Make Utterly Useless Apps

In praise of the utterly useless app

Utility is probably the plague of apps everywhere. “What does it do?” people ask. Why? Why can’t apps be useless? Why can’t they just exist without justifying their existence? When was the last time that someone turned to their dogs and asked what use they were? (Especially pugs.) Or their cats? And, how wounded would you be if that line of questioning took a left at the traffic light and landed on your doorstep, trying to plumb your utility to the universe? Punch them in the face, you would. And, rightly so! Free yourself, and your apps, from the tyranny of purpose. Unite against utilitarianism!

Now that I’ve conclusively argued against the need of apps to be useful, let’s go build an utterly useless app.

Photo by Ali Kokab on Unsplash

What is an Utterly Useless App?

Oh, nothing major — just something that uses cutting-edge technology to do something no one can find a use for. As benchmarks go, the true measure of the success of an utterly useless app is when the inventors of these cutting-edge technologies use both hands to cover their faces in disbelief.

Cutting-edge today generally means AI. So, if we built apps that made Geoffrey Hinton, Demis Hassabis and Fei-Fei Li shift uncomfortably in their seats, we’d be well on our way. Here are some ideas:

Arch Nemesis: Sick of AI Assistants agreeing with you all the time? Build an app that roasts your ideas, questions your life choices, and laughs villainously when you admit that you failed at something?!
Apology Letter Generator for Socially Awkward People: Waved at someone who wasn’t even looking in your direction? Didn’t know how to end a chat conversation and so left it in a way that made the other person think you’re an arsehole? Held the door open for someone who was too far away and then let so as to not pressure them, just when they started hurrying up? Apology Letter Generator to the rescue! Print out the letter, sign it and wait around to hand it to them. You’d have amped up the awkwardness to a whole new level but at least you’d have apologized.
Existential Crisis Companion: On the lines of describing the water when you’re drowning, it can quote Sartre and Camus to you with every press of a button!

Will it take a lot of effort to build Utterly Useless Apps?

Effort? Ha! AI is tossing junior developers off career ladders like a tree shaker in an apple orchard. Getting apps coded up is easy-peasy.

The two main parts to building AI apps are:

Ollama brings AI to your computer so it’ll cost you nothing to build apps that use AI. Look, you’re already building a useless app, you don’t want to compound that with having to pay for AI too! And, the models that Ollama offers aren’t the bruised cretins from the back-shelves, they are cutting-edge. Deepseek-r1 is available, for speaking out loud. Quantized but will do wonderfully for our genius designs! And, Llama 3.2, and Llama Vision, Phi4 and Bark from Suno. Really, there’s no pressing need to whip out your credit card and pay for OpenAI’s APIs. Save your money. Winter is coming.
Producing code is easy too! While Claude is best known for coding, even good ol’ ChatGPT will produce code that you’ll only have to edit minimally. Most times, it’ll run fine right out the box. And, for when you really want to, GitHub Copilot’s free tier can help with touching up your code. And, if you feel like you’ll develop RSI from all the copying and pasting you’ll be doing, Cursor is a great alternative.

And, what’s the point?

“Why do all this?” you may well ask. The answer to that, little butterfly, is “To engender our lost sense of play!”

“Are you saying that there is a use to this useless app, then?”

Shut it!!!

We’ve gone from being a society of builders and makers to ones just consuming technology. Even the tech we build is laden with the weight of trying to be useful, on the way to being the next unicorn. So, there aren’t people just tinkering anymore, just building stuff for the fun of it. This ‘ere effort of mine is just an effort to remind us to start doing that again. Heck, with AI becoming more and more capable, we’re all going to be out of jobs soon, anyway. So, whether you heed the reminder or not, this is what we’re going to be doing. Might as well get with it!

Let’s start building!

Here are the step by step instructions on building a totally unhelpful thought for the day generator.

Step 1: Install Ollama

Install Ollama on your computer if you haven’t already. Click the “Download” button on their website and follow the instructions. It’s pretty simple.

Step 2: Set up the project

Let’s start up a plain vanilla JavaScript project, and use vite to have it show up in our browsers. Here are the steps:

Create a folder called thecompletelyunhelpfulthoughtforthedaygenerator. (Yeah, there’s no mistaking that folder for anything else!)
Open the folder in Visual Studio Code or any other editor you may have.
Click the File Explorer and create a new file in the root, called index.html with the following code in it:

<html>
  <body>
    <h1>The Completely Unhelpful Thought For The Day Generator</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Open up the terminal panel by choosing View > Terminal in the menu. Execute the following command to initialize the project with vite:

npm install -D vite

Let’s get the app running by executing this command:

npx vite

Cmd + click the http://localhost:5173 link in the terminal. That should show the text in your browser’s window.

Okay, so that’s us all set with our infrastructure. Let’s get to building the actual app.

Step 3: Generate code

So, it’s very important in this step that you DO NOT put too much effort into writing the code. Sit back, relax, and let AI do it for you. Let’s use Claude because it’s the one with the programming chops. Fire it up, describe the project in your own words, and it’ll write up the code for you. In the spirit of not lifting fingers, here is the prompt I wrote, which you can copy and paste:

Hey Claude, please help me write this web app using Javascript. It’s named ‘The Completely Unhelpful Thought For The Day Generator. When the user clicks on the ‘Generate’ button, send a request to Ollama’s ‘llama3.2’ model, and display the completely unhelpful thought for the day.

Claudius will run off and do its thing. You should get back a very nice looking app that does exactly what you asked it to. In its enthusiasm, it might produce React code when you wanted just plain JavaScript. Either roll with it or just start another chat and try again. Once satisfied, paste that code into your code editor replacing the stand-in code we had. Your changes should be reflected in your browser. Click the “Generate” button. Et voila! You should have a completely unhelpful thought for the day displayed right there in your browser!

Conclusion

See how easy it is to build Utterly Useless Apps? An Utterly Useless AI App, even. You barely had to lift a finger! Now, go forth and waste some computing power. Make app development useless again!

I write articles on technology, intelligence, philosophy, psychology and other sciences. You can read my other articles here.