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.

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.

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...

"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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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

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

Some screenies and the code at 0…

I struggle to understand why, though.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE HAHA HE SAID THE THING

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.

AI generated blog. Boring…

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!

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?

> 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

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

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?

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.

AI slop, pretty sad.

Programmers turning into mindless slop feeders.

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