatever means they do subscriptions. Support the decentralized web.