I love a good habit tracker. I’ve been using the habit tracking built into TickTick for ages now. But recently HabitKit appeared and it’s very pretty and brilliantly easy to use. But it’s expensive – I appreciate the effort put into these things, but I don’t see THAT much value in them.
Then, a few weeks ago, I came across init.habits, which is also a design/style that I love, and is very well done with so many cool little extras to regular habit tracking. I do love it.
But it has a smell about it… the smell of lots of LLMs at work. And I don’t like it. “I was spending hours in Claude Code every day” says the developer. “Kept on hitting my token limits daily, so I switched to 20x for a month. Let’s see how much change this brings!”
There is a general dislike of LLMs (I have an epic post about this in the works), but my main fear with many new bits of software that indie devs are launching is: how long is this going to be around? Like, sure you made a cool thing. But it needs a business behind it, and it needs infrastructure running to support it, and it needs customer support. I’ve written about all this before.
Sure, I could rip this off and make my own, hand-crafted, low-dependency, no-infrastructure version. And yes, I started making my own once I saw HabitKit! But if this already exists, why don’t I just use it?
It’s a real dilemma. And init.habits is just one instance of it that I see. How do you know if a new piece of software will be secure, sustainable, trustworthy, in the long term? Or if someone just made a vibe coded thing and launched it to make a quick buck and it will quickly rot?
How?!