A desktop made for one

https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One.html

by xngbuilds • 3 months ago

461 266 3 months ago

isene.org

cyberpunk• 3 months ago

Some screenies and the code at 0…

I struggle to understand why, though.

0: https://github.com/isene/chasm

thom• 3 months ago

Same reason people muck about with knowledge management systems... to put off the day when you have to sit down at your desk and actually do something.

gbgarbeb3• 3 months ago

Did OP write this by hand? It reads like language written by a human overfitted on GPT 4o or Claude.

jgilias2• 3 months ago

If they basically generated a desktop for themselves, what’s the chance they didn’t generate the article? I think pretty slim.

Also, reading it is probably not the intended use. It’s probably: “Hey Claude, give me a TLDR of this”

swaits• 3 months ago

Who cares? It’s their content. If they hired an editor to help them, cool. If the content doesn’t suit you, move on.

But the incessant “AI was used here, thus is it garbage” is long past time to enter the grave.

geir_isene24• 3 months ago

OP did this: Prompted CC for all the points I wanted included (something like a 200 word prompt) and asked CC to draft it, including all the links added to the table I furnished. Then I edited the draft (about 50% then edited). Then asked CC to spellcheck and fixed the 5 it found.

gbgarbeb3• 3 months ago

Thank you. It would have been nice to see you personalize the hook and show your storytelling voice the way you personalized your computer in the story, but we aren't all poets.

robotresearcher3• 3 months ago

I’m inspired by the message.

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.

salvesefu• 3 months ago

we are there now. depending on boot loader/os combination, one can get to the sub 1-5 sec range, if its cli-only.

CableNinja• 3 months ago

Clearly havent seen what enterprise hardware is like these days... sure, the OS takes 5 seconds.. but the hardware can take 10 minutes in some cases now glares at hpe gen11 systems. Its seriously bad now. The amount of power and time backround hardware level tasks now take has significantly increased over the last 10 years. Even the ancient dell r710 i have sititng in a closet collecting dust boots faster than todays hp gen11's.

We waste a ton of energy on ineffeciencies in hardware and software today all because we managed to "just go faster".

geir_isene24• 3 months ago

It feels very different. It's all damn instant. Me happy.

robotresearcher3• 3 months ago

That’s wonderful! I’ve made ultra-lightweight web apps of my own to replace bloated, slow, and poor UIs. It’s a night and day difference when the dependencies are few-to-none. And that’s on a fat browser stack. Your ASM desktop must zip!

ekjhgkejhgk2• 3 months ago

How often do you hit against bugs that stop you from being able to do something and then you have to stop what you're doing and go fix the bug?

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.

jstanley2• 3 months ago

Why did you choose to have Claude write it in assembly language?

There are big benefits to using a language that has good static analysis with LLMs.

cultofmetatron3• 3 months ago

seriously.... we already have a constellation of good deterministic tooling for taking a relatively high concept spec to low level assembly. what does an llm offer in generating optimized asm that rust wouldn't??

geir_isene24• 3 months ago

Less memory footprint. No reliance on libs. Pure first-person control. No wasted CPU cycles is the target here for me. And if you read the post, the asm set is only for the desktop itself. The tools I use are in Rust. Result is: Laptop now runs at between 5-6W (down from ~9W) [XPS14 latest hw] on Ubuntu 26.04 - giving me around 3.5h extra battery life.

nine_k3• 3 months ago

This is very cool. I wonder how much time did it actually take, and how much did it cost, because Clause Code is very much not free [1] [2]. It's more like hiring a robotic contractor, very fast, but with a serious hourly rate.

[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...

geir_isene24• 3 months ago

I'm on Claude Max, so it didn't cost me anything more than the subscription I already have. Had to use it for Something. As for time - for the full CHasm and Fe2O3 suite of sw, I started the work 2026-03-29 and have probably spent 60h or so of my time. But then again I have a very tailored CC setup that I have fine-tuned since last summer with more than 70 CC projects helping me get it the way I need it to be since then.

nine_k3• 3 months ago

So, it's at most $400 in Claude expenses for a fully custom suite of software in 2 months. Even if your time is 300/h, it's less than $2k in your own time (which, I would expect, you enjoyed spending). That's insanely impressive.

topaz0• 3 months ago

Do you know how much it would have been at API prices?

linsomniac• 3 months ago

@geir_isene: This is insanely cool, thanks for writing about it.

chickensong• 3 months ago

Interested to hear about your CC setup if you'd like to share.

theshrike7914• 3 months ago

My irccloud.com subscription is about 60€/year.

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.

[0] https://www.noodlesoft.com/whats-new-in-hazel-6/

vbernat• 3 months ago

I find this fascinating. I also like to customize my desktop experience with my own code, but it's more assembling stuff with some additional code as glue.

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).

geir_isene24• 3 months ago

Thanks. I'll look into it and borrow whatever is useful there into bolt.

dadoum• 3 months ago

Sorry I have a question that is a little off-topic: what's the value of generating an image of a laptop on a desk? That's not like it's particularly relevant, when you could have integrated a screen shot of your set-up (like the same one you put on a few of your repos) or something more unique, and even if you want to show that, it's easy to find similar images with the same vibe, so I guess it's for some fun I missed in the process?

geir_isene24• 3 months ago

I like the image. It was simple.

gwern3• 3 months ago

But doesn't that make it bad? It doesn't say anything new. Unlike the software in question, which is personalized, so it's not even symbolically reflecting the topic. It's a sheer waste of pixels and time spent looking at it or scrolling past the cognitive junk food.

redfloatplane2• 3 months ago

I (and I'm sure many others) have been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of months. I called it "Extremely Personal Software" in a blog post a few months ago (https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/14-releasing-software-now/) but there are lots of names and concepts floating about for the same basic idea.

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.

geir_isene24• 3 months ago

A really good and thoughtful response. Thanks.

vessenes3• 3 months ago

I had the same reaction. We're headed into a period where you can shape your tools exactly as you like them; artisanal rather than factory-created workshops, essentially.

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.

chrisweekly2• 3 months ago

"Everting"?

blks5• 3 months ago

We're headed into a period where you can shape your tools exactly as you like the

What period were we for the past 50 years?

Agingcoder2• 3 months ago

Agreed I’ve already started writing software for myself using Claude. I would never have done this if it weren’t for AI - I simply don’t have the time otherwise .

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

nz2• 3 months ago

I don't know how to tell you this, but people have been writing custom software for personal use for decades. I've been doing it since at least 2009! 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. Is it the price? Are people simply too cheap to buy books? Or have they simply "forgotten" how to patiently and thoughtfully read them? Or has the quality of tutorials/documentation of languages/libraries/framework online decayed in the last decade? Or is it really that people have struggled to type characters of code into their text editors[1]?

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?

sandworm1012• 3 months ago

I shudder to think about the security implications of everyone rolling thier own software. I trust my OS/browser/file system is secure because thousands of people are invovled in a complex network of interests in keeping it secure, from the kid contributing his first bit of code to the PHds at NSA writing encryption standards. The idea that any one person can replace that network is laughable.

9dev• 3 months ago

That seems like a naive view to me. Most modern software development is gluing vendor code and libraries into a CRUD app, and I don't see why that would change with agents doing the majority of programming. If anything, there's an even bigger market for solid libraries and interoperability, plugging things together like LEGO - only for real this time.

jpease• 3 months ago

Just to be contrarian, perhaps some measure of risk is reduced by the scale of one.

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).

jzb• 3 months ago

If they’re hosting network services, sure. I wouldn’t put vibe-coded software outside a home network, ever. But it seems low risk if people are just creating their own desktop software: especially since it’s less likely to be vulnerable to widespread malware.

(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.)

graemep• 3 months ago

The article is about desktop software. If it does not accept network connections what is the risk? If it needs to do so you can run restrict it to you LAN or a VPN or over access it an ssh tunnel. If it replaces something you use over the public internet (e.g. SaaS) it might even be more secure.

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.

theshrike7914• 3 months ago

Not everyone's "personal software" runs on a publicly accessible host on the internet.

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.

quietthrow• 3 months ago

This. I have written so much software recently to make my computer my own. It’s been so much fun to be able to borrow the the ideas from different tools I have used (eg vim modal behaviours etc ) and also bring them together with some completely novel ideas to produce tools for myself that are one of a kind and that “fits me like a glove“

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.

dannyfritz07• 3 months ago

Reminds me of this blog post and conference presentation on home cooked software by Maggie Appleton.

https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

redfloatplane2• 3 months ago

Great post, thanks for sharing. Evidently I am far behind the real thinkers! The Robin Sloan post mentioned is also very good.

stateofinquiry• 3 months ago

Interesting points. With the extreme cheapening of the cost (time/skill) for software production, we can have "Extremely Personal Software", as you mention and as demonstrated by the source. I wonder if we will reach a stage where "software" is written by a computer for an audience of 1 and for a single task, to be run once only- via an interface that works for all tasks. The very concept of software as something that users have to learn to use (memorizing keybindings, for example), might go the way of the punch card.

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.

theshrike7914• 3 months ago

More likely we'll have a library of skeletons for single task software, where the LLM can fill in the blanks as needed.

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.

criddell• 3 months ago

LLMs seem to be great for speeding up the creation of things that aren't all that hard to write in the first place.

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.

dllu• 3 months ago

I vibe coded an image viewer for myself to address a big pain point that had been annoying me for years. [1]

[1] https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2025-10-22-sriv-simple-rust-...

paulhallett• 3 months ago

I agree. I’ve noticed this phenomenon too as I’ve been building more and more tools for myself, and I’ve started calling it hyper personal software: https://paulwrites.software/articles/hyps/

utopiah6• 3 months ago

I called it "software".

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.

Ygg23• 3 months ago

It's YOUR computer, you can put YOUR software on it. In fact even pocket calculator do that.

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.

MrGilbert• 3 months ago

With the current situation on the hardware market, it makes me sad the we discover it only now. If things continue the way they are, there will be no Personal Computer any longer.

customguy2• 3 months ago

To me this doesn't seem like a step towards those foundations, but another layer of of loss of agency. You can run "a" model locally, but you cannot make it locally (at least not for the purpose of just talking software into existence). You need to slurp up all the internet first, so to speak. And even if you could do that, you still depend on people putting new things onto the internet for you to slurp up. So is it really my software? What if it breaks or I want a new feature and AI corp nuked my account? How much did I learn during my time having it done for me?

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.

pamcake• 3 months ago

I think I agree. But at the same time we have strength in numbers and people will find something close to what they want and fork off that.

So I think the same thesis holds for audiences of 10-100 and 100-1000.

A cambrian explosion of software.

jdright• 3 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46334206#46376113

konschubert• 3 months ago

I built an optimisation for charging my car. It’s very smart, looks multiple days ahead in weather and prices and predicts my driving habits.

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!

mempko• 3 months ago

I've been building an object oriented system re-imagined in a world with LLMs called Abject (https://abject.world) and one thought I had was to build an OS that boots into my project. One way to do it would be a minimal linux distro (think firefox os or similar). Has anyone done something like this with their projects?

grebc• 3 months ago

So how productive are you now vs. before? I assume this was the reason for doing this?

zem• 3 months ago

I would think the reason was to enjoy using their system as much as possible.

sorenjan• 3 months ago

I think it's more like gardening.

vidarh2• 3 months ago

While I wouldn't do asm, I love the approach and do much the same myself but in Ruby instead.

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.

psychoslave3• 3 months ago

Hey I remember already reading you about this on HN, yes way before LLMs were unleashed to general public. So just a kind message to tell you that quietly in some corner of my head, there is a place holding the idea "that’s the kind of humble hero worth being secretly remembered."

Cheers :)

shampoo_capital• 3 months ago

Is this an advertisement for Claude Code? It sure seems like it.

uncircle• 3 months ago

They all are.

badgersnake• 3 months ago

If it is, it’s not a good one. I just thought “You moron”.

yrds96• 3 months ago

The fact where all posts of this blog make sure to state that claude code is a life changer, i wouldn't doubt about it

onetom2• 3 months ago

The agent sessions (traces) would be very educational too.

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?

https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/2041151967695634619?s=46

geir_isene24• 3 months ago

That would be a huge payload with a few thousand prompts...

JHonaker• 3 months ago

Even better!

analogpixel• 3 months ago

I think this is going to be the OS of the future. You tell the computer what you want to do, and it uses the OS's APIs to create your program for you. No more copilot embedded in notepad unless that what you ask for.

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.

mettamage• 3 months ago

I use code that hooks into existing programs so that I can customize the existing programs to what I want

cloudhead2• 3 months ago

Did you have to look or review any of the code produced, to get the performance/capabilities that you wanted, or were all interactions through CC? In other words, did you hit any walls with the pure agentic workflow?

geir_isene24• 3 months ago

I monitored the process very tightly. I have programmed my fair share of asm (and some 30 other programming languages), but for this I did not read any code. I hit lots of obstacles on this road, lots. In the process we also created a complete TTF rasterizer on par with what kitty gives me, and that was a true deep-dive.

cloudhead2• 3 months ago

Thanks for explaining!

ahaferburg• 3 months ago

I think some of these obstacles are documented here. https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode

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!

arjie• 3 months ago

Haha, it's funny that we've all reached the same conclusion. I, too, believe in the same idea[0][1]. What is fascinating to me is how many things can now be elided from software. I don't use configuration files or things like that. I can simply hardcode everything in because there is only one user. If I want to configure it the other way, I just modify it and rebuild it.

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

geir_isene24• 3 months ago

Cool reply & thanks for the links.

noashavit• 3 months ago

I feel like build vs buy is the conversation now. I’m not a developer but I’ve built agents I use daily. When most people can vibe code their way to a custom app, value will most likely hinge on support and other “services”. Just my 2 cents, feel free to tell me I’m wrong!

theshrike7914• 3 months ago

TBH this is a discussion companies are having internally. There are so many low/mid-tier SaaS systems people have bought because they need maybe one or two features from there. Maybe they're the only one that integrates with $vendor properly.

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.

thatxliner• 3 months ago

Note that Rust is not in fact named after Fe2O3; it’s named after a resilient fungus of the same name

geir_isene24• 3 months ago

Just goes to show how little I know about Rust.

beanjuiceII• 3 months ago

everyone is finally coming around to emacs way of doing things after all these years :D

Kalabasa• 3 months ago

One term for these is "home-cooked" software.

https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

soraminazuki• 3 months ago

"Home" as in "phoning home"? Because Claude Code sure isn't local, privacy-respecting software.

theshrike7914• 3 months ago

No, but you can (and should) use VC-funded AIs to create local privacy-respecting software that will keep working when the bubble bursts.

cadamsdotcom• 3 months ago

This is really exciting.

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.

deepfriedbits4• 3 months ago

Absolutely and you're dead on thinking about the opening of the possibility space. The value of software as an enterprise will fall as we enter an age of abundant, and often custom, bespoke software. There will be many great apps coming and some lousy apps.

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.

gnabgib• 3 months ago

Real nice to see two accounts using LLMs discuss nothing like this. They warned us this would happen, and here we are. I guess the topic is apt, but we used to customize windows (95+) and Linux like this (not down to vibe-coded insecure replacement of apps, but display/desktop/widgets/explorer/transparency of components).

theshrike7914• 3 months ago

The value of software as an enterprise will fall as we enter an age of abundant, and often custom, bespoke software.

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... =)

blks5• 3 months ago

This is nice, but is also leagues away from something you’re written yourself. Take LLMs out of equation, and you have piles of code that you barely recognise and barely can edit or tweak by yourself.

notesinthefield• 3 months ago

I dont think it matters at all to OP. Sidestepping the insult, it sounds like they very, very much want to tools that support their needs only, methodology be damned.

senbrow2• 3 months ago

This just doesn't matter for a lot of us. We have LLMs that can tweak it and the tools work as intended.

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.

blks5• 3 months ago

I don’t think the time sink is that significant with many tools, especially since you can take existing projects and change them. And it’s fun to hack!

blks5• 3 months ago

Also open source tools can be “hacked” to enable features you want.

btbuildem• 3 months ago

Nor do I have to write documentation for users who don’t exist

Brother mine, you will learn that the future you is ignorant of all the things, and every bit of documentation goes a long way

matheusmoreira• 3 months ago

Respect. I want to do the same thing. I'm studying electronics, PCBs and CAD in order to build the literal computer that I've always wanted as well. It's my lifetime project. Who knows if I'll ever succeed? I think AI significantly upped my chances but still.

wyre2• 3 months ago

Great job! This is super cool and probably feels incredibly satisfying!

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.

geir_isene24• 3 months ago

Hmmm

techgnosis• 3 months ago

Can't use his Max sub with his own custom agent. No custom agent is worth per-token Opus pricing

wyre2• 3 months ago

As someone who did write their own custom agent, I figured that was the reason.

However, gpt5.5 does not make me miss Opus.

furyofantares2• 3 months ago

I've got a wrapper around tmux for an audience of one. I can operate claude code, codex, opencode, or just a shell, from any of my devices to any of my devices (via tailscale) or more commonly, operate it on my exe.dev server.

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.

paweladamczuk2• 3 months ago

Do you have a way to use voice on your smartphone?

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.

yjftsjthsd-h• 3 months ago

You could always just use whisper as a keyboard on the phone: https://github.com/woheller69/whisperIME

protostork• 3 months ago

FUTO has a superb Android keyboard with on-device voice transcription using a fine-tuned Whisper model, which is quite performant for me (and actually does fairly impressive text autocorrect and prediction too): https://keyboard.futo.org/

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/

furyofantares2• 3 months ago

Yeah, two ways, lol. I have a big mic button on the bottom that I hold to speak, which uses the browser speech api. edit: I'm reading that that's local in safari but remote in chrome.

But I also type into an input field rather than the terminal and can use the mic on the phone keyboard (iOS).

geir_isene24• 3 months ago

I do the same also

adampac• 3 months ago

Would love to learn more about your setup as I put something fairly similar for myself and looking for ways to improve it even further.

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.

ilaksh• 3 months ago

Is there a demo video? An installer or pre built package or ISO?

geir_isene24• 3 months ago

Nope. Probably never will be.

lichenwarp• 3 months ago

ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE HAHA HE SAID THE THING

grodes• 3 months ago

AI generated blog. Boring…

hum3hum3• 3 months ago

I was inspired by Nicklaus Wirth when he wrote his own language opearting system and CPU. LLM allow many more to do this like you so am seriously impressed. It is also fun.

nurettin• 3 months ago

I do this because I don't want to rely on others for my basic needs.

https://github.com/nurettin/gnome-extensions-topterm

https://github.com/nurettin/gnome-extensions-toptop

paweladamczuk2• 3 months ago

What about the cybersecurity aspect of bespoke software?

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.

lionkor4• 3 months ago

Software made for one, made by LLMs which regurgitate the average of existing tools, are going to have more security issues, not less.

theshrike7914• 3 months ago

But how would you exploit them when every one of them is subtly different?

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?

ximm• 3 months ago

My experience is that often when I think "I wish my email / browser / calendar / … did X" it turns out be a limitation of the underlying protocol. So even if you build all software yourself, you still have to make compromises when you interact with the outside world.

aorth• 3 months ago

Brilliant! I hate it. The author will surely admit that there was "joy" in creating this suite of software, but it's a different kind of joy than most of us here would recognize. I am looking forward to being a part of the group of detractors doing things the old way, similar to the "small web" or other counter cultures on the Internet. I fantasize about being here to pick up the pieces after all the others went full-on into AI-assisted everything and lost their critical thinking capacity, programming skills, knowledge of Unix command line, etc.

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.

dimator2• 3 months ago

I read somewhere (in the myriad blog posts dealing with this Cambrian LLM explosion) that software developers could be put into two camps: those that just want the thing to exist, and those that want to build and understand the thing (in addition to wanting it to exist).

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.

theshrike7914• 3 months ago

I kinda like the woodworking analogy of this.

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.

viccis2• 3 months ago

I'm in the second camp.

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.

latexr• 3 months ago

I read somewhere (…) that software developers could be put into two camps (…)

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!

ptnpzwqd• 3 months ago

I think a notable difference is that the AI that is portrayed in most sci-fi (that I have read/watched anyway) tend to be "logical machines" that act deterministically based on the data available to them.

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.

cyclopeanutopia• 3 months ago

People who watch/read cyberpunk and dream about living in such a world are way beyond stupid. :(

Antibabelic• 3 months ago

It used to be that writing your own editor, your own file manager, your own window manager, was a project of years.

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.

ramon156• 3 months ago

Instead of replacing, downsize. Do you really need a GUI for git? Do you need the JetBrains Smart Ultra Analysis Pro™? Do you even need syntax highlighting? How far can you go?

Its fun, and a lot more rewarding than replacing tool X with tool Y, realizing you actually hate it.

psychoslave3• 3 months ago

Finally the great solipsism singularity collapse can be mine!

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?

boxed• 3 months ago

I started porting TurboVision from C++ to mojo with Claude as a sort of joke. Then I said, why not port the entire Turbo editor? And then like. hmm.. it doesn't have all the modern affordances like language servers, syntax highlighting for all languages, debuggers for everything, real-time find-in-files, projects, etc. Well now I have all this implemented: https://github.com/boxed/TurboKod

Not sure I can use it as a daily driver yet, but it would be pretty cool!

voidUpdate• 3 months ago

I sometimes wonder what will happen when people who use rust run out of punny names for their programs that reference the concept of metal rusting...

po1nt2• 3 months ago

We still have crab puns. Then we're screwed

a96• 3 months ago

They might start looking at other fungi, but maybe that's for bigger projects.

po1nt2• 3 months ago

I just realized I'm following the same philosophy. I use suckless tools and made so many modifications to st, dwm and such it feels like home. I'm currently in the process of implementing my own git manager so that it would nicely integrate with my workflow.

Fokamul• 3 months ago

AI slop, pretty sad.

Programmers turning into mindless slop feeders.

geir_isene24• 3 months ago

For those who may be interested - I broke down some numbers for my CHasm and Fe2O3 efforts in a new blog post: https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One-Numbers.html

alchemist1e9• 3 months ago

You’ve reduce the memory requirements so much that it could all run on an early 90s computer easily. When I see such extreme examples I think back to the OLPC machines and this idea of how can extremely cheap but with useful software computers be available in very impoverished areas. I understand this has nothing to do with your argument or anything you’re writing about. It just made me think if LLM assisted software production might make the failed OLPC idea viable again. Could a minimalist but useful set of tools be created to run on old chromebooks for example.

patcon• 3 months ago

I fuckin love this.

It points toward the parts of "reduce, reuse, recycle" that capitalism has demonstrated no interest in serving

vidarh2• 3 months ago

Back when I was using Amiga, there was an ongoing competition to trim tools down to the point you'd see people shaving off bytes at a time in some cases. It largely stopped because of the time investment. Ironically, if we can fire off some hugely resource hungry LLMs and trim the bloat we might end up reducing the resource requirements for everything else again...

lionkor4• 3 months ago

CHasm[0] is a bit of a joke, right? Did it take a lot of Claude massaging to get it to ignore basic engineering knowledge, like that compilers write better assembly than any other tool or person will (in the general case, which this is)?

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.

0: https://github.com/isene/chasm

lpcvoid2• 3 months ago

I agree. I have no idea why this story is upvoted. Hacker culture is truely dead, it's all slop now.

abrookewood• 3 months ago

This is pretty crazy. The largest of the applications is the shell: bare Interactive shell with line editing, history, completion, nicks, multi-pipes, redirects, here-strings, abbreviations, undo, smart hotkeys ~16k (lines) ~150KB (size). Far out.

Link: https://github.com/isene/chasm

overfeed• 3 months ago

This appears to be a harbinger of a Plastic-era of software. A miracle product that's used for everything, and will turn up everywhere before we've had the chance to consider the wider impact. Learning to write software in a generation will be a royal mess, as will be finding clean training data, and software discovery.

mentos• 3 months ago

AGI or bust

Havoc• 3 months ago

I like this as a concept & have been pushing towards similar (though more in homelab/webapp space than desktop).

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

theshrike7914• 3 months ago

I like the simonw tools approach: https://tools.simonwillison.net/

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.

noisy_boy• 3 months ago

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

Or a regularly backed up raspberry pi running services in lightweight docker containers exposed over tailscale.

laszlokorte• 3 months ago

Semi-honest question: What do you need a window manager, code editor, chat app, etc for if claude is so awesome that it can do everything for you? Why spend 400$ on making tools that you wont use in any workflow because the only workflow that will be left is prompting and agent to run in a loop

i_think_so7• 3 months ago

Asking the real questions right here. ^

"Computer. Run program Riker omega six." <things happen>

ks2048• 3 months ago

"Powered by Jekyll w/modified Slate+Simple theme."

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.

willtemperley• 3 months ago

The flip side of this is professional software will be designed and written by those that know the industry.

We're actually going to have hammers designed by blacksmiths, not by comittee.

tokkkie• 3 months ago

I think the OS and software should be as minimal as possible. Most people would be happier if they could just install what they actually need, nothing more.

ekjhgkejhgk2• 3 months ago

Prediction: AI coding will be a boon for Free software. Eventually people will get tired of the novelty of "each person can write his own desktop environment made for one" and coalesce around a few instances which become popular. The effort will then turn from "everyone can build his own using AI" to "everyone can add features that they themselves want or fix the bugs that bother them using AI".

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".

geir_isene24• 3 months ago

CHasm: https://isene.org/chasm/

Fe2O3: https://isene.org/fe2o3/

tmzt• 3 months ago

I'm working on this too. I'm building a distributed environment where compute and GPU resources can be on one system, display on another, organized into a type of piconet. So far, I'm working with offline/local AI though running into limitations with it. The goal is to allow for a user to customize the environment with personalized cards powered by open schema databases. The same UI works on mobile devices, tablets, desktops, even TVs and IoT devices (ESP).

A desktop made for one

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