For 15 years I've been visiting sketchy ad-riddled websites to convert a PNG to an ICO. I've Googled "regex tester" a thousand times. I've wanted a better image editor on Linux, a simpler database manager, a way to organize 15 terminal windows at once. I knew exactly how to build all of it. I just couldn't justify the time.
That math has completely changed.
When you stop writing code and start directing AI agents, the cost of building a small utility drops from "a weekend I don't have" to "20 minutes of describing what I want." Suddenly every little annoyance becomes an opportunity. And I've been on a tear.
The Catalyst
This all started when I wiped Windows off my machine. Again.
I'd gone back and forth between Linux and Windows for years, but Windows 11 finally pushed me over the edge. When Copilot showed up inside Notepad — Notepad! — I was done. Wiped the drive, installed Pop!_OS, kept a Windows partition for the rare occasions I need it, and committed to Linux full time.
And then I hit the first wall.
Between — The Image Editor That Doesn't Exist
There's an image editor on Windows called Paint.NET. Not a URL — it's named after Microsoft's .NET framework, which means it will literally never run on Linux. And nothing on Linux fills the same gap.
You've got GIMP if you want full Photoshop complexity. You've got a handful of MS Paint clones if you want almost nothing. But there's nothing in between — something where you can quickly edit a photo, make a poster, resize and crop for a website, apply a few effects, and get on with your life.
I used Paint.NET constantly. Show posters, photo editing, website assets. It's extremely powerful for what it is. And there was nothing like it on Linux.
So I built it. Between — written entirely in Rust, open source, and it does exactly what I need. It's not a 1:1 clone of Paint.NET. It didn't need to be. It has the functionality I used most, in a convenient way. More advanced than Paint, nowhere near as complex as GIMP. It's between them.
My son recently switched to Linux too, and he's been using it regularly. It serves about 95% of what I need. There's more to build, but the problem is solved.
nextMyAdmin — Because I'm a Creature of Habit
I've used phpMyAdmin for my entire career. Originally through cPanel, and in recent years I'd actually install it on remote servers because I just preferred it to MySQL Workbench or the other 9,000 database tools that exist.
When I moved to Linux, instead of installing PHP and Apache just to run phpMyAdmin, I had a thought: I know exactly which parts of phpMyAdmin I actually use. I bet I can have a replacement built faster than it would take to configure the real thing.
That turned out to be true. nextMyAdmin's first version was running in about 5 minutes. Every time I discover a feature I need, I just have an agent add it. It's nowhere near as complex as phpMyAdmin actually is — but I don't need it to be. It lives at localhost on my machine, and I can manage every database I work with, quickly.
Convertify — The Sketchy Website Killer
This one started when I was Googling "png to ico converter" for the 400th time, about to use yet another ad-infested website to convert a favicon. And I thought: this is so simple. It would take me hours to build by hand, but an agent could knock this out in minutes.
So localhost/convertify was born. PNG to ICO. PDF to PNG. WAV to MP3. Every conversion I've needed since I built it.
Then it grew. Because why stop at file conversion?
- Video downloader — paste a URL, download the file, never visit another sketchy site
- String generator — secure passwords, API keys, SHA1 hashes, lorem ipsum, CUIDs, UUIDs, hex strings. Configurable length, seeding, symbols or not
- QR code generator — multiple styles, custom colors. I generate QR codes constantly for the karaoke shows, so this was a no-brainer. I also built QR generation into Between, because why not?
- Regex validator — shows JS console output of my pattern against a test string so I can verify before committing
- JS fiddle — quick scratch pad for testing snippets
- DNS propagation checker — because I was tired of visiting yet another website for that too
The name "Convertify" doesn't really describe it anymore. It's basically a local utility suite for every little thing I used to trust random websites to do. No ads, no tracking, no upload limits. Just works.
Terminal Command Center
Here's the thing about not being in an IDE much anymore — I live in terminals. A lot of them.
One project might mean 1 terminal running an AI agent and 4 terminals spinning up local services for testing. Multiple projects? I could have 10-15 terminal windows going at once. It was chaos.
So I built TCC — Terminal Command Center. I save project locations, define CLI commands that should run when terminals open, set startup commands for each service. I get a workspace where I can arrange terminal sizes and have everything laid out in one window. I can save workspace configurations per project, open multiple TCCs for different projects, and keep it all organized.
I've had 3 TCC windows open with over 15 terminals running at the same time. It's the way to go.
The Actual Point
None of these are groundbreaking software. They're small, personal tools that solve daily annoyances. And that's exactly why they matter.
Every one of these utilities failed the old time-vs-value calculation. Spending a weekend building a PNG-to-ICO converter? Stupid. Spending 20 minutes describing one to an AI agent? Obviously worth it.
When the cost of building drops by an order of magnitude, the threshold for "worth building" drops with it. Things that were never worth the time are suddenly trivial. And you end up with a machine that's fully customized to how you actually work — not how some app developer imagined you might.
Between is open source now. Convertify and nextMyAdmin will be eventually, once they're ready. TCC too. Because if these things are useful to me, they're probably useful to someone else who got tired of the same sketchy websites and messy terminal windows.
I didn't have time to build any of this a year ago. Now I build things like this almost every week. That's what AI agents actually gave me — not a replacement for my skills, but the bandwidth to finally use them on everything I'd been putting off for 15 years.