Noted on 24 Sep 2026

My daughter sits her GCSEs next summer, so I built her a revision app. It has exactly one user, and it will never have more.

It's ten minutes at a time, on her phone. One real past-exam question at a time: work it out on paper, reveal the official mark scheme, tap got-it / sort-of / missed it. Something she missed comes back within the week, something she knew stays away for a month, and the topics she's weakest on get more of the questions. That's all there is to it. No streaks, no badges, no cartoon owl making her feel guilty.

Behind it, a pipeline finds the papers on the exam board's public archive, splits each one into individual questions, pairs every question with its mark scheme answer, and tags it against the official specification. Her combined science alone is 47 papers and 297 questions, going back to 2018.

I wrote almost none of the code. Claude Code did. The first real exam paper went from PDF to a question on a phone in a single evening. The whole science archive took about six days of work, spread over three weeks of evenings and odd hours. It's built as a static site and hosted for free (thanks Cloudflare).

I've scoped projects like this for a living. Not long ago this could've been a small team for a couple of months and a five-figure invoice, which means it would never have existed. Nobody signs that off for one teenager. That's what I think is underappreciated. It’s not just that software got cheaper for the companies that were going to build it anyway. It's that bespoke software for an audience of one now makes economic sense, and that's a category of software that didn't exist before.

It wasn't as quite simple as it sounds though. Exam PDFs are tricky: ticks that turn out to be a symbol font, fractions stacked across three lines, mark schemes whose columns wander from page to page. Knowing what to build was still on me, and so was deciding what to leave out. And every issue that's come up so far, was found by seeing what the app actually served, not from a failing test.

(And no, you can't have it. The papers are exam-board copyright: fine for her revision, not mine to republish. Cheap code doesn't change who owns the data.)

So what would you build, if it only had to work for one person?