I used to be an engineer. The robots wrote this one.

A confession that would have horrified me five years ago: dumbsms is almost entirely written by AI.

I used to be an engineer. I can read a stack trace, reason about a protocol, and smell a bad abstraction from across the room. So this isn’t a story about someone who can’t code handing the keys to a chatbot. It’s about someone who can choosing to, and finding it works better than expected.

Why hand it over?

Because this is a hobby. I have two small kids and a flip phone full of work texts. The hours I’d spend hand-rolling Android SmsManager quirks and hand- encoding MMS PDUs are hours I don’t have. What I do have is enough taste to direct the work, review it, and call out when something’s wrong.

So the loop looks like this:

• I decide what to build and why. The architecture, the constraints, the “no cloud, phone is source of truth” rules — those are mine.
• The AI writes the code. The Rust core, the on-phone companion app, the fiddly bits that talk to the carrier.
• I review, test on real hardware, and push back. This is where being a former engineer earns its keep. You still have to know what “right” looks like.

The parts that were genuinely hard

The honest surprise is how much of the hard stuff the AI got through:

• Discovering that raw shell commands can send an SMS but cannot send an MMS, and why (the framework wants a Uri/Bundle/PendingIntent you can’t marshal from a shell).
• Building a tiny companion app for the phone that hand-builds the MMS message and lets the OS ship it to the carrier.
• Working out that this particular flip phone’s firmware will only sideload an app under one very specific, whitelisted name — a genuinely weird constraint that took real debugging.

I’m not going to pretend it was push-button. It wasn’t. But the ratio of my hours to working software is unlike anything from my actual engineering career.

What this is really about

I went to a dumb phone to put less screen between me and my life. There’s a funny symmetry in then using AI to build the bridge back to typing — automating away the boring part so the human part (two kids, dinner, bedtime) gets the attention.

The phone stays dumb. The tooling got smart. I just point at things.