A desktop made for one
isene.org
isene.org
I think it's possible the amount of new software that will be written for an audience of 1-10 will be greater in 2026 than in any previous year, and then the same again for many years to come. I also think a lot of this software will be essentially 'hidden' - people just writing this stuff for themselves because the cost to say things to an agent is very low compared with the cost of actually planning out a software design and so forth.
Interoperability will probably be important in the next few years and I wonder if this is something solvable at the agent/LLM level (standing instructions like 'typically, use sqlite, use plaintext, use open standards' or whatever). I also think observability and ops will be pretty important - many people who want personal software but don't care for the maintenance and upkeep.
I think the instinct that APIs, validation layers, and so on take on a much higher importance is right.. I have a few internal tools that made sense to make libraries out of, and once the first library is good, and a test suite is comprehensive, porting to a bunch of different languages is extremely simple.
Everting that, it's also going to be simple for someone to hook up to this library with custom tooling.
Really interesting period in computing, for sure.
What period were we for the past 50 years?
The ~20 years prior to that we were in a world where you chose to align with either Microsoft's tooling, IBM, or shops providing Unix tooling from proprietary vendors.
I elide a nearly infinite amount of detail, obviously.
What's new now is that you can get your own window manager written to spec in under a week, perhaps much more quickly, not just choose one of a few major window managers and configure it in accordance with the chosen configuration options delivered by the large developer team.
I don't think I can explain the difference, but it feels really different. Even if you used claude.
Now I can build a bespoke table in an evening or two and it fits my stuff just perfectly.
I could do it before too, but it would've taken too long for me to bother, so I dealt with the whole house along with the table.
I now have tailor made apps with all kinds of bells and whistles that commercial products can’t offer easily ( I fall under non commercial usage which opens a lot of doors ), and that free software might offer, but later.
I have also learnt a lot technically in the process, since I’ve been able to venture into what was for me unknown territory but at controlled cost
I plan to create more such apps in the future. What is certain though is that my cooking app has immediately displaced all the others on the market , because none of the others cater to my requirements.
The production side is indeed of specific interest - most users don’t run production software so I had to think about that one. Tailscale and Cloudflare came in quite handy and there is indeed a market here
Basically, I am prepared to accept that there is a friction that LLMs lubricate away, but what is the source of the friction, and why am I (and a bunch of other colleagues) not feeling that friction daily in our practice?
[1]: And if so, where did we programmers and computer scientists go wrong? Were subroutines and macros not sufficient for automating all of that excess typing? Were Emacs and Vim simply not saving enough keystrokes? Did people forget how to touch-type?
Interestingly, I also converged on the "reverse dictionary" usage of LLMs, in around 2024[1], mostly to indulge in (human) language-learning.
An excerpt from the post below:
``` It is a phenomenal reverse dictionary (i.e. which English words mean "of a specific but unspecified character, quality, or degree"). It not only works for English, but also for Esperanto (i.e. which Esperanto words mean "of a specific but unspecified character, quality, or degree"), as well as my own obscure native language. This is a huge time-saver when learning languages (normal dictionaries won't cut it, and bi-lingual dictionaries are limited, if they are available at all). Even if you are just using a language you are fluent in, a reverse-dictionary-prompt can help you find words and usages, and can also help you find "dark spots" in the language's lexicon. ```
[1]: https://galacticbeyond.com/chat-room-dispatches-intelligence...
Well. You should have seen the look on their faces. I might as well have morphed into the Steve Buscemi meme "How do you do, fellow kids?" They looked at me like I was a total relic or greybeard and said things like "Nah, nobody reads tech books anymore; I learned Typescript from YouTube videos."
I think every generation feels like their way of learning was the best, but we all make it work. There was a time when the architects of systems directly tutored programmers on how to write programs.
Not really. It's probably complexity for the sake of it in some cases. Also it's frequently ambiguous, and I'm really not sure why: it looks like some developers lack the basic logic (?!).
I write plenty of code at my job, and generally don't have the desire to write more code as a hobby, except in rare cases when the mood really strikes.
I'm a long time ops guy. I script, but I spend most of my time configuring, patch testing, and keeping the low level infra running much of which doesn't require "coding" per say. Infra as code is in the grand scheme relatively new and still not ubiquitous despite what silicon valley would have you believe. I never had a need to learn to code to a level to do many of the things I'd like to see happen and find useful. Now I can make those software desires a reality without having to alter my career, preferred hobbies, or much of anything else about my life.
You must be extremely talented and fast if LLMs make no difference for you.
For people like me though, it's another story: I've been doing this professionally for 25 years and of course, like many, I have been writing custom software for my own use all this time, on personal time. But with LLMs I get better results, faster and with very little effort. And that is the difference between another item in my list of unfinished software that consumed too much of my weekends and a cool utility/toy/useful thing I got after a few fun and interesting chat sessions.
> I find it hard to believe that there is a demographic of people that were yearning to write code, but simply could not because they lacked LLMs.
We didn't lack LLMs, we lacked time and energy.
Yes, because the price is measured in time.
With LLM tooling I’ve churned out idiosyncratic tools that fit my use cases quickly. Takes maybe a day instead of a week. A week instead of months. The fast turnaround changes the economics of writing custom tools for myself.
I also know that these days, for all kinds of reasons, I do not have the time to write the tools I’m writing now without AI. I don’t lack the ability, and I could - it will simply be multi months side projects that I can’t / won’t complete.
Have I tried to write my own IRC client yet? Nope. Because even though I know how to, the time spent wouldn't have been worth it. Getting from zero to feature parity would've taken me weeks or months of evenings doing nothing else.
I've got my own irccloud/thelounge clone running now, took me two weeks of calendar time and I spent maybe 6-7 evenings on it and a few hare-brained ideas with Claude on my phone.
The amount of "lubrication" LLMs have given me in going from idea to something good enough just for me is completely bonkers.
Yes, definitely, though I'm unsure what it means being cheap here.
Not everyone has SV incomes and infinite time to read all the books that would allow to buy, let alone integrate the lessons at a practical implementation level. Plus people might have other interest in life, and family and friends they want to dedicate time and warm attention to.
GP never claimed otherwise.
As for the rest of your comment, it's frankly a bit patronising: are people too cheap, are people too lazy to read, are people unable to type...?
No, people are busy, a fact which GP made abundantly clear in the very first paragraph.
> I would never have done this if it weren’t for AI - I simply don’t have the time otherwise.
If its not for fun, what's it for? It doesn't really seem like anyone is making stuff they are going to use next month anyway? But, I totally get how its recreational, and can be fun in the "computer, make my program" kind of way.
Otherwise, why not, e.g., just use or fork vim?
The original blog post, and the ensuing discussion, is about creating software that fits your specific requirements, for the purposes of daily use.
As for using vim, the author did, for 20 years. The article discusses that in detail.
Further, the article does not mention "requirements," it mentions the "joy" of having software "fit" just you. It goes through I think a certain amount of care in the writing to say they are enabled by their system only insofar as there is a "satisfaction" to not dealing with something from without that is for a more general audience.
At the end of the day, life is what you spend time doing. I don't think the author or anybody really thinks cumulative time is saved one way or the other here. This is all a product of what we want to spend time doing. And I am just saying, that's recreational! It doesn't have to be the case that something is lesser if its not about maximizing productivity or making more money. Either you have a "decades-long" project configuring a system, or your spending a decade writing new software for you, that's a "quiet pleasure to use." It's clearly either way about the project of it. Do we really think anyone is going to vibe code a vim clone and, insofar as they use it, not continue to tinker with it? Isn't that like the whole upshot here? That you can make things forever?
A guy who uses i3/sway and rolls their own DE even before vibe coding world is already a particular kind of person with certain priorities and judgements about time! And that's cool! I am that kind of guy, fwiw.
A lot of people into the synthesizers and related stuff talk about so-called "gear acquisition syndrome," where, in the search for hardware that fits their "requirements" as serious musicians, the time (and money) they end up spending just getting new things ends up eclipsing time doing the actual thing (making music). Depending on how much money they have, this doesn't necessarily become bad, one just realizes they are maybe a synth collector more than a composer.
Even if I had all the AI money token blah blah in the world, I would still hesitate spending time rebuilding an IDE or editor on my weekends, because for me personally, that's time getting in the way of using the computer to make my things. Like I am hungry, I do not want to forge my own chef's knife first, but I do think the people that do have a kinda cool hobby! Or, if its about spending my weekend making an OS so that I can, come Monday, read work emails exactly how I want, well that just terrible to me but everyone has their own work-life balance I think.
Again, I am not trying to explain away or I guess be negative here. There are lots of kinds of people, that's ok! I think it's just interesting how we know traffic concepts of "time" and "productivity" and "serious computer work vs. recreational computer stuff" these days!
I know how to do all of these things and even find them easy, but it's just much faster now. These are personal one task toy apps, but they are useful.
I work 8-10 hours a day and outside those working hours I want to spend time with my family, my friends, and my hobbies.
At the same time, during those 8-10 working hours I don't want to spend time fiddling around with different programming languages or software patterns just to spit out a quirky little tool that would make my job a bit easier.
For example, I wanted a local to-do list software that I could easily integrate with my workflow. Spent some time trying to find one, but not a single one worked the way I wanted. So, one morning, I spent 5 minutes detailing what I wanted, prompted it to Claude and let it rip while I was working. 30 minutes later, it was ready.
I am in that demographic. I have been hacking on other peoples' software as a necessity, to get it to work or to do things I wanted that it didn't yet do, all my career. LLMs came along and afforded me the opportunity to act like a full time programmer when I'm just a paranoid systems monkey who is normally obliged to treat programming as a barrier to be overcome, not a career or even primary hobby.
In my specific case, the reason I was yearning to write code but did not was simply because there weren't enough hours in the day, and I wasn't told that I should spend my on-the-clock hours doing it (unless it was for automating my job). So despite the fact that I have had hundreds of instructional hours of programming classes, learned the basics in half a dozen languages, and been "hacking" code for years, none of it stuck because I never had an employer say to me "right, you're going to be responsible for writing (or maintaining) this Perl app here..."
> Basically, I am prepared to accept that there is a friction that LLMs lubricate away, but what is the source of the friction, and why am I (and a bunch of other colleagues) not feeling that friction daily in our practice?
Learning a programming language and then not getting to use it more than a few days every 3 years means you don't actually learn the language. It's more like a pleasant evening playing a game.
You and your colleagues are, I presume, programmers. I'd wager what I just described is Greek to you. So try to imagine it this way: somebody comes out with a crazy new prototype CPU. It's got a radically different ISA, so it doesn't even have C on it yet -- you have to poke registers with a brand new language that's like Ada on mescaline and it's built on a flavor of assembly that's like nothing you've ever heard of. So your boss tells you to learn it, then 2 weeks later pulls you off the project to do something normal and takes the dev board away.
If you don't see that CPU again for 3 years, how long are you going to retain that bit of knowledge you acquired? Well, that's what it's like for us programmer-adjacent nerds who spend all our time building systems, replacing failed components, crimping cables, writing disaster recovery documents, adjusting backup schedules, and getting woken the hell up night after night because another filesystem filled up.
I have no data to share on how many of us there are out there in similar situations world-wide, but I have met numerous traditional sysadmin in my time who were competent at automating things with shell scripts, not competent at writing "software" in "real" programming languages, and are probably using LLMs now to remedy that lack of skill.
For every 10 DevOps guys there may be one trad sysadmin out there who knows enough Perl to glue the server farm together and keep it running but can't be bothered to learn Python. Or the ratio may be the opposite. But whichever it is, that demographic very much exists.
Identifying a vulnerability that can be exploited against many thousands or millions of targets is perhaps more attractive than a single one of individually low value.
This of course would assume that vulnerabilities are in fact unique (which is admittedly questionable).
See e.g the lock screen gap that another commenter noted in a nearby thread.
Although everyone might use their own flavor of "database" or "REST API", I can't imagine every layout to be unique enough to not have similar exploit classes entirely. AI isn't known for being super original after all...
(Appreciate your counterpoint for its own sake. It’s an interesting idea.)
Yeah, I don't think all that generated software will be as unique as people expect.
Considering it will be generated with the same LLMs that all share roughly the same training data we will se patterns of vulnerabilities will also be similar and so easily exploitable.
Besides that, one could easily imagine software created for similar purposes ("make me a file editor") by the same tool or handful thereof (claude and a very small "etc" for completeness) might share similar vulnerabilities, so this kind of broad net might be even cheaper to cast than one might imagine at first.
(Note: I’m not an LLM fan, don’t vibe code myself at all. But I would be unconcerned about security for the kind of things I would create if I did start doing so.)
Rolling your own might make you more vulnerable to targetted attacks, but less vulnerable to automated attacks looking for known weaknesses. Most people will not publish their code. The article says "It’s not an invitation to use my software. Honestly, please don’t. None of it is built for you.".
You can roll your own software and still use libraries for security sensitive things like encryption.
Even the author of this article (who is taking it much further than most people will) still uses Firefox, Weechat, and X11.
I trust my Browser, OS and file system too.
But I'm also pretty sure none of the bespoke software I have will get any kind of security implications. The chance of my own file manager having a buffer overflow RCE triggered by a random file is practically zero.
Too bad this is all on the work computer and need to bring it to my personal one but can’t copy paste lol. It’s been thrilling building g and using them and the time from an ideating a small enhancement/ optimization to actually using it is like 5 to 15 minutes away. Soo cool.
More like Star Trek, we would just ask "computer" to do things, and its machinations (and "software") will be invisible to us. We would just have output to deal with.
I think this would mean a lot of things. I'm sure I can't fathom all of the implications, but it sure makes me feel old! Interesting times ahead.
Maybe it saves the script locally (invisible to the user) and reuses it if the user repeats the same request, the script is deleted if it's not needed for X amount of time.
They don't seem to be helping much with difficult tasks.
Text editor? Easy. That used to be a rite of passage. Lots of people have written their own basic text editor.
3d solid modeler? It's always been difficult and AI coders aren't (yet?) up to the task. Most open source CAD projects that show up here are layers on top of OCCT (Open Cascade) which is pretty far behind what commercial geometry kernels are capable of.
[1] https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2025-10-22-sriv-simple-rust-...
It's so strange to me that since the 1960s with BASIC then later on dozens of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_programmin... including Logo by Feurzeig/Papert/Solomon there is effort to precisely help beginners program software.
The effort was not to onboard future professional software developers but rather to make the personal in personal computer, or PC, meaningful. It's YOUR computer, you can put YOUR software on it. In fact even pocket calculator do that.
We keep on re-discovering the foundations.
I'm pretty sure this exists. It's called OSS or, more ubiquitously, Linux.
The problem is, of course, no one wants to publish software for your PC/handmade OS. Which makes it a huge problem. You can't write every piece of your OS, without wasting huge amount of time. Nor do people generally want this.
Your software can be made by you, for you. It can be open source/free software if you want. Others can contribute to it, if you want but it can be open source without accepting external contributions also.
My point was to highlight that having software made by you for your machine is not new. Arguably the way to do so changed but I would say the principle remains.
If by "us" you mean big bucks corporations, then yes: ~80% is big corporations [0]. Unfortunately, it does not look like it's a personal OS.
And we badly need the personal platform with the personal OS.
0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/za564c/is_i...
Don't fall into the trap of assuming "A big company did it / paid for it to be done, therefore it must be bad". I see that mindset (which I'll call anti-corporatist) on HN from time to time. Companies are made up of people, and it's the people that make the decisions. Some people are good-natured, some are greedy and grasping. And the company that acted one way one decade can turn around and act completely differently the next decade, because a different person was at the helm.
Fundamentally, it's about the people, not the companies. The anti-corporatist mindset is prone to forgetting that.
The question is what does it change? Are the contributions from those corporations irreversible or are they targeting their own products for e.g. virtualization for cloud computing which doesn't affect the typical personal OS user?
Anyway the kernel itself was still started by a random student in his dorm. GNU was just started by another student. That possibility still exists today. It's also possible to trim that kernel with e.g. Linux-libre or even run Hurd.
One can use Debian with KDE today and see nor be subject to any corporate impact in terms of arbitrary limits to their usage. If they decide to not personalize it more it is most likely because they didn't consider it, not because they can't.
Yeah, but it's probably derived from OSS software anyway either via license or LLM. That said, you can customize your Linux/BSD/Haiku/TempleOS as much as you want.
But consider the following: even in the better case of an OS making 1% of OS userbase (vs. 0.0000001%) no one wants to support it.
Want to play Diablo? Better to sit down and waste your time.
And before anyone mentions it, I don't think the fact that I need a compiler and a manual and some example software to learn from is quite on the same level. I might be wrong but I would need some convincing.
I agree on the SaaS side of the story, that's why it is so important to have open models.
1. every LLM is _local_ in relation to the location the storage and/or the computers hosting/using it
2. the LLM running in your home is only _local_, until u step out of the door, but if you have some tailscale or zerotier VPN setup, u can still access it _remote_ly...
Is it "their" software? Sure, if it meets their needs. What if the AI changes? Who cares, I already have the software. All the what ifs are solved by taking the current code, stuffing into into any AI you like today, and getting the new version.
As a user, this all sounds like a great deal. Devs can continue wringing their hands over code quality and long term support and architecture and preferred framework, meanwhile the user who had an itch got it scratched and didn't need nor care about any of those things.
It's just dismissing the question. If the AI changes, just use one that didn't change. If it gets 1000x more expensive, just use one that remains cheap.
Apart from the fact that without new input to learn from, things will probably stagnate in new exciting ways, on top of the stagnation, bloat and slop we worked so hard to make a culture over the last decades.
> Devs can continue wringing their hands over code quality and long term support and architecture and preferred framework
I mentioned none of those things.
> the user who had an itch got it scratched and didn't need nor care about any of those things.
And I don't care about that user when it comes to the question of my agency and autonomy. It's like people discussing how to make cats do tricks and someone going "just get a dog".
So I think the same thesis holds for audiences of 10-100 and 100-1000.
A cambrian explosion of software.
I tried to make it a product, but I didn’t find much interest. Maybe I’m just bad at marketing.
With the help of Claude, it cost me years of experience and few weekends to build. So even if nobody other than me ever profits from it, it was still worth it!
My wm, shell, terminal, editor, file manager, pop-up menu (dmenu-like) are all pure ruby (including font rendering and X11 bindings). These all started before I started using Claude to improve them, so they're still mostly hand-written, but that is changing.
They're messy, they have bugs and "misfeatures" that works for me but likely would be painful for others.
Like OP, I don't really recommend anyone else use my code, at least not directly, and that is extremely liberating.
Overall, the projects covers the largest surface of what I use beyond the kernel, a browser, and Xorg (I'm so, so tempted, but I think an LLM will need to get a lot further first before I could fit it into my schedule).
It doesn't need to be polished because it's mostly for me. It's okay for them to have bugs as long as they work better for me than the alternatives.
I strongly believe more people should do this. It's both a great learning experience, and it gives you a system that has exactly the features you actually want and use.
And it's only going to get easier to do this.
Cheers :)
[1]: https://fortune.com/2026/04/28/nvidia-executive-cost-of-ai-i...
[2]: https://www.briefs.co/news/uber-torches-entire-2026-ai-budge...
As a hobby, normal rates don’t apply, but just not to be misleading on the equivalent cost.
literally every app they need, except the browser, at least have 10 alternatives that are FOSS, much more mature, better structured and prone to be bug free... or do you really think the OP with months/years of use won't need some other feature and will re-invent the wheel on software that is around for more than a decade with hundreds of bug reports done (i3 wm was released in 2009)
I've spent two weeks with the cheapest tiers of Claude Pro + pi.dev+GPT-5.5 (+ some deepseek-v4 via openrouter recently) to create my own bespoke version.
I'm at 90% feature parity currently and surpassed on some levels. For ~20€-ish I've soon replaced a 60€/year subscription service.
I haven't spent a single second thinking about how someone else might run it, it doesn't have logins, security or anything - because I'm going to run it 100% behind a Tailscale node with no external access. The release and deployment processes are exactly how I like it, other people might not. I don't need to care, it's mine =)
A few months ago I did the same with Hazel[0]. That took maybe one evening to get an MVP and a week of casual updates to make it pretty. Now I have my own macOS application that does the exact things I needed Hazel for. It's mine forever and I can add or remove features as I feel like it.
I mean, I'm a gwern fan, but...can't you just let people enjoy things?
Just as their words are presumed to be meaningful and worth reading... but slightly less so every day, I fear.
Then it wasn't for you. No big whoop.
> It wasted my thoughts as I stared at it,
I think we have arrived at the kernel of the problem. :-)
The rest of this comment is left as an exercise for the student.
Ah yes. I remember this in Penny Arcade: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/24/the-adventures...
Dumping slop into the public commons deserves criticism.
I often continue a session on my phone, sometimes with voice. I have buttons for viewing files or following links the agent has referenced, extracted from the stream of text, and I have some buttons for exactly the git stuff I need. I have a button to toggle between yolo mode and normal.
Basically, very simple UI for everything I actually use, easy to use on a phone - and maybe more importantly, no UI for anything I don't personally use. Also all my machines have the repo for the uh, harness-harness, so I just open the tab for it if I need some changes and prompt them into existence and get the changes live.
All this is great, except it enables me to work every waking hour of my life. That part might be bad.
I use a whisper wrapper (also "built for one") for Windows and connect through SSH but it only works well enough because of the laptop's ARC graphics card. I wish I could do that when connecting to SSH from my smartphone.
They also do a pure play voice input keyboard, if that's your jam or you want to use it with other keuboards: https://voiceinput.futo.org/
But I also type into an input field rather than the terminal and can use the mic on the phone keyboard (iOS).
My goal is to have agents work independently from any of my devices (hence VM setup) and to access any session at any time.
My setup so far:
A simple VM on Google Cloud. Always on. Repo lives in there. Claude Code, Codex, Gemini installed as CLIs.
The agents run inside terminal sessions on the VM, managed by zmx (small Zig project, keeps a raw PTY around). Session keeps running regardless of what’s connected.
From the Mac, transport is Eternal Terminal on port 2022. ET is like SSH but reconnects silently. I never see the disconnect.
From the phone, transport is mosh. UDP based, roams gracefully (cellular to wifi and back). Client is Moshi (iOS), renders the terminal and manages tmux sessions well. Moshi needs alternate screen for scrollback, so on the phone path zmx is wrapped in tmux. The tmux is just an adapter for the phone client, not the persistence layer.
The point: both transports attach to the same zmx session. Same scrollback, same prompt, same agent state. Laptop, phone, both at once, all clients of the same long running shell on the VM.
The annoying part was scrollback: duplicated history, lack of native scroll, lagging. zmx avoids the alternate screen (tmux uses it by default, which makes scrolling agent output awkward). Combined with Claude’s --no-flicker flag, the terminal’s own scrollback ends up actually usable.
I wanted to avoid manually switching scroll modes and re-attaching. Moshi sees all my current sessions on the Mac, I just tap and swipe between them. Awesome.
A few shell functions hide the layering on the Mac with a few commands and keyboard shortcuts.
A word of warning: a reliable lock tool for X11 is difficult. You should look at XSecureLock, which uses a multiprocess approach to avoid leaving the desktop unprotected in case of crash. It also implements a number of countermeasure to ensure the desktop stays locked and the locker stays in the front of the display. It's small too, so easy to audit (but written in C).
On this software itself: I’d like to know how this feels to use. It’s so very lightweight. Does it feel categorically different to what we are used to?
One of the things I miss about the 1980s home computers is that they booted into a usable command line in a handful of seconds, from a few KB in ROM. Imagine what today’s HW could do if we’d retained that level of efficiency.
We waste a ton of energy on ineffeciencies in hardware and software today all because we managed to "just go faster".
For me, I've used i3-wm exclusively for 4 years now, and it has always felt instant. I struggle to believe that getting whatever incremental performance at the cost of increased bugs is worth bothering about it.
It points toward the parts of "reduce, reuse, recycle" that capitalism has demonstrated no interest in serving
Some of the folks who make things will go on to make things that suit not just their preferences but also those of a small audience.
Some of those audiences will go on to grow and grow and disrupt the big players.
The capital intensive part of software construction is melting away and being converted to opex (payg token costs and your time) and that will blast open the possibility space and lead to a massive new commons.
If the thing was so cheap to create why not open source it!
And if you like someone else’s open source thing but don’t want to take it wholesale why not give it to your agent and say “put the ideas from this onto my thing”!
It’s a new way of thinking about code too.
Another thing to watch for is how chatty the internet is about to become. A great many of these apps will hit APIs, ping each other, and so forth.
Not just software. I'm predicting we'll be getting bespoke books and comics in a few years. TV and Movies after that.
Basically there will be a service with mad-libs style book skeletons and you can get your exact specifics put in with LLM writing in them.
You want a romance novel with dragons (D&D style), a red-headed princess protagonist that's a bad-ass fighter and she has three men competing for her affection, each with a very distinct look that YOU specifically like.
Done.
This already being done by actual human writers, many (not all!) people read books based on tropes they like, the rest doesn't really matter. They basically check the tags of the story and if they match well enough, they'll buy it and read it. And I mean very specific: https://www.goodreads.com/series/151379-ice-planet-barbarian... =)
AI is inverting the old "ideas are worthless; value is in the execution" adage. Ideas themselves will be valuable.
There are big benefits to using a language that has good static analysis with LLMs.
rust can do that. You can run a hyper stripped down rust that was made for embedded devices specifically because those devices don't have room for a runtime.
And it apparently can. And very well.
One advantage seems to be that the complete asm file fits easily into CC context window.
well, I can respect that for sure
Still a cool project, thanks for sharing.
I have wondered about having LLMs output machine code directly and skipping the compiler/assembler altogether. Then you'd just commit your spec/prompt and run it through the LLM to get your binary.
cmp dword [rax], 'XAUT'
jne .rxa_next
cmp dword [rax+4], 'HORI'
jne .rxa_next
cmp word [rax+8], 'TY'
jne .rxa_next
cmp byte [rax+10], '='
jne .rxa_next
; Found XAUTHORITY=path
This pattern is used everywhere for copying or comparing strings, this was just one example of it.
There's a state variable that's used to keep track of whether the input is text to be displayed or part of a control sequence. It's a full 64 bits, probably not because we need 18 quintillion states? Here's how it is evaluated:
; Dispatch based on state
mov rcx, [vt_state]
cmp rcx, VT_ESC
je .vtp_esc
cmp rcx, VT_CSI
je .vtp_csi
cmp rcx, VT_CSI_PARAM
...
This code is on the "slow" path, there's a faster one for 7-bit ASCII outside of control sequences, with a lengthy comment by Claude at the top on how it optimized this. Even this one starts with a bunch of conditionals though:
cmp qword [vt_state], 0 ; VT_NORMAL == 0
jne .vtp_loop_slow
cmp dword [utf8_remaining], 0
jne .vtp_loop_slow
cmp byte [pending_wrap], 0
jne .vtp_loop_slow
mov rbx, [grid_cols]
sub rbx, [cursor_col] ; rbx = cells left on this row
test rbx, rbx
jle .vtp_loop_slow ; no room (or already past)
I freely confess that I'm a "Luddite", and was explicitly looking for bad (and obviously so) code, but this took me just a few minutes of scrolling through the nearly 20K lines in this file, so it should be somewhat representative of the whole.
There is part of me that understands the appeal of the all-in on AI and personalized software approach. It's a bit cyberpunk! In terms of open-source software, the downsides outweigh the benefits in my opinion, though. Important principles like community ownership and commitment are absent, and this approach is even radically antisocial. And then there's the inevitable issues with maintainability, to say noting about dependence on big tech companies.
To each their own, but this is not for me.
those in the first camp are having a great time.
those in the second camp (which is how you're describing yourself, and how I'd describe myself) are wary and suspicious.
it is somewhat paradoxical, we've watched/read sci-fi/cyberpunk for years and dreamed of this kind of world. after all, when did you see any members of the Enterprise writing code? they just asked the computer to "write a subroutine" and that was that. what a world!
but here we are, with the craft in danger, not entirely impressed by the idea of "just ask and walk away".
i, too, fear for my loss of critical thinking, raw skills, and design sense, as do i think about being one of the few (in 2, 3, 5, 10 years) that didn't abdicate their cognition, their craft, to the tech overlords.
but i wonder if it will matter anyway. i wonder if "source code" will be a deep abstraction that nobody thinks about anyway, similar to how 99% of us don't care/need to care what the machine code we're eventually emitting does or looks like.
in any case, i'll keep my thinking for now.
I, in theory, can plane a piece of wood with a hand planer. But I'll never do it again, we did it at school in ye olden times before the millennium and it was boring then as it is boring now.
I know people who get satisfaction from it, they take one sliver off with the hand planer, feel the wood with their hand and figure out the perfect angle for the next tiny sliver of wood to come out off, repeating the process over and over again.
I, personally, will just feed the damn plank to a mechanical planer with the exact specs of the resulting board set up. I just want the board smooth so I can get to the next step of the process. I'm not doubting the "wood-slop" the machine produces, I can see and measure if it's good enough or not. I don't need to be involved in the process.
We're both making a table, mine will be done faster. It might not be hand-crafted to perfection, but it will hold the stuff I intend to put on it just fine. If I find out it sucks later on, I can make a new one that's slightly better or fix the existing one. My goal was a functional product, not a piece of handcrafted art.
More close is: if there was a table making machine, you just push a button and something like a table comes out, would you still be a woodworker? You haven't planed, nor measured, nor cut, nor jointed, you've only pressed on "make me a table"
Another example: I enjoy writing with a good pen. But whether I write by pen or on a keyboard, it's still me writing it.
However, AI does basically all the real work, only leaving you to guide it. Make a table? AI gives you one with 2 legs. More legs? Guess I can live with 5 legs.
And you wouldn't be making that table, AI is. You cannot have pride in something that you never made yourself. It's the same as 3D-printing something from Thingiverse and claiming you made it.
People who create AI blog posts are not writing. Those that prompt their way to a piece of software are not doing software engineering. The ones that generate AI images are not being artists.
It all depends on the view you take on the thing. What real problem are you solving? If the problem is "I need a table for X", both ways solve it. How the problem is solved is secondary.
I don't need pride in "making it myself", what I get pride in is "I solved this problem". Printing something out of Thingiverse still solves the problem, as does buying something ready-made. For me, personally, the means doesn't matter - I get zero dopamine in doing something the hard way, quite the opposite.
As for the writing, there are actual studies that writing by hand activates different parts of your brain than typing.
Except you didn't solve the problem. Yes, the problem was solved, but not by you.
When I was in high school, the school library had a "Where's Waldo" book. Someone has taken a red marker and marked with big red arrows where Waldo was on every page.
The problem was solved, but I found no pleasure in it.
>Printing something out of Thingiverse still solves the problem, as does buying something ready-made.
That's a good point. If my motorcycle has a broken spark plug, I won't create my own. I'll go to the store and buy a new one. I've solved the problem.
I could also take it to the mechanic and get it replaced there. Much like the Where's Waldo book, the problem has been solved for me.
>As for the writing, there are actual studies that writing by hand activates different parts of your brain than typing.
Doesn't matter, the final product is still your own work.
Part of it's that the whole point of going into this industry is that I love coding and have been doing it since I was 8. Part of it is that I'm a control freak and it makes me uncomfortable to have to trust AI generated code. Sure, I already trust interpreters and compilers, but those are much more deterministic, and they don't generally do anything I have to be wary of. Part of it is that anytime I've used Claude to write stuff (using Opus 4.7 via an API key), I've had to handhold it when doing simple things (telling it repeatedly that a given column doesn't exist in Snowflake's task history table and eventually just giving up and taking it out by hand) and had to remove tons of completely pointless Python code it generates. The big difference is that the people in the first camp don't seem to care enough to check. Someone at my company used Claude to write 20k lines of code this past Friday. No way he read and scrutinized all of that in one day.
The other big thing I've noticed is that a lot of the people using it extensively seem to just be spitting out API endpoint after endpoint. Just doing endless CRUD with some light business logic. Yeah, it's not too hard to automate that with AI without any major issues. Hell, back when Ruby on Rails was hot, it was so fast to write those kinds of things with it that I could spin up things as fast as AI is doing now. Full websites or APIs in an hour or two because its syntactic sugar and scaffolding did what AI does with the FastAPI codebases I see these days. You could go from an ER diagram to a working app in minutes sometimes. I don't care that much if that kind of work is automated.
Surely you read it more than once, because that has become a talking point. It’s a false dichotomy that, you’ll notice, is most often used by the people who put themselves in the first camp to steer the conversation. By framing it as “there are two camps, it’s just different, none of them is better”, it lends legitimacy to their position.
You don't have to pick one camp over the other. Good, high quality craft makes good products.
> after all, when did you see any members of the Enterprise writing code?
When did you see anyone in any media taking a dump, or sleeping, or doing any of the boring bits? Rarely, because if it’s not relevant to the story they don’t show it, but it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
I’m more of a DS9 fan, and I remember them having computer problems all the time. O’Brien, despite being highly competent and the chief of engineering with a team, was constantly overworked.
And their computers were infinitely superior to the LLMs we have now. When they gave you an answer, you could be confident it was correct. And if they didn’t know, they’d tell you!
What we got are "statistical machines" that tend to do the right thing under the right conditions, but can go completely off the rail every now and then.
The former are more akin to a generalization of computers as we typically think of it, whereas the latter is something else. Maybe that something else is closer to human behavior in some ways, but also so very different - unlike humans, where you get to know people, build relationships, know who to trust in what ways, and so forth, you can never really trust an LLM with any critical tasks without close supervision.
I found the asm skill file quite interesting. Gives a glimpse into a world I didn't know still existed. Very cool! https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/skills/x86_64-...
Thank you for sharing!
This is... Not really true? Especially if you are writing just for yourself. These are week-long projects at most to get to a usable state, if you know what you're doing. This is why there are so many text editors and window managers in the first place.
I struggle to understand why, though.
Not sure I can use it as a daily driver yet, but it would be pretty cool!
The whole point of this sentiment is that the personal tools wouldn't EXIST due to the time sink needed.
The tradeoff makes sense for a lot of people even if it's not a good fit for you.
Also I don't want to take someone's existing project and change it. They have too much cruft and don't work Just The Way I Like It.
That's why we create custom stuff from scratch.
I don't want to sift through docs and man pages and debug cryptic compiler and runtime errors in my spare time.
There are far richer things for me to do with my life.
I want to use my computer to get my tasks done and be done with it. Slogging through technical details an LLM could crush in minutes is a much better use of my resources.
Also, reading it is probably not the intended use. It’s probably: “Hey Claude, give me a TLDR of this”
But the incessant “AI was used here, thus is it garbage” is long past time to enter the grave.
I usually stop reading at the first LLM-ism, but I found the premise of this post interesting enough to keep going - and guess what, the entire article was literally just "I prompt CC to make software tailored for me" blown out to 8 sections.
The parent comment does. Why do you care that they care?
I care, because it landed on the front-page of a website that I thought was about engineering and hacking, not prompting a no-code tool and spending 400 bucks on it, to get something nobody else wants.
Nah, that rule is more relevant and true now than it was a year ago.
Would it be possible to share the jsonl files too, like how Mario Zechner shared his chats with the AI, while working on his Pi coding agent?
This kind of summarizes the whole post for me. I struggle to see how, on a platform that I thought was passionate about engineering, this is gaining any kind of traction. Writing GUI tools in assembly, not to learn, but for whatever other reasons, is nightmarish levels of silly. I get the idea of making software TRULY yours. I get it. This isn't that. Letting an AI agent literally vibe code your entire desktop is not an idea that would come to anyone's mind as more than the punchline of a joke or a side note in a dystopian book.
You're not making software, Claude is. You're not learning anything, and the tools produced are (by design) not really editable.
"Computer. Run program Riker omega six." <things happen>
Now it's perfectly possible to do a "good enough" solution in-house for less than what we pay for the SaaS monthly. And as a bonus we own the full solution and can add any features we want without the SaaS provider gatekeeping it.
Kind of funny seeing that at the bottom of this article. Especially given that static site generators are probably one of the biggest roll-your-own categories of software.
ok seems a lot of fun (for those like-minded), but who seriously want to be dealing with maintenance of everything they use in the long term, in pure assembly all the more?
In particular I've found that if you have a good infrastructure layer available on which you can deploy then it's much easier to throw small purpose built webtools on there that solves personal problems. Infra here being fixed IP, mTLS reverse proxy, k3s/container, S3 etc. Basic building blocks like that - store data, run app & safe gateway to access it.
If you have that in place then most smaller apps (shopping list, notes etc) is a couple prompts away
Basically you have a repo with web-based tools and a way to deploy them on change. Then you can just quickly whip up (or ask an LLM to do so) any simple tool and it's live within minutes.
Or a regularly backed up raspberry pi running services in lightweight docker containers exposed over tailscale.
A cybersecurity research company can now spend a small fortune on finding zero days in iOS because of the amount of people that use it. It basically guarantees there will be clients like government agencies willing to pay through the nose for the exploits.
Software made for one might disrupt this business model.
With software that's deployed to millions of computers you have an abundance of targets, but trying to target some random LLM average todo list at scale is hard, isn't it?
Once millions of completely unskilled developers have "workflows" that consist of asking an LLM to make a thing, followed by those LLMs pulling in the same 100 (often outdated versions of) dependencies, you have a beautiful attack vector.
Yes, it's "easy" to attack something like Obsidian. It's probably easier to attack a couple hundred dependencies LLMs like to use, or to test what LLMs commonly do to implement things from scratch, and attack those weaknesses.
We are just lucky that enough real, smart, people engineered things that actually work, are well understood, and keep us safe, like firewalls.
At day 9, right as he is getting ready to deploy his beautifully crafted shell code, the clock hits midnight UTC. The website shuts down for maintenance.
"This is it" he thinks. "As soon as the backups finish I'm getting in. No problem."
Minutes tick by. He gets up, stretches, sits back down, watches the clock impatiently. Then, as he prepares to start refreshing the site he recollects, "I'm glad I begged so hard to get authorization to use this PHP 0day."
His partially obscured terminal window has the script ready to launch, all arguments pre-populated, waiting for the link and session token to be pasted in and executed.
The site comes back up. But the url of his launch point returns 404. Undaunted, he returns to a previous url. It is also 404. He curses aloud. Beginning to perspire, he goes to the homepage and prepares to navigate back to the launch point.
The link isn't there. Well, it's there, but it has changed.
"What the....!" The link is no longer a PHP url. He mouses over other links. NO links say PHP anymore. Starting to panic, he clicks on links at random. Not a single one appears to be PHP.
The following morning he schedules an urgent meeting with his supervisor.
"How's that project coming along. Got anything yet?"
"No. I, uh...I'm going to need a bit more time."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. Uh. The site. It got..." He mutes his microphone and, for the 22nd time since midnight, he screams in frustration. Unmuting, he continues:
"It got rewritten. Completely. In Nim."
"What??"
"Yeah. It's some esoteric language that just got a new web framework. I guess somebody decided they wanted to mess around with it. So they vibe coded a complete translation. The whole front end is nimlang now. None of the PHP attacks are going to work on it."
His supervisor expresses his disgust and ends the call.
11 days later the process repeats itself, this time with Rust.
The TAO engineer submits an application to change jobs to the DoD's procurement division, then requests an appointment with a mental health counselor.
Excuse me, I need to go solicit VC for my new evolving web security startup that is really just Claude rewriting 10% of the infra each day....
I wasn't trying to write a Great American [Cyber]Spy Novel. I banged out a silly short story over maybe 40 minutes while I was eating. Then I went back and cleaned up a bit of the text I didn't like and gave it to the world.
I smiled and chuckled a few times as I was writing, because that's what often happens when an author is making something he's happy with. I hoped a few others would get a chuckle out of it too. I gather that 2 people did, so far. That's good enough for me.
If you're applying to become my editor, please email me at bizinquiries@i_think_so.com during M-F so we can discuss your fee.
Maybe, in fact, some group somewhere combines supply chain attacks with models and/or agents. A model or agent that’s compromised upstream and becomes designed to insert a backdoor is not beyond possibility.
Most software is done after the first or second version and the developers just keep working on it to justify their job; adding features no one needs and just get in the way or make the program worse. It'll be nice when the software I have does exactly what I need and doesn't change until I tell it to change for something I need.
The only feature Macos has shipped in the past 10 years that I actually like is air-drop. Everything else is a PITA annoyance, or as I've found out from upgrading, just bug ridden slop that doesn't work well anymore.
Fe2O3: https://isene.org/fe2o3/
I do find it curious how even after replacing all of your software, but are still using Claude Code instead of building your own coding agent.
However, gpt5.5 does not make me miss Opus.
We're actually going to have hammers designed by blacksmiths, not by comittee.
The other thing is that other people's applications are rarely useful. Their libraries are, the feature description READMEs are, but the software itself is full of attempts at generality that make them overly annoying for me to use. Instead I have extremely idiosyncratic software - anyone else would find it insufferable.
The wild thing, though, is that my software is outrageously useful for me. I can see why Anthropic and OpenAI are (or shortly will be) the trillion-dollar behemoths they are. They are enabling a personal productivity increase of epic proportions[2]. The highly specific functionality also means strange things performance wise. I don't need to use Electron or Tauri or whatever. Instead, my thing is Rust with objc2 and it starts instantaneously. On my M1 Max, it's the fastest text viewer I can start. 100s of megabytes of JSON and it's launching is imperceptible for my tool, pretty-printing is instantaneous, breadcrumbs are live.
Because I can make it do only the thing I want it to do. It can't do other things. I cannot edit or auto-complete or anything. And this is great. Useless to others and fantastic to me.
Likewise, my blog is on Mediawiki (which I like so anyone can edit) but the authoring flow is kind of annoying. Uploading images causes a break from writing, and requires a lot of form-filling that interrupts my thought. So I now have this software that does everything I want: link autocompletion, background image uploads, post-hoc publishing, previews and diffs, built-in Wikipedia search to interwiki link. Who would want this but me? It only brings me pleasure.
What a revolution in software.
0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-25/The_rise_of_...
1: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-30/Personal_Sof...
2: Predictably, I have chosen to use the spare time on leisure
Brother mine, you will learn that the future you is ignorant of all the things, and every bit of documentation goes a long way
And before you say "oh but these are just stochastic parrots and this is really stolen code" - well the jury is stil out, but currently companies don't have these kind of problems, so I expect that anyone will be able to go "my claude did it so I declare it to be Free software".
Its fun, and a lot more rewarding than replacing tool X with tool Y, realizing you actually hate it.
Programmers turning into mindless slop feeders.