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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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 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.
[1] https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2025-10-22-sriv-simple-rust-...
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.
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.
So I think the same thesis holds for audiences of 10-100 and 100-1000.
A cambrian explosion of software.
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).
(Appreciate your counterpoint for its own sake. It’s an interesting idea.)
(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.)
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...
As a hobby, normal rates don’t apply, but just not to be misleading on the equivalent cost.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, reading it is probably not the intended use. It’s probably: “Hey Claude, give me a TLDR of this”
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
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?
Fe2O3: https://isene.org/fe2o3/
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.
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.
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.
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.
We're actually going to have hammers designed by blacksmiths, not by comittee.
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
Brother mine, you will learn that the future you is ignorant of all the things, and every bit of documentation goes a long way
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?
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.
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".
Programmers turning into mindless slop feeders.
