What happens when you use the most sophisticated AI tools available—not to build more, but to build less? This episode unpacks a fascinating paradox: a solo Norwegian developer who leveraged ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor to launch 11 iOS apps in just three months, each one designed to do radically less than its competitors. We’ll have a look at using state-of-the-art technology to create tools that explicitly reject the "more is more" philosophy driving the modern app economy. It's about constraints as features, maintenance as craft, and designing for humans who break down rather than machines that optimize endlessly. Drawing on the book Life as User Experience and the apps built to embody its principles, we explore how the barrier to coding has collapsed—but the barrier to having a vision worth building remains as high as ever. Disclaimer: In this episode we discuss the inner workings, philosophy and design decisions that drive the company behind this series. You are as always invited to listen critically and take away from this what you may. What You'll Hear The Technical Foundation: - How someone with basic HTML knowledge from the early 2000s shipped 11 professional iOS apps using AI assistance - Why AI tools can generate code but cannot generate philosophy or design sense - The difference between lowering the barrier to *creation* versus lowering the barrier to *vision* The Philosophy Behind the Code: Four Norwegian concepts that scaffold the entire design approach: - Digg: Pleasantly good, sustainably sufficient—optimizing for marathon walks, not sprints - Passe:Just right, the Goldilocks zone applied to schedules, possessions, and ambitions - Ærlighet: Honest awareness of your actual situation without judgment - Vedlikehold: The craft of maintenance, valued and visible rather than invisible and ignored Also covered: * Designing for Inevitable Collapse * The Zero-Data Challenge * The Anti-Productivity Productivity System Why This Story Matters It demonstrates AI as amplifier, not replacement: The tools made coding accessible, but they didn't design the philosophy, choose the constraints, or maintain the vision through 11 distinct projects. It applies software engineering principles to life: Concepts like featured deprecation, graceful degradation, and intentional defaults move from code architecture into personal systems design. It offers «permission» to be "*passe*»: Appropriately finished, good enough, never perfectly optimized—and that being completely fine. It's honest about breakdown: Rather than pretending collapse won't happen, the philosophy designs explicitly for what to do when everything falls apart. The Practical Takeaway The episode leaves you with a simple challenge: Think about the systems, habits, or identities you're currently maintaining—perhaps out of loyalty, guilt, or inertia—that no longer serve you, that aren't "digg." What is the one small adjustment, maybe even a "tak for nå," you could make today to achieve a little more digg in just one area of your life? Disclaimer: Episodes are based on human-written scripts from essays, design docs, and research. Scripts are AI-refined, creator-approved, then voiced using Google NotebookLM. This is human-directed, AI-assisted storytelling—not AI-generated content. Every idea originates from the creator's work and vision. Relevant Resources: - Book: Life as User Experience (available on Apple Books) - Apps: Focus Anchor, Note-to-Self, Day Rater, Ancestrix (iOS) - Website: digtek.app (blog posts on similar topics) - Free companion workbook available at digtek.app Catch you in the next one!