6 ms·

To me, the most interesting thing about Pi and the "claw" phenomenon is what it means for open source. It's becoming passé to ask for feature requests and even

To me, the most interesting thing about Pi and the "claw" phenomenon is what it means for open source. It's becoming passé to ask for feature requests and even to submit PRs to open source repos. Instead of extensions you install, you download a skill file that tells a coding agent how to add a feature. The software stops being an artifact and starts being a living tool that isn't the same as anyone else's copy. I'm curious to see what tooling will emerge for collaborating with this new paradigm.

axelthegerman 8mo ago
And how great it will be to troubleshoot any issues because everyone is basically running a distinct piece of software
- sshine 8mo ago
  ... made minutes ago.
  - krickelkrackel 8mo ago
    So everybody will be using (sometimes slightly, sometimes entirely) different software. Like mutations, these adapt to the specific problems in the situation they were prompted to be programmed.
- wrxd 8mo ago
  I don’t want to be the one who has to upgrade this software + vibe coded patches. It’s going to be very likely that once something is patched is to be considered as diverged and very hard to upgrade
- theshrike79 8mo ago
  It's like the dude who monkey-patches their car and goes to the dealer to complain why the suspension is stiff. It's because you put 2by4's in place of the shocks, you absolute muppet. And then they either give them a massive bill to fix it properly or politely show them out. Same will happen in self-modifying software. Some people are self-aware enough to know that "I made this, it's my problem to fix", some will complain to the maker of the harness they used and will be summarily shown the door.
throwaway13337 8mo ago
I see this happening, too. We know that a lack of control over their environment makes animals, including humans, depressed. The software we use has so much of this lack of control. It's their way, their branding, their ads, their app. You're the guest on your own device. It's no wonder everyone hates technology. A world with software that is malleable, personal, and cheap - this could do a lot of good. Real ownership. The nerds could always make a home with their linux desktop. Now everyone can. It'll change the equation. I'm quite optimistic for this future.
- hdjrudni 8mo ago
  That's just because corporations got greedy and made their apps suck. Strip away the ads, the data harvesting, add back the power features, and we'll be happy again. I'm more willing than ever to pay a one-time fee good software. I've started donating to all the free apps I use on a regular basis. I don't want to own my own slop. That doesn't help me. Use your AI tools to build out the software if you want, but make sure it does a good job. Don't make me fiddle with indeterministic flavor-of-the-month AI gents.
  - safety1st 8mo ago
    I think there's room for both visions. Big Tech is generating more toxic sludge than ever, and yeah sure this is because they're greedy, but more precisely the root cause is how they lobbied Washington and our elected officials agreed to all kinds of pro-corporate, anti-human legislation. Like destroying our right to repair, like criminalizing "circumvention" measures in devices we own, like insane life-destroying penalties for copyright infringement, like looking the other way when Big Tech broke anti-trust laws, etc. The Big Tech slop can only be fixed in one way, and actually it's really predictable and will work - we need to fix the laws so that they put the rights and flourishing of human beings first, not the rights and flourishing of Big Tech. We need to fix enforcement because there are so many times that these companies just break the law and they get convicted but they get off with a slap on the wrist. We need to legislate a dismantling of barriers to new entrants in the sectors they dominate. Competition for the consumer dollar is the only thing that can force them to be more honest. They need to see that their customers are leaving for something better, otherwise they'll never improve. But our elected officials have crafted laws and an enforcement system which make 'something better' impossible (or at least highly uneconomical). Parallel to this if open source projects can develop software which is easier for the user to change via a PR, they totally should. We can and should have the best of both worlds. We should have the big companies producing better "boxed" software. Plus we should have more flexibility to build, tweak and run whatever we want.
CuriouslyC 8mo ago
[flagged]
- theshrike79 8mo ago
  Think of skills more like Excel macros (or any other software with robust macro support). It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to provide the specific workflow you need, but your own sheet needs it.
  - navigate8310 8mo ago
    Except "skills" being worked upon by a deterministic model will result in inconsistent results than a heuristic VB macro written for Excel
bandrami 8mo ago
> a living tool that isn't the same as anyone else's copy Yes, which is why this model of development is basically dead-in-the-water in terms of institutional adoption. No large firm or government is going to allow that.
- raincole 8mo ago
  Large institutions and governments had been pushing back against open source too until it became obviously inevitable.
  - bandrami 8mo ago
    It wasn't "inevitable", it took Red Hat and some other key players addressing the concerns the businesses and governments had, which took the better part of a decade. If LLMs as an ecosystem don't implode in the next year or so I imagine you'll start to see some big consultancies starting that same process for them.
    - embedding-shape 8mo ago
      > it took Red Hat and some other key players addressing the concerns the businesses and governments had Red Hat? I don't think they are involved in the moves to FOSS for government agencies, mostly because they're American, and the ones who are currently moving quickly (in the government world at least) are the ones who aren't American and what to get rid of their reliance on American infrastructure and software.
      - bandrami 8mo ago
        Visit Washington DC some time and ride the metro. Red Hat puts out ads about all their public sector offerings.
        embedding-shape 8mo ago
        > Visit Washington DC some time and ride the metro. Red Hat puts out ads about all their public sector offerings. I haven't had a single need to visit the US, and I still have zero needs for it. If I need to read subway ads to understand how a company is connected to FOSS, I think I'll skip that and continue using and working with companies who make that clear up front :) Thanks for the offer though!
lugao 8mo ago
Why would this new paradigm create interesting tooling? From your description I expect wrose not better tools.
- vidarh 8mo ago
  Worse it better for you when it meets your needs better. I use a lot of my own software. Most of it is strictly worse both in terms of features and bugs than more intentional, planned projects. The reason I do it is because each of those tools solve my specific pain points in ways that makes my life better. A concrete example: I have a personal dashboard. It was written by Claude in its entirety. I've skimmed the code, but no more than that. I don't review individual changes. It works for me. It pulls in my calendar, my fitbit data, my TODO list, various custom reminders to work around my tendency to procrastinate, it surfaces data from my coding agents, it provides a nice interface for me to browse various documentation I keep to hand, and a lot more. I could write a "proper" dashboard system with cleanly pluggable modules. If I were to write it manually I probably would because I'd want something I could easily dip in and out of working on. But when I've started doing stuff like that in the past I quickly put it aside because it cost more effort than I got out of it. The benefit it provides is low enough that even a team effort would be difficult to make pay off. Now that equation has fundamentally changed. If there's something I don't like, I tell Claude, and a few minutes - or more - later, I reload the dashboard and 90% of the time it's improved. I have no illusions that code is generic enough to be usable for others, and that's fine, because the cost of maintaining it in my time is so low that I have no need to share that burden with others. I think this will change how a lot of software is written. A "dashboard toolkit" for example would still have value to my "project". But for my agent to pull in and use to put together my dashboard faster. A lot of "finished products" will be a lot less valuable because it'll become easier to get exactly what you want by having your agent assemble what is out there, and write what isn't out there from scratch.
  - lugao 8mo ago
    To be clear I never said custom vibe coded personal software is bad. But clearly that's not the point from OP. Quoting directly: > you download a skill file that tells a coding agent how to add a feature This is suggesting a my_feature.md would be a way of sharing and improving software in the future, which I think is mostly a bad thing.
redfloatplane 8mo ago
I've been thinking about this lately too. I think we're going to see the rise of Extremely Personal Software, software that barely makes any sense outside of someone's personal context. I think there is going to be _so_ much software written for an audience of 1-10 people in the next year. I've had Claude create so much tooling for me and a small number of others in the last few months. A DnD schedule app; a spoiler-free formula e news checker; a single-use voting site for a climbing co-op; tools to access other tools that I don't like using by hand; just absolutely tons of stuff that would never have made any sense to spend time on before. It's a new world. https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/14-releasing-software-now/ https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/14-releasing-software-now/
- boh 8mo ago
  I think people overestimate the general population's ability and interest in vibe coding. Open source tools are still a small niche. Vibe code customized apps are an even bigger niche.
  - redfloatplane 8mo ago
    Maybe so. I guess I feel that in a couple of years it may not be called vibe coding, or even coding, I think it might be called 'using a computer'. I suppose it's very hard to correctly estimate or reason about such a big change.
  - tagami 8mo ago
    even smaller?
  - dotancohen 8mo ago
    My entire career has been building niche software for small business and personal use. The current crop of AI tools help get that software into my clients' hands quicker and cheaper. And those reduced timelines mean that the client has less opportunity to change scope and features - that is the real value for me as a developer.
thierrydamiba 8mo ago
I actually look at this another way. I think we’re going to see a lot more open source. Before you had to get your pr merged into main. Now people will just ask ai to build the tool they need and then open source it. Maintainers won’t have to deal with an endless stream of PRs. Now people will just clone your library the second it has traction and make it perfect for their specific use case. Cherry pick the best features and build something perfect for them. They’ll be able to do things your product can’t, and individual users will probably find a better fit in these spinoffs than in the original app.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
rbren 8mo ago
Funny, I just released my dev setup as “Open prompt” https://github.com/rbren/personal-ai-devbox https://github.com/rbren/personal-ai-devbox
GTP 8mo ago
> It's becoming passé to ask for feature requests and even to submit PRs to open source repos. Yet, the first impact on FOSS seems to be quite the opposite: maintainers complaining about PRs and vulnerability disclosures that turn out to be AI hallucinations, wasting their time. It seems to be so bad that now GitHub is offering the possibility of turning off pull requests for repositories. What you present here is an optimistic view, and I would be happy for it to be correct, but what we've seen so far unfortunately seems to point in a different direction.
- brandensilva 8mo ago
  We might be witnessing some survivor bias here based on our own human conditioning. Successful PRs aren't going to make the news like the bad ones do. With that said, we are all dealing with AI still convincingly writing code that doesn't work despite passing tests or introducing hard to find bugs. It will be some time until we iron that out fully for more reliable output I suspect. Unfortunately we won't be able to stop humans thinking they are software engineers when they are not now that the abstraction language is the human language so guarding from spam will be more important than ever.
davej 8mo ago
Patrick Collison said this yesterday on TBPN, "Software is becoming like pizza […] It should be cooked right then and there at the moment of use"
- dTal 8mo ago
  Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble? --Alan Perlis
giancarlostoro 8mo ago
> Instead of extensions you install, you download a skill file that tells a coding agent how to add a feature. The software stops being an artifact and starts being a living tool that isn't the same as anyone else's copy. I'm curious to see what tooling will emerge for collaborating with this new paradigm. I build my own inspired by Beads, not quite as you're describing, but I store todo's in a SQLite database (beads used SQLite AND git hooks, I didn't want to be married to git), and I let them sync to and from GitHub Issues, so in theory I can fork a GitHub repo, and have my tool pull down issues from the original repo (havent tried it when its a fork, so that's a new task for the task pile). https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails/issues https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails/issues You can see me dogfeeding my tool to my tools codebase and having my issues on the github for anyone to see, you can see the closed ones. I do think we will see an increase in local dev tooling that is tried and tested by its own creators, which will yield better purpose driven tooling that is generic enough to be useful to others. I used to use Beads for all my Claude Code projects, now I just use GuardRails because it has safety nets and works without git which is what I wanted. I could have forked Beads, but the other thing is Beads is a behemoth of code, it was much easier to start from nothing but a very detailed spec and Claude Code ;)
brandensilva 8mo ago
I totally feel this. Prior I never had time for doing this but now I just do it without even thinking about contributing.
indiekitai 8mo ago
[dead]

axelthegerman 8mo ago

And how great it will be to troubleshoot any issues because everyone is basically running a distinct piece of software

sshine 8mo ago
... made minutes ago.
- krickelkrackel 8mo ago
  So everybody will be using (sometimes slightly, sometimes entirely) different software. Like mutations, these adapt to the specific problems in the situation they were prompted to be programmed.
wrxd 8mo ago
I don’t want to be the one who has to upgrade this software + vibe coded patches. It’s going to be very likely that once something is patched is to be considered as diverged and very hard to upgrade
theshrike79 8mo ago
It's like the dude who monkey-patches their car and goes to the dealer to complain why the suspension is stiff. It's because you put 2by4's in place of the shocks, you absolute muppet. And then they either give them a massive bill to fix it properly or politely show them out. Same will happen in self-modifying software. Some people are self-aware enough to know that "I made this, it's my problem to fix", some will complain to the maker of the harness they used and will be summarily shown the door.

throwaway13337 8mo ago

I see this happening, too. We know that a lack of control over their environment makes animals, including humans, depressed. The software we use has so much of this lack of control. It's their way, their branding, their ads, their app. You're the guest on your own device. It's no wonder everyone hates technology. A world with software that is malleable, personal, and cheap - this could do a lot of good. Real ownership. The nerds could always make a home with their linux desktop. Now everyone can. It'll change the equation. I'm quite optimistic for this future.

hdjrudni 8mo ago
That's just because corporations got greedy and made their apps suck. Strip away the ads, the data harvesting, add back the power features, and we'll be happy again. I'm more willing than ever to pay a one-time fee good software. I've started donating to all the free apps I use on a regular basis. I don't want to own my own slop. That doesn't help me. Use your AI tools to build out the software if you want, but make sure it does a good job. Don't make me fiddle with indeterministic flavor-of-the-month AI gents.
- safety1st 8mo ago
  I think there's room for both visions. Big Tech is generating more toxic sludge than ever, and yeah sure this is because they're greedy, but more precisely the root cause is how they lobbied Washington and our elected officials agreed to all kinds of pro-corporate, anti-human legislation. Like destroying our right to repair, like criminalizing "circumvention" measures in devices we own, like insane life-destroying penalties for copyright infringement, like looking the other way when Big Tech broke anti-trust laws, etc. The Big Tech slop can only be fixed in one way, and actually it's really predictable and will work - we need to fix the laws so that they put the rights and flourishing of human beings first, not the rights and flourishing of Big Tech. We need to fix enforcement because there are so many times that these companies just break the law and they get convicted but they get off with a slap on the wrist. We need to legislate a dismantling of barriers to new entrants in the sectors they dominate. Competition for the consumer dollar is the only thing that can force them to be more honest. They need to see that their customers are leaving for something better, otherwise they'll never improve. But our elected officials have crafted laws and an enforcement system which make 'something better' impossible (or at least highly uneconomical). Parallel to this if open source projects can develop software which is easier for the user to change via a PR, they totally should. We can and should have the best of both worlds. We should have the big companies producing better "boxed" software. Plus we should have more flexibility to build, tweak and run whatever we want.

CuriouslyC 8mo ago

[flagged]

theshrike79 8mo ago
Think of skills more like Excel macros (or any other software with robust macro support). It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to provide the specific workflow you need, but your own sheet needs it.
- navigate8310 8mo ago
  Except "skills" being worked upon by a deterministic model will result in inconsistent results than a heuristic VB macro written for Excel

bandrami 8mo ago

> a living tool that isn't the same as anyone else's copy Yes, which is why this model of development is basically dead-in-the-water in terms of institutional adoption. No large firm or government is going to allow that.

raincole 8mo ago
Large institutions and governments had been pushing back against open source too until it became obviously inevitable.
- bandrami 8mo ago
  It wasn't "inevitable", it took Red Hat and some other key players addressing the concerns the businesses and governments had, which took the better part of a decade. If LLMs as an ecosystem don't implode in the next year or so I imagine you'll start to see some big consultancies starting that same process for them.
  - embedding-shape 8mo ago
    > it took Red Hat and some other key players addressing the concerns the businesses and governments had Red Hat? I don't think they are involved in the moves to FOSS for government agencies, mostly because they're American, and the ones who are currently moving quickly (in the government world at least) are the ones who aren't American and what to get rid of their reliance on American infrastructure and software.
    - bandrami 8mo ago
      Visit Washington DC some time and ride the metro. Red Hat puts out ads about all their public sector offerings.
      - embedding-shape 8mo ago
        > Visit Washington DC some time and ride the metro. Red Hat puts out ads about all their public sector offerings. I haven't had a single need to visit the US, and I still have zero needs for it. If I need to read subway ads to understand how a company is connected to FOSS, I think I'll skip that and continue using and working with companies who make that clear up front :) Thanks for the offer though!

lugao 8mo ago

Why would this new paradigm create interesting tooling? From your description I expect wrose not better tools.

vidarh 8mo ago
Worse it better for you when it meets your needs better. I use a lot of my own software. Most of it is strictly worse both in terms of features and bugs than more intentional, planned projects. The reason I do it is because each of those tools solve my specific pain points in ways that makes my life better. A concrete example: I have a personal dashboard. It was written by Claude in its entirety. I've skimmed the code, but no more than that. I don't review individual changes. It works for me. It pulls in my calendar, my fitbit data, my TODO list, various custom reminders to work around my tendency to procrastinate, it surfaces data from my coding agents, it provides a nice interface for me to browse various documentation I keep to hand, and a lot more. I could write a "proper" dashboard system with cleanly pluggable modules. If I were to write it manually I probably would because I'd want something I could easily dip in and out of working on. But when I've started doing stuff like that in the past I quickly put it aside because it cost more effort than I got out of it. The benefit it provides is low enough that even a team effort would be difficult to make pay off. Now that equation has fundamentally changed. If there's something I don't like, I tell Claude, and a few minutes - or more - later, I reload the dashboard and 90% of the time it's improved. I have no illusions that code is generic enough to be usable for others, and that's fine, because the cost of maintaining it in my time is so low that I have no need to share that burden with others. I think this will change how a lot of software is written. A "dashboard toolkit" for example would still have value to my "project". But for my agent to pull in and use to put together my dashboard faster. A lot of "finished products" will be a lot less valuable because it'll become easier to get exactly what you want by having your agent assemble what is out there, and write what isn't out there from scratch.
- lugao 8mo ago
  To be clear I never said custom vibe coded personal software is bad. But clearly that's not the point from OP. Quoting directly: > you download a skill file that tells a coding agent how to add a feature This is suggesting a my_feature.md would be a way of sharing and improving software in the future, which I think is mostly a bad thing.

redfloatplane 8mo ago

I've been thinking about this lately too. I think we're going to see the rise of Extremely Personal Software, software that barely makes any sense outside of someone's personal context. I think there is going to be _so_ much software written for an audience of 1-10 people in the next year. I've had Claude create so much tooling for me and a small number of others in the last few months. A DnD schedule app; a spoiler-free formula e news checker; a single-use voting site for a climbing co-op; tools to access other tools that I don't like using by hand; just absolutely tons of stuff that would never have made any sense to spend time on before. It's a new world. https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/14-releasing-software-now/ https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/14-releasing-software-now/

boh 8mo ago
I think people overestimate the general population's ability and interest in vibe coding. Open source tools are still a small niche. Vibe code customized apps are an even bigger niche.
- redfloatplane 8mo ago
  Maybe so. I guess I feel that in a couple of years it may not be called vibe coding, or even coding, I think it might be called 'using a computer'. I suppose it's very hard to correctly estimate or reason about such a big change.
- tagami 8mo ago
  even smaller?
- dotancohen 8mo ago
  My entire career has been building niche software for small business and personal use. The current crop of AI tools help get that software into my clients' hands quicker and cheaper. And those reduced timelines mean that the client has less opportunity to change scope and features - that is the real value for me as a developer.

thierrydamiba 8mo ago

I actually look at this another way. I think we’re going to see a lot more open source. Before you had to get your pr merged into main. Now people will just ask ai to build the tool they need and then open source it. Maintainers won’t have to deal with an endless stream of PRs. Now people will just clone your library the second it has traction and make it perfect for their specific use case. Cherry pick the best features and build something perfect for them. They’ll be able to do things your product can’t, and individual users will probably find a better fit in these spinoffs than in the original app.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

rbren 8mo ago

Funny, I just released my dev setup as “Open prompt” https://github.com/rbren/personal-ai-devbox https://github.com/rbren/personal-ai-devbox

GTP 8mo ago

> It's becoming passé to ask for feature requests and even to submit PRs to open source repos. Yet, the first impact on FOSS seems to be quite the opposite: maintainers complaining about PRs and vulnerability disclosures that turn out to be AI hallucinations, wasting their time. It seems to be so bad that now GitHub is offering the possibility of turning off pull requests for repositories. What you present here is an optimistic view, and I would be happy for it to be correct, but what we've seen so far unfortunately seems to point in a different direction.

brandensilva 8mo ago
We might be witnessing some survivor bias here based on our own human conditioning. Successful PRs aren't going to make the news like the bad ones do. With that said, we are all dealing with AI still convincingly writing code that doesn't work despite passing tests or introducing hard to find bugs. It will be some time until we iron that out fully for more reliable output I suspect. Unfortunately we won't be able to stop humans thinking they are software engineers when they are not now that the abstraction language is the human language so guarding from spam will be more important than ever.

davej 8mo ago

Patrick Collison said this yesterday on TBPN, "Software is becoming like pizza […] It should be cooked right then and there at the moment of use"

dTal 8mo ago
Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble? --Alan Perlis

giancarlostoro 8mo ago

> Instead of extensions you install, you download a skill file that tells a coding agent how to add a feature. The software stops being an artifact and starts being a living tool that isn't the same as anyone else's copy. I'm curious to see what tooling will emerge for collaborating with this new paradigm. I build my own inspired by Beads, not quite as you're describing, but I store todo's in a SQLite database (beads used SQLite AND git hooks, I didn't want to be married to git), and I let them sync to and from GitHub Issues, so in theory I can fork a GitHub repo, and have my tool pull down issues from the original repo (havent tried it when its a fork, so that's a new task for the task pile). https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails/issues https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails/issues You can see me dogfeeding my tool to my tools codebase and having my issues on the github for anyone to see, you can see the closed ones. I do think we will see an increase in local dev tooling that is tried and tested by its own creators, which will yield better purpose driven tooling that is generic enough to be useful to others. I used to use Beads for all my Claude Code projects, now I just use GuardRails because it has safety nets and works without git which is what I wanted. I could have forked Beads, but the other thing is Beads is a behemoth of code, it was much easier to start from nothing but a very detailed spec and Claude Code ;)

brandensilva 8mo ago

I totally feel this. Prior I never had time for doing this but now I just do it without even thinking about contributing.

indiekitai 8mo ago

[dead]