An ode to houseplant programming (2025) | Hacker News Reader

An ode to houseplant programming (2025)

hannahilea.com

155 pointsevakhoury28 comments

Not sure we need another term for this, as "utilities" has been the accepted term for various one-off programs that do miscellaneous things, and of which power-users will tend to have a rather large collection of.

However, the term reminded me of a memorable interaction I had many decades ago with an old woman who wanted to write a program in x86 Asm to manage various aspects of the plants in her garden. (She did succeed at doing so.)

I like the new term which distinguishes it from "utilities" that are personal tools used for programming it self.

"Utilities" is a generic term suggesting it is small, potentially reusable, purpose-limited, and used to simplify a task.

"Utilities" doesn't indicate the audience or the intended longevity of use of the tool like "houseplant" and "bouquet" do.

Both indicate they are built for personal use cases, suggesting potentially low reusability. The longevity of "houseplant" suggests it's intended for ongoing use, while "bouquet" suggests a limited use tool.

With work, either could be made reusable for others, but I think it's implied that the scope is an edge case or uncommon case that likely only applies to its creator or a very limited audience.

I see value in the terms, but these terms may themselves be houseplant terms, not sure if general adoption is useful to someone not building houseplant software, they are mostly hobbiest terms by definition.

userscripts

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"

I was surprised when I actually dabbled in x86 ASM (in the guise of MASM which arguably is a higher-level language than direct ASM) with BIOS and DOS interrupts as functions - it's quite close to C and not at all difficult - just tedious.

A powerful editor/IDE makes it ... not the worst programming experience in the world.

And since it's "so detailed" it's pretty easy to understand and explain, unlike higher-level languages that "do everything for you".

This is such a lovely article. It’s one of the few things posted to HN these days that actually feels human.

I also feel this way. It’s a breath of fresh air. I love the Blomsterfönstret illustration too.

Yeah this place has been depressing lately. The hope is that AI could be used to automate the parts of our lives that bring us no joy or growth and help us become fully actualised human beings, but instead it seems like it's just used as a tool to boost profits while making the world a worse place.

As someone said, "Machines were supposed to rid us of tedious work. Instead they write poetry and create art, and we fill captchas to prove to them that we are human"

I prefer a quote from Dune - "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

Yeah, something like "I want AI to do my laundry and clean my house so I have more time to write and create art. Instead the AI writes and generates art so I have more time to clean my house and do laundry."

It's the denigration of any and all intellectual pursuits that gets me. It's the myopic lead the blind, in a race to empty their brain fastest before the singularity can rupture them into the mainframe heaven.

Their irl counterparts at the university make me think it must be envy, the same as with AI art: they were never good programmers but have always envied the their prestige; and using this new wonderful machine, they can now live out their fantasy at the expense of others. For others it's just nihilism: why not cheat through your entire higher ed if it's now entirely possible?

But many AI-boosters here on HN were once respected programmers, so what else can it be? Fatigue setting in with age, exacerbated by too many levels of indirection in modern software, AI becoming a crutch to avoid noticing you're slowing down?

Or it’s just a useful tool that lets me build more stuff and focus on what I’m more interested in, and can use it to learn.

AI becomes problematic when its exceeds the role of a tool.

It can be a useful tool to do all that, that's what I use it for. Unfortunately a lot of AI boosters have the sfba move fast and break things mentality and that leads to all sorts of slop being pushed.

I think broadly speaking, we need less software that's higher quality. Commercially at least, LLM's seem to be creating more lower quality software. Less software but much higher quality, and then let the gaps be filled in by houseplant programming. Instead we get half-baked vibe coded Cloudflare-isk slop being promoted, or CEO's of saas-slop providers salivating at the chance to fire half of their workforce.

I want to see more houseplants being posted here, LLM generated or not. At least they would tend to have more care and love put into them.

> A happy home: I love having both plants and homemade projects in my living space.

This reminds me of various programs I've made to improve the quality of my digital life. Humble little things that I didn't want to build, addressing minor problems that could be mostly solved by other means, but nevertheless appeared on my mental wish list often enough that I eventually dedicated some time to creating them.

These tools do exactly what I need, all day, every day, quietly making things more pleasant than they would be otherwise. With them, I feel at home.

I love it. I do plant tissue culture as hobby and really see plants as the living systems that they are.

Cool, can you provide some more info on how you got in to this, recommended dabbling strategy and what sort of ROI you're getting from time invested? I have been getting in to botany pretty heavily already.

I've always had a passion for carnivorous plants and it was inevitable that I would end up doing tissue culture by keeping on digging deeper in the obsession.

The biggest ROI is fulfilling my childhood dream of having a ton of my favourites rare plants. Then I sell my extra ones on my webshop, but it doesn't make that much money as I am not focusing on expensive varieties, just the ones I like.

You can check out plants in jars on YouTube, or use a LLM to get into it. Some LLMs might not want to answer you because they think you're trying to do something dangerous... Claude has been flagging a lot of my questions.

Ahh, succulents! Happened upon a succulent show around 2 years ago. Wow. Never imagined how many oddball shapes were out there, it's a real scene. Some of those combo monstrosities belong in sci-fi! I can see how people get in to it.

The article has a bonus cat video so I highly recommend it. I like the houseplant metaphor, but I don't see how the author is tending to the programs like the plants. The plants are getting regular care, do the one of programs?

I love this, although I tend to use the “Home-cooked meal” analogy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877423

I prefer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening

While interesting, that seems unrelated. A software equivalent might be turning an agent loose on a codebase unrestricted and seeing what it comes up with (which is followed by cleaning up the mess, analogous to the rounds of outcrossing that follow irradiation and selection).

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