Sometime back in November last year I typed into an AI to come up with a name for a hiking app. I told it roughly what the thing should do, and it threw back about ten. Around the fourth one, there it was: Roamr. It was raining outside. I said it out loud on the way from my study to the living room. It didn’t fall flat in the air, so that was the one.
Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the morning I first put on the backpack for the Camino.
I did this once before, ten years ago. Back then with an EU grant, an office, colleagues, a business plan, and the kind of attitude where sure, failure is important because you can learn from it, and so on. But I’d rather stay unlearned, since I won’t be the one going down with this. That project went its own way, straight into the ditch, and I went mine. I didn’t stay unlearned... and now, ten years later, the same kind of idea is in front of me again, only everything around it has changed. I’m alone. There’s no office. And the code we’re going to write, most of it won’t be written by me. In fact, not even by a human.
Before I dive in, let me set one thing straight, because this is what the whole series is going to live or die on: this is not a dev blog. There won’t be code snippets and architecture diagrams here. Well, there will be, but those won’t be the point. The point is the story. How an app gets built when you spend hours every day talking to an AI, mostly on weekends and in the evenings, since during the day the focus is on earning the daily bread.
I have a phrase for this that I came up with along the way, and it’s possible someone else thought of it before me: story-based development. It came from noticing what I’m actually doing. Working with an AI isn’t coding. Vibe, maybe, but coding, no. It’s a conversation. I describe what I want, it asks back, suggests, we argue, and the picture in my head shifts along the way. This conversation has an arc, it has turning points, it has nerve-grinding stretches and moments where I lean back in my chair, or fall flat next to it. Every feature is a scene. Every refactor is a rewritten chapter.
And if that’s true, then what we’re building isn’t just an app. It’s a novel, whose end product happens to run on iOS and Android.
The novel is called Roamr. The authors are me and an AI. The reader will be you.
A few words about myself, since some is owed: my name is Zsolt, I live in Solymár, in one of its prettier parts. A village, I think, next to Budapest, where in the mornings even the neighbour’s rooster stays quiet, the silence is that big. I’m a theoretical physicist, I have a paper to prove it, but I left that path sometime in the early two thousands and drifted into software. Whether that was a good decision, I still don’t have an answer to. Maybe I won’t have one by the end of this series either. What’s certain is that something stayed with me from physics that’s coming in handy now: the belief that behind every complicated thing there’s a simpler layer worth scratching at, only to find out that this layer is also bloody complicated, but there must be something simpler behind it.
We start around tomorrow. I still don’t know what the app is going to do beyond being called Roamr. I have hunches, and a few trail markers. I don’t know either if I’ll get anywhere with it. What I do know is that I’ll write down how it happens. The good calls and the dumb dead ends, the AI’s small wonders, and the moments when I drive the laptop into the monitor with the keyboard, preferably right where I can see the Claude logo.
If something comes of this, you’ll be able to say you were here from the start. If nothing comes of it, that’s also a story, and you were here at the start of that too.
Sit down. Let the mechanical keys clack. Let’s begin.