FRESH
Hacker News
Hacker News Hacker NewsKind 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.
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.
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.
[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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
There are big benefits to using a language that has good static analysis with LLMs.
I struggle to understand why, though.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
Its fun, and a lot more rewarding than replacing tool X with tool Y, realizing you actually hate it.
Not sure I can use it as a daily driver yet, but it would be pretty cool!
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?
Brother mine, you will learn that the future you is ignorant of all the things, and every bit of documentation goes a long way
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.
Programmers turning into mindless slop feeders.