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Personal Software

leerob.com

56 pointsleerob56 comments

Has anyone done experiments with people who have absolutely no programming or programming-like experience and see what they can come up with?

From my experiences, any output I got from "AI", required already some level of experience/understanding of the tooling or language to get something useful out of it.

I work for someone who uses Apple Shortcuts and Zappier to bridge things together, that's working with common stuff like transcribing to One Note or Notta to Notion

edit: they would use ChatGPT to ask questions/find direction but wouldn't actually use the code if any was given but I think if you're using say WP where you can just dump in random code via a plugin, people would try that

Surely the next prompt would be

> I pasted the code you gave me into my Wordpress and now when I refresh the page it’s just white. Why?

"Is there a line break at the end of your file?"

edit: I've seen this as a potential answer before

I can see something like Shortcuts/Zappier or some visual things to work quite well for non-programmers. After all, we've had lots of businesses using rule engines and visual editors to "program" their business logic for a long time.

I just don't see "AI" spitting out code and people just putting it somewhere and it all working just fine, without having to learn some of the basics first.

Maybe some highly integrated system could work, that does the doing for you, and users don't _have_ to deal with code and the tooling to run it. But those systems will again be quite limited, so questionable how "personal" it gets.

One thing I've used "AI" for multiple times already with little to no modification, is to write some one-off script to automate some basic repetitive task (e.g. batch converting something with ffmpeg). Can you call this personal software?

I think any code is software/for you = personal

It is crazy what Zapier does. I learned Airtable's API myself and setting up the webhooks took me a bit where as it's just there for Zapier. Started to make me think which way is faster do it myself or use this bridge granted Zapier costs money but yeah.

So funny how things go we wanted to use Airtable now they're like "we want our own branded Airtable" and eventually we'll probably just go with a hosted DB like RDS anyway ahh well.

I'm running my own self-hosted n8n instance for basic automations, which has the added benefit that the OAuth and other credentials remain on my hardware rather than, somewhere in the cloud.

I do that too, strangely it isn't a tool many people know about.

Knowing how to code though is what makes me value that thing, time saver yet can be as powerful as an app built from the ground up.

There still needs to be more user-friendly interfaces built on top of the raw AI materials. For many of my non-tech friends, the open text input for ChatGPT is intimidating. Yes, it can do everything, but they don't know the right questions to ask. We'll need better products that make app building more "consumer" feeling, versus understanding the intricacies of prompting.

I agree. I wonder if the author has actually tried to build their baby tracking software using AI? I suspect AI would turn out to be a lot less useful than hoped.

But there is a middle ground between writing your own code and buying an off the shelf app - no/low code tools. For example, you can use our Easy Data Transform software to drag and drop a data processing pipeline to turn data from one form to another, no need to learn (or ask an AI about) Python+Pandas or R. But this only an option if there is a tool fits your needs, off course.

My 9 year old can sit down with the Replit Agent and make a simple game that entertains her for hours.

She couldn't make a business application and go out and start selling subscriptions, but there are whole categories of tools that can be created that are ultra simple CRUD apps that bring specific value to one person. Code quality and/or understanding how it works is irrelevant for that use case.

How much is this saying when just a couple decades ago a 9 year old could imagine that a broomstick was a sword and that they were fighting knights on the battlefield?

A child can fill in tons of gaps with their animation (see: Rugrats). We're talking about "is AI good enough to enable a 100% non-technical user able to create software on the fly without the non-technical user losing patience?" This is the discussion.

> Code quality and/or understanding how it works is irrelevant for that use case.

Until you encounter an error that needs debugging, or you want to extend their functionality.

> Creating software is starting to resemble cooking. Your home-cooked software is exactly what you need, without extra fuss or cost. And each time you build something personal, you gain a deeper appreciation for the craft of creating software.

I think this is true, but it also actually requires you to want to make your own software. In cooking, most people are aware that they're physically capable of making a roast chicken with gravy and mashed potatoes.

Yet takeaway/delivery is thriving. It's not that the ability to cook is scarce, but the desire to do it. I think the same is (now) true with building software.

I could probably be a pretty damn good cook, perhaps even a sous chef. But there is so so much I want to do that is not cooking. Is it really so difficult for CEOs and devrels of AI companies to imagine that some people don't want to spend their time making software, even if it is accessible?

If we stick with the comparison to cooking, I think AI is not like a cookbook, but like an air fryer.

A cookbook lets you cook like Thomas Keller or Eric Ripert or whoever because you get their exact recipes, even when those recipes have 18 steps and take 7 hours.

An air fryer lets anyone make something acceptably tasty in 20 minutes and with zero technique.

Imo this is what AI is doing for software building. It lets almost anyone build something that accomplishes a job. But we don't have to expect it to have scalable architecture, beautiful UI or follow security best practices.

I think part of the problem is that most software engineers rightfully care about these things for their jobs. But maybe they don't matter if you're building "home-cooked software".

The same way you can read cookbooks from 3 michelin star chefs and wonder if anyone will ever follow the recipes in them (check out Marc Pierre White recipes for an example).

I think the cooking metaphor is actively wrong.

Cooking (manually) takes skill (let's say that's a one-time thing you need to have acquired in the past) and then it needs time (repeatedly).

The outcome (food) is a temporary benefit.

Software meanwhile, in general, is written once in order to solve a problem at all, or make a task easier/more repeatable. The software is the cook, so to speak.

A more apt comparison would be to craft a cooking tool that makes your work easier, or possible at all. (e.g a pot)

> A more apt comparison would be to craft a cooking tool that makes your work easier, or possible at all. (e.g a pot)

Which is funny because almost nobody ever makes their own cooking tools. Most people are happy to buy off the shelf—just like software.

I don't disagree that the comparison isn't perfect, but your take just spelled out why this home-cooked software idea is pretty unlikely.

I think this is especially true because Gen Z/Alpha seem to actually be less tech-savvy than previous generations.

I reread that part of the post and this makes me disagree even more (not with you):

> The more that build software, the more who will appreciate using great software. Cooking at home makes you appreciate going out to eat.

Like.. no, I don't appreciate great cooking in restaurants.

I'm eating out because I hate cooking and I don't know how to cook certain things and with my tools I am not able to cook certain things. (e.g. good pizza). But the stuff I like cooking (and can do) is not worse than the same dish in a restaurant, sometimes I even prefer it. Same for software.

But I guess that's the thing. If I'm a professional software developer it would be kinda weird if I hated using my own home-made software? So maybe this is actually more true for people who just need a thing but can't do it without (AI) help?

AI doesn't enable non programmer to make their own app. It made non tech managers wishfully believe they won't have to pay coders to spend days to write the code.

They won't do away with all developers, the ones who will be kept will pick up all the work and have to work much harder because .. AI.

Maintaining bad AI code is the new maintaining bad offshore code.

It may as well be left unmaintained, seems like quality isn't something that matters anymore.

I feel like existing models and platforms still have a bit of work to do to make this easy for everyone, but overall I agree that this is the direction things are headed. I have very minimal programming experience, but I was able to put together a personal project manager that I'm actually using in my personal life and at work.

I posted about it recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=cgarduno1garduno.gith...

Here's the repo: https://github.com/cgarduno1garduno/SPOT

The thing that blew me away was that this took ~2 hours total time and I didn't touch the code at all - this was 100% done using Cursor. Similarly, I've been building other tools that I use at work and my team is starting to roll them into our standard workflows because they work well.

There are many instances where I struggle to get it to make what I want, but overall I've been really impressed by how much it has helped me and by how easy it has been to start building my own personal software.

I lean toward most people remaining generally apathetic. There are many DIY kits and guides for a great number of things that have done most of the hard work of designing, measuring, cutting, etc for you. My perception is that most people would still rather buy or use an already finished product.

Does the average person even use computers outside of desk workers at work now, anyway? Can you build and deploy an app with an iPhone/Android app?

Yes you can e.g. with the replit app. Quite powerful if you don't have a preferred editor and can stand the haptics of a phone to edit stuff

I think that people should give the idea that the common man is a boiling vessel of ingenuity and wonder restrained only by not having to right tools (read: products) a rest. I know that there are cultural and socioeconomic incentives to believing this. So the idea persists, for now.

I just don’t buy the supposition that in ten years those incentives will still attract the common man.

I don't think most people want to customize their software based on how many years of the Linux desktop there has been.

I don't think most people know customizing software is even a thing. I think it just doesn't occur to people.

I once heard an anecdote that being a welder makes you look at metal objects differently than non-welders. What a non-welder sees as rigid and inflexible a welder sees as able to be changed.

I think the view of software for programmers vs. non-programmers is similar.

Having said that, just as most people don't see the benefit to being a welder, most people aren't going to suddenly see the benefit of being a programmer.

> I once heard an anecdote that being a welder makes you look at metal objects differently than non-welders. What a non-welder sees as rigid and inflexible a welder sees as able to be changed.

Was it this one?

“One of the unexpected things about watching the steel guys work is how the solidity of metal means nothing to them. Most people think of metal as something hard and inflexible, but welders don't. Which should be obvious in hindsight, I guess. But, for example, they have these saw-horses that are made of tube steel. And I can see how that came about: they needed some saw-horses; they had some steel. It took them 30 seconds to make them. And, an example with the stairs: the legs of the stairs' landing platform have big threaded bolts for feet, to fine-tune the height of the legs for levelling. And there are these steel tube sleeves that go around the legs, that drop down and cover the bolts. So when they were moving this platform in, they had to flip it over, and they didn't want the sleeves to fall off while they did this. Now to me, that job calls for duct tape. To them: they welded the sleeves in place, then de-welded them when they needed them to move again.”

— <https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2001/04/13.html>

> Was it this one?

Absolutely. I tried to search-engine it when I posted and couldn't come up with it. Your search-engine skills are superior!

I used the superior search engine called “remembering where I read it”.

Ha. You have a superior brain!

This is a case where I wish for a personal archiving tool to scoop-up and index everything I read on the web (and everything write, for that matter). I know there are projects out there to do that. I really should look into one. I always get hung-up in perfect being the enemy of the good and don't do anything.

The Microsoft Recall product sounded vaguely interesting, albeit I'd want a local-only version.

I've also wondered if accessibility interfaces for screen readers could be used for bulk capture of on-screen data for scraping into this mythical index. That would make the index application independent, since the text is being captured at a different "layer".

It is a very old idea: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex>

Let's just say that Linux is not a bastion of good user experience

For a certain class of users it is.

Bad UX? Maybe a bad UI but the UX is fantastic. I prefer the keyboard magic I can do. Just look at MARSHA (For Marriott hotels), a terrible UI but major in the keyboard warriors that have been using it for two decades.

Most people don't even know Linux exists.

> We need more builders, not fewer. Because building fosters understanding. And as more people start making personal software, the bar for what counts as “great software” will inevitably rise.

Love this take. After over a decade of software development I've gained much more appreciation for well-built/useful products.

Random tidbit, I made this anemometer thing it collects data every second I think I'm at 20 million rows now since it's been running for years, what do I do with this data? nothing

It's not even calibrated to speed or anything I just have an ADC connected to a DC motor and logging the values/mapped to milliwatts via resistor value

I also had a solar cell but the coolest thing with that is seeing that bell curve or solar maximum

On the topic of personal software, I keep making note taking apps. I've made chrome extensions, mobile apps, Android widget, desktop app, etc... with multiple databases, end of the day it's just grabbing text, though recently I did go advanced and add in drag-drop image to base64 support (lazy) at some point I'm trying to unify all this data into one place with a sync mechanism

Yeah, I just wrote keybindings in Emacs Lisp such that mashing C-c n n appends a note to an org file.

I appreciate the sentiment but this is totally unrealistic. I've tried to use AI several times before to help me quickly build out some personal software side projects and it took me waaaaay longer every time. It would just confidently spit out code that looked ok at first glance but if you actually know what you are looking at you'd realize it wasn't correct at all. Or worse, if it was an area I didn't fully understand such as native mobile dev, I'd burn an hour or two before realizing the problem wasn't me.

Yes build personal software. But to act like someone can leverage AI to do all the donkey work without actually understanding it is just silly.

The saddest part about this is that children, back in the 70s, were making personal software using Smalltalk.

The reason we even need AI to build "personal software" is because building modern software is terrible. Building for the web is terrible.

If we had a modern OS with easy to use app building tools and a language as easy to learn as smalltalk, then anyone could make software, including children. You can add AI on top of that and it's still better because at least you can understand what the AI made.

https://wiki.laptop.org/go/The_OLPC_Wiki

https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Scratch

I find it amusing how the idea of ordinary people programming is talked about like it was something new, only made possible today by Dissociated Press on steroids, and it was NOT the default in personal computing even into the 90s with things like QBasic, only to be quashed by vendors who saw more money in "information appliances", especially with the web and then mobile ascendant.

Yes, an app can be a home-cooked meal. Back in the day, we didn't feel the need to eat out all the time.

I think spreadsheets were sort of an earlier version of this. You wanted to track some information, or make a plan, or just lay out some things, and this canvas of cells allowed you to put whatever structure _you_ needed in on the fly, adjust as you realized you needed something else.

It gave you the freedom and reduced the friction of iteration to figure out how you needed to organize things to discover what you wanted.

But it brought many limitations that surprisingly (to me at least) still persist today. I think AI has the ability to give you the same kind of freedom and friction reduction to allow you to build what you need.

HyperCard on the Mac solved this problem on System 6 through Mac OS 9. It was very easy to build your own stacks and even build stand-alone apps. With HyperCard, MacWrite, and MacPaint or even ClarisWorks (alter AppleWorks) bundled with the hardware, pre-OS X Macs were fairly personal in both hardware and software right out of the box. And when Apple started to bundle Claris Emailer and Claris Organizer with Macs along side SoundJam (and later iTunes), you really didn't need much more for the average Performa user.

If AI was a real person, the author was licking its ass.

I haven't seen anyone with zero computer skill build apps but I've definitely started building and deploying apps outside my day job that I've been able to put together quickly with the aid of Claude artefacts or copilot. It's really exciting!

That's awesome. Yeah, I agree with your point about people without any computer skills. We're probably still years away from that reality.

> Software can now adapt to you, not the other way around. Better yet, AI is making it possible for anyone, not just developers, to create single-use or custom applications.

Yeah, because that wouldn't be a customer service / troubleshooting nightmare.

> But within the next decade, millions of people will be able to create software. Designers, marketers, product mangers, and others will be the first.

Hahaha - clearly the author is young. All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

This is the only argument I've seen for why a second look at generative AI for (new) software developers might not be an unmitigated train-wreck…

…yet the author's points are completely invalidated by the lack of any explanation for how they intend to address the myriad of horrifying ethical lapses involved in how these models are developed and deployed—not to mention why most of the key influencers in this "AI" movement are deeply anti-craft and anti-humanist.

We in the pro-craft protest movement are happy to engage in good-faith conversations about which types of "AI" technologies might be good at in the future given satisfying resolutions to the host of ethical issues currently involved, but articles like this which seem shockingly unaware of this fierce debate simply come across as uninformed, and uninformative.

> Creating software is starting to resemble cooking.

I'm so tired of the relentless hype around AI. No normal non-technical person is going to build and be able to maintain their own software.

It's very easy to see where a lot of VC money is going: marketing.

AI writing code for you is a terrible way for a beginner to "make their own software."

We've already had solutions to this for years, it's called jamming a bunch of plugins on to a Wordpress site so it roughly does what the person wants it to do.

or perhaps remember Visual Basic?

Why does every god damn thing on the website need to be about how "AI will change everything"? You do realize we've had these tools since the 90s, right?

There's a reason only a small percentage of people are actually interested in making their own software. Most people just want to use the thing and be done with it, not tinker around with code.

How many people are making their own clothing? Clearly sewing machines are widely available, so they will surely create a revolution where everyone will make their own clothing! And yet - do you want to actually make your own clothing? No. You want to have time for other things, like making your own software.

> or perhaps remember Visual Basic?

Eh... While I agree in general, let's not compare dragging controls on forms and writing sometimes pretty arcane code incantations to writing a simple request in plain English.

> AI writing code for you is a terrible way for a beginner to "make their own software."

Yes, but it is a way. And it's a way which enables many more people to start going it, then other ways. Maybe they will also never leave this way, or reach great heights on it, but that's ok, if they get their things done.

> How many people are making their own clothing? Clearly sewing machines are widely available, so they will surely create a revolution where everyone will make their own clothing! And yet - do you want to actually make your own clothing? No. You want to have time for other things, like making your own software.

I can buy cheap clothes in any shop. Usually cheaper and in better quality than making it myself. But AI is more or less for free, there is no investment. And It's useful for gaining solutions which one other would not get.

The more appropriate comparison here would be probably Excel, which is also used for personalized "software" by people.

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