Sometimes utilities can be production-grade, tho, so I don't think that captures the nonchalance the author was looking for.

"Home-cooked apps" is still my preferred phrase. Personal software and subsistence development are also good terms.

Home-cooked doesn't sound right. The term Handmade has a fair bit of usage for this already and has a lot less semantic friction in my head. Homemade isn't bad either, if you really like the cooking analogy.

I think Maggie uses home-cooked here and it works for me because of the extended analogy

https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

"subsistence development", to me, sounds like "doing menial dev tasks in order to earn enough $ to survive"