lol calling Python lightweight:

  ⟩ dnf install --downloadonly --installroot /tmp/yourmom python3
  …SNIP…
  Transaction Summary:
  Installing:        59 packages

  Total size of inbound packages is 33 MiB. Need to download 33 MiB.
  After this operation, 118 MiB extra will be used (install 118 MiB, remove 0 B).
  The operation will only download packages for the transaction.

Don't get me wrong, Python is a great many things. Easy to use, surprisingly fast for a scripting language, and well documented. But not lightweight.

(( The Windows version is 110MiB after decompression. ))

while this is cool and I want to play with it myself, it's still sort of discounting the overhead here of installing python, installing tkinter, adding shortcuts to the program within Windows, etc.

Of course the barrier to creating bespoke tools is lower but it's also still a decent bit of overhead and not just "hey AI, create me a Notepad clone that works like it used to". Arguably it's still more intensive than googling "notepad clone" and just downloading n++.

> Welcome to 2026

But anyone with basic experience in Python could have written that same app in minutes 20 years ago?

>python

>tkinter

so you missed the part where notepad starts instantly, doesn't choke on files larger than 25KB and uses native Win32 controls ?