How I Built 4 Custom Apps in One Week to Solve My Real-Life Problems (With an AI Agent)

We are always told that programming is a tool for problem-solving. But this week, I experienced this truth on a completely different level. Using my autonomous AI Agent (Hermes), software development became my real-time, daily survival tool.

Instead of searching for half-baked third-party apps, dealing with intrusive ads, or compromising on terrible mobile UX, I spent the last few days building four highly customized, production-grade applications to solve exact friction points in my daily life and for my family.

Here is the story of how these four apps came to life.

1. Remote Terminal (Defeating NoMachine's Screen Rotation Limit)
   The Problem: I use NoMachine to control my main development PC remotely from my mobile phone. However, I ran into an incredibly frustrating limitation: there was absolutely no way to rotate the remote display viewport by 90 degrees to fit my mobile screen orientation properly.

The Solution: Instead of giving up or hunting for obscure system-level workarounds, I built Remote Terminal. It is a lightweight remote execution client designed with a single killer feature: a built-in, hardware-accelerated 90-degree viewport rotation. Now, I can access and control my remote terminal rig perfectly, at the exact angle I need.

1. Tefila Meditation (From Print Draft to Interactive PWA)
   The Problem: I saw the draft of my wife's new meditation and prayer book right before it was sent to the physical print shop. I instantly realized that this content deserved an interactive, accessible digital life.

The Solution: Within 24 hours, we built a generic, highly optimized book framework and compiled it as a Flutter Web PWA and Native Android App.

• Autoplay-Safe Audio: Implemented a synchronous audio player engine to bypass aggressive mobile browser autoplay blocks.


• Beautiful Visuals: Added native vector-animated CustomPaint widgets (a flickering flame, flowing water, and rotating mandalas).


• Offline-First Premium Model: Built a secure offline licensing system that unlocks chapters via secret coupon codes.


• Live Proofreading Portal: Included a hidden, secure proofreader screen (edit2026) so she can edit chapters and export updated Dart code directly from her phone!


• Deployed live on GitHub Pages: Check it out here.

1. My Personal Gym Companion
   The Problem: Most fitness and gym trackers on the app store are bloated with subscription popups, social feeds, and annoying ads. I just wanted a clean, fast way to log my workout routines and track my personal metrics while at the gym.

The Solution: While heading out to my workout session, I scaffolded a lightweight, completely local Gym Companion app. It is entirely ad-free, runs completely offline, and lets me track my progress, sets, and health metrics with zero distraction.

1. Today: Visual Food Tracker (With Gemini Vision AI Integration)
   The Problem: Today, I visited my diabetes specialist. She requested that I start keeping a meticulous daily food diary to monitor my dietary habits. The thought of manually typing every meal, ingredient, and portion size into a clunky text-based app sounded exhausting.

The Solution: I went home and, within a few hours, we built Food Tracker. It is an offline-first, visual-centric tracking app. I just released version 3.0:

• Multi-Image Support: You can snap multiple photos per meal to track individual food items separately.


• Smooth Carousel UI: On the home screen, meal cards turn into interactive swipeable carousels (PageView) so you can flip through the photos of your meal.


• Google Gemini Vision AI Integration: I integrated Google's official google_generative_ai SDK (using Gemini Flash). You take a photo, tap the "🪄 Smart AI Analysis" button, and the AI:
  
  
  
  
  1. Identifies the food items and auto-updates the captions for each image.
  
  
  2. Calculates estimated nutritional values (calories, protein, carbs, and fats).
  
  
  3. Automatically writes a detailed nutritional summary in the notes and suggests a cohesive title for the entire meal in Hebrew.
  
  
  
  

The Takeaway: Software as a Personal Utility

We are living in an era where the barrier between a raw idea and a working, compiled application has completely evaporated. When you pair your domain knowledge with a highly capable, autonomous AI agent, you stop being a mere consumer of software.

You become a producer of your own tools, tailoring technology to fit your life, your health, and your family's needs in real-time.

What is the next custom app you are going to build for yourself? Let me know in the comments!