Cerfa Factory - Usine à Gaz

In France a Cerfa is the numbered official form behind almost every administrative procedure, and an “usine à gaz” is a machine far too complicated for its job. Cerfa Factory is a parody counter run by a fictional “Direction générale des imprimés inutiles” (general directorate of useless forms). You describe a procedure in one sentence, real, absurd or non-existent, and the counter issues a numbered form to match. The result is shared as a 9:16 image for Instagram, TikTok or X, or exported as a PDF.

The app is explicit about what it is not. No form is a real Cerfa, none carries a real form number, an official emblem or the name of an existing administration, nothing is ever sent to a public service, and every document is marked as a parody with no legal value. The store page adds one instruction: do not file it at the town hall.

The app is in French and on sale in the French and US App Stores. A request is first matched against a catalogue of existing forms; only when nothing is close does the server ask a language model, Claude by Anthropic, to draft the blank skeleton: title, sections and boxes. What you then type into the boxes stays on the device. It works offline with a bundled set of forms, and a blank form can be published to a public gallery under a pseudonym the server assigns, after automatic screening and human review.

• One sentence in, one numbered parody form out, for any procedure you can describe
• Sharing as a 9:16 image for Instagram, TikTok or X, or export as a PDF
• No real form numbers, no official emblems, no real administration, a parody mark on every page
• The answers typed into a form never leave the device; no account, no tracking, no usage analytics
• A public gallery of blank forms, posted under assigned pseudonyms such as “Agent 4412” and reviewed before they appear

French administration is known for its paperwork. Cerfa Factory turns that reputation into a counter that always says yes. The hard part was making sure a parody could never pass for the real thing, so the app refuses real form numbers, official emblems and existing administrations, and marks every page. The same care goes into privacy: the language model only sees the one-sentence request, and only when the catalogue has nothing close, while whatever someone fills in stays on their own phone.

The developer has been writing native Apple software since the first public iPhone SDK in 2008. He works from Rennes, France, under SAS Corvaisier, and has published 24 apps across 7 platforms, from iPhone and iPad through to Apple Watch, Mac, Apple TV, Android, Fire TV and Roku. Everything is built natively, one platform at a time, with no cross-platform wrapper in between.