Show HN: Spit Notes – A songwriting app that keeps lyrics and audio together

2 points

8 months ago

Any songwriter who uses the iOS Notes app to write their lyrics has a mess of New Recording 142 voice memos in their Voice Memos app. I made Spit Notes as basically the Notes app but with a built-in voice recorder that keeps your audio files neatly organized on the same line as your lyrics. Now you can quickly capture your song ideas while driving or when you wake up in the middle of the night without worrying about losing them in your pile of untitled voice memos.

While you can attach audio to notes with other apps, adding and recording audio has a lot of friction, and often the layout of the audio elements in those apps are too pronounced to keep the text flowing seamlessly. This is not the case with Spit Notes.

I've wanted this app to exist for years but I put off making it myself because I knew it would take me a lot of time to build manually without knowing Swift. In recent years I've been writing AI-assisted code, but with AI coding agents getting better and better, 3 months ago I decided to see if I could vibe code a full product.

The code for this project was not AI-assisted, but human-assisted, with me providing the vision and feel of the app, while the AI agent takes that, makes a pass at the code base, and then I QA it, letting the AI know what worked/didn't work, and iterating.

I started with paying for Cursor and using Opus 4 but after getting insanely good initial results with Opus 4 and seeing my cursor costs start to rise, I remembered this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44167412 and took the plunge with Claude Code max $200 plan. This turned out to be an incredible value because it allowed me to use claude basically without limit. However, Gemini still had the biggest context window and as the project grew I had to use Gemini to create plans for big features and find deep bugs across all of the AI-generated modules.

Pro tip: create broad reference files for you and the AI, like an ARCHITECTURE.md where you keep a human-readable version of the technical big picture. You can then reference that for the AI so it stays aligned with your current progression.

Once the Codex CLI became available on homebrew it was a wrap. I cancelled my claude code max plan and have been happily coding without ever hitting any rate limits (other than when they made that update that accidentally reduced rate limits instead of increase them). Today, I pay for for chatgpt plus and gemini $20 plan and am able to clear most obstacles on the first or second prompt. I haven't tried opus 4.5 but since I am not really getting stuck with codex, for now I'll stick with that.