What To Watch

At some point I realized that almost everything in my life is tracked, counted, and stored in the cloud. I have a history of my travels, what I ordered to eat, where I drove, how many commits I pushed during the workday - you get the point.

But the one thing I'd never be able to see in stats, track my progress on, or review without keeping it all in my head? Movies and shows. One of my favorite things.

So, as any developer would do, I started searching for a ready-made solution - because "if you thought of a problem, someone probably already thought of it and built an app for it." I tried them all. And it's all bullshit. And I'm not even talking about bad UI or awful monetization where they create artificial limitations to push you onto a paid plan.

I'm talking about the core idea of how the problem is "solved" - you have to manually find everything you've watched or are currently watching and update it by hand. Obvious solution. But incredibly inconsistent, slow, and it just doesn't make sense to me.

So I thought: what if I build a watchlist app that handles statuses automatically, makes it comfortable to use, and pairs it with an extension that detects what's playing in the browser while I watch? I built it. It worked.

Then I realized I could automate onboarding new streaming platforms with AI. Done. Then I realized I could connect my own library and build a candidate retrieval + LLM reranking system for smart, taste-based recommendations. Also done.

I think I already overcomplicated what I wanted to say in this post. So yeah - I over-engineered a watchlist app.