Apprendre 🖥️ 🇫🇷🧑🏻‍🎓

New year is a good excuse to fix one high‑leverage thing: Learning French 🇫🇷 Apprendre @apprendre_app is a quiet little French companion for your Mac: no subscriptions, no gems/coins, no “come back or lose your streak” nonsense. Just a clean space to read, translate, listen, and rewrite real sentences until they feel natural. ✍️ ✨ Free download, with a full 7‑day Pro trial on every install – play with everything, then decide later. 🧰 Core tools stay free forever even after the trial ends, so you’re not locked out by a paywall. 🗺️ Current app is just the beginning – the roadmap includes DELF‑style paths, better writing help, and eventually an on‑device speaking tutor as it evolves 🤝 Early‑supporter deal (not a sale, more like a handshake): If you actually use it for a few days and send thoughtful feedback or bug reports, you can earn a nice discount on the one‑time Pro upgrade and help shape what gets built next. Read the roadmap to see what’s planned 💻 Download on your Mac: 🛒 App Store → apps.apple.com/us/app/appren… 🔗 Website / .dmg → apprendre.bytebanyan.com 🚧 Roadmap → apprendre.bytebanyan.com/#ro… ❤️ Built from one learner to other learners.

It happened! I'm published! After 10 gory reviews and sweat and I'm finally published in AppStore 🛳️🚢. I'm a seller now 🥹 As someone who just wanted a quiet, distraction‑free way to learn French, I ended up building Apprendre (@apprendre_app) : a focused, private local AI powered French lab for learners like me. Built with AI coding agents, close review cycles, vibe engineering, late nights, and a stubborn urge to ship. This is only version one, but it’s the first real step in a much longer journey to make French learning calmer, deeper, and truly yours. 🚀 AppStore link : apps.apple.com/us/app/appren…

✅ 2025: shipped Apprendre @apprendre_app , a macOS French-learning app powered by #MLX LLMs, my first real step into local models on Apple silicon. ✅ 2026: leveling up with Recu, an iOS app that uses local VLMs to read and parse receipts on-device and auto-log them into a system, with the goal of becoming a full insights builder. Why receipts? I’m that person who asks for a receipt for a $1 coffee “for my records.” Years of paper folders turned into chaos, then I gave up. The receipts won. Every app I tried either had OCR that treated my grocery bill like hieroglyphics, or demanded I upload my financial life to their cloud. They say they don’t sell my data but collect my images? They say they don’t collect data but ask me to login? Or they limit scans or show ads? Hard pass.✋🏻 I did what someone with commoditized intelligence and high agency would do : built the app I needed myself. The TestFlight build is live and the App Store review is in progress. I'm looking for early beta testers. TF sign up link 👉🏻 forms.gle/YsQu3y42in2AtRqc8 This is very much V1: ⚠️ Quality is not 100% accurate yet, especially across messy / long receipts. ⚠️ hitting some OOM scenarios on certain devices. But the promise of local VLMs on everyday phones is crystal clear, and this space is going to move very fast. Glad to be building front and center as it happens. Huge thanks to the Apple #MLX (@awnihannun and team), the broader MLX / on-device community (hi 👋🏻LocalLLaMA!), and especially the @Alibaba_Qwen team for their VLM offering that powers Recu. Dropping a demo video below 👇🏻. If you join the beta, hit reply with your weirdest receipt and let’s see where Recu breaks so we can make it better. 🌐 recu.bytebanyan.com

Currently in the middle of a house move. My wife and I are frantically packing boxes, coordinating logistics, managing a hundred details. Yet whenever I get a spare 5 minutes? I'm working on @apprendre_app . Reviewing code, testing builds, writing blog posts, brainstorming features. @karpathy is right: agency > intelligence. When you have high agency and AI manages the intelligence, there's no stopping you. Every spare moment becomes productive. The solo builder era is wild. 🚀

Vibe coding, No. Vibe engineering works. I have proof. Wrote about it here nitter.cf/apprendre_app/status/2…

Master French Privately using Local LLMs. Meet @apprendre_app - an indie macOS app. No subscriptions, gamifications and distractions. Just you, your mac and la langue française. apprendre.bytebanyan.com

Running a French-learning app (@apprendre_app) on fully local LLMs has been ridiculously fun. 💎 In Apprendre, every word you click is analyzed on-device: the model predicts its lemma, and if it’s a noun it surfaces gender. If it’s a verb it unpacks conjugation and tense so you see exactly what’s going on under the hood. ✨ 💎 On top of that, the same local model predicts phonetic cues so you get an immediate hint for how to say each word, without bouncing anything off a server. It also suggests an emoji and a semantic category for each word, which turns raw text into something visual and memorable. 🎯 💎 All of this runs on my Mac via a local LLM stack (powered by #MLX #Swift thanks to @awnihannun & team) so there are no usage-based API bills, no external AI subscriptions, and no privacy tradeoffs. Once the model is downloaded, inference is fast enough that it just feels like a native language feature baked into the OS. ⚡️ 💎 If you’re learning French and want this kind of intuitive “language workbench” instead of streaks and locked content, Apprendre is free to download on macOS and gives you a full 7-day Pro trial to play with everything. Grab a short French paragraph, run it through the app for one real study session, and see how it feels: 👉🏻 apprendre.bytebanyan.com 🇫🇷💻 On-device AI really does feel like the future, and it’s exciting to already be living inside that future today.

Always working on @apprendre_app app 😊🤗

Adding more features to @apprendre_app . Things I added today ✅ Import / Export for Vocabs mgmt ✅ Added support to add multi meaning words in vocab (eg temp is both time and weather) ✅ Added search feature to vocab view to search by both English meaning and French word ✅ Added accent mgmt. so they côtè and côte are treated differently And many more small bug fixes… 🥹

What did I get done today? #buildinpublic #swiftui #indiedev Revamped the @apprendre_app website. ✅ Wrote and published a marketing post on Substack and Reddit. ✅ Emailed previous free customers about Apprendre v2 and gave them a 25% off coupon to upgrade to Pro. ✅ Emailed previous paid customers about Apprendre v2 and gave them a 100% off coupon to upgrade to Pro. ✅ Set up a GitHub Discussions space to collect feedback and bug reports for #Apprendre. ✅ Shipped two new TestFlight builds and prepared all the metadata needed for App Store review. Life of an indie app owner is anything but “normal” – it’s weird, intense, and fun. Right now there are just 2 paid customers, but that won’t stop me. 😤

Apprendre (@apprendre_app) is now free to download with a full 7‑day Pro trial, a refreshed site, and a much more polished experience for serious French learners on macOS.​​ From my side: if you grab the new build, actually use the Pro features for 7 days, and report a confirmed bug or rough edge via the Apprendre tickets repo, you’ll get a coupon code to unlock Pro for free as a thank you 🙏🏻.​ You can also earn a free Pro coupon by hanging out in the Apprendre community hub on GitHub Discussions — sharing how you use the app, asking good questions, or helping other learners. Active, thoughtful participation there counts just as much as bug reports.​ All bugs, ideas, and feedback go here: 👉 github.com/kspviswa/apprendr…