Nina Kolari builds real apps with AI.

I learned by building one real thing at a time

I went all in on AI-assisted app building in August 2025. Before that, I was already using custom GPTs and AI workflows, but learning iOS development made the change feel concrete: I could turn an idea into software that worked on a real device.

I deliberately started small. Each app taught me one new skill, and the next app added another. That approach took me from a nontechnical builder to shipping apps in the App Store and winning the Cursor Hackathon with AANI, an AAC iPhone app built in three hours for people with aphasia.

Why I made canaibuild

People I interview—non-developers and developers alike—keep asking the same question: “What could I realistically build for myself?” At the same time, small personal apps are becoming easier to make while subscriptions keep multiplying.

I believe we are moving from one-size-fits-all SaaS products toward small, private, hyper-personal apps people build for themselves. But building is not automatically the right answer. Sometimes an existing product is safer, cheaper, or simply not worth replacing.

canaibuild exists to make that decision clearer. The goal is to tell you what AI can handle, what will become difficult, what the smallest useful version looks like, and when you should happily keep paying for the existing product.

My position on safety

A local personal tool can be a perfectly sensible app. It does not need a public launch, user accounts, or a venture-scale backend to be useful. But I would not casually build my own password manager, payment infrastructure, clinical system, or anything that handles sensitive information I could not safely maintain.

The more sensitive the data and the more serious the consequences of failure, the stronger the case for using a product maintained by specialists.

Experience and independent profiles

• NinaKolari.com — apps, articles, training, and current work
• CodeWithChris profile — the story of the Cursor Hackathon win and learning iOS development
• Apps by Katja Nina Kolari — public App Store developer profile
• LinkedIn and GitHub

Read how canaibuild reaches its verdicts