9 ms·

A desktop made for one

461 points by xngbuilds 5mo ago

thatxliner 5mo ago
Note that Rust is not in fact named after Fe2O3; it’s named after a resilient fungus of the same name
- geir_isene 5mo ago
  Just goes to show how little I know about Rust.
cyberpunk 5mo ago
Some screenies and the code at 0… I struggle to understand why, though. 0: https://github.com/isene/chasm https://github.com/isene/chasm
- thom 5mo 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.
gbgarbeb 5mo ago
Did OP write this by hand? It reads like language written by a human overfitted on GPT 4o or Claude.
- jgilias 5mo 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 5mo 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_isene 5mo ago
      ^^ some anti-luddism right there
      - wiseowise 5mo ago
        Luddism is when you don't bother reading what someone didn't bother to write.
        geir_isene 5mo ago
        Dictionaries on the second row down that aisle.
        gbgarbeb 5mo ago
        Not a good look to be here fighting in the comments when you could have been writing something that reads like anything other than Claudeslop.
        wiseowise 5mo ago
        Is that supposed to mean something?
    - jgilias 5mo ago
      I agree, yeah
    - gbgarbeb 5mo ago
      [flagged]
    - nullsanity 5mo ago
- geir_isene 5mo 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.
  - gbgarbeb 5mo 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.
robotresearcher 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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_isene 5mo ago
  It feels very different. It's all damn instant. Me happy.
  - robotresearcher 5mo 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!
    - chrisweekly 5mo ago
jstanley 5mo 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.
- cultofmetatron 5mo 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_isene 5mo 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.
    - cultofmetatron 5mo ago
      > Less memory footprint. No reliance on libs. 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.
      - geir_isene 5mo ago
        I'm sure I can. The original challenge was more in line of "I wonder if CC can do this now?" And it apparently can. And very well. One advantage seems to be that the complete asm file fits easily into CC context window.
        cultofmetatron 5mo ago
        > The original challenge was more in line of "I wonder if CC can do this now?" well, I can respect that for sure
nine_k 5mo 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-is-greater-than-cost-of-employees/ https://fortune.com/2026/04/28/nvidia-executive-cost-of-ai-i... [2]: https://www.briefs.co/news/uber-torches-entire-2026-ai-budget-on-claude-code-in-four-months/ https://www.briefs.co/news/uber-torches-entire-2026-ai-budge...
- geir_isene 5mo 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_k 5mo 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.
    - geir_isene 5mo ago
      I need Claude Max in any case for my work, so the cost is effectively null. And I do creative stuff in my spare time regardless, and I don't really think about my hourly rate when I play with my kids either ;)
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
    - robotresearcher 5mo ago
vbernat 5mo 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_isene 5mo ago
  Thanks. I'll look into it and borrow whatever is useful there into bolt.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
dadoum 5mo 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_isene 5mo ago
  I like the image. It was simple.
  - gwern 5mo 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.
    - i_think_so 5mo ago
      Come on, bro. Why you gotta be like that? I mean, I'm a gwern fan, but...can't you just let people enjoy things?
      - AlecSchueler 5mo ago
        Consider the cost of generating the image.
      - gwern 5mo ago
        I didn't enjoy it. It flunks my criteria for good AI images, because there is no there there: https://gwern.net/blog/2025/good-ai-samples https://gwern.net/blog/2025/good-ai-samples It wasted my thoughts as I stared at it, trying to learn about the author and 'X uses this' and thinking about how moleskin notebooks related to personal computing etc... only to realize I had been lied to and my time wasted, as he took advantage of my good faith - the good faith I extend to a fellow hacker, that their images will be meaningful and worth reading. Just as their words are presumed to be meaningful and worth reading... but slightly less so every day, I fear.
redfloatplane 5mo 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/ 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_isene 5mo ago
  A really good and thoughtful response. Thanks.
- vessenes 5mo 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.
  - chrisweekly 5mo ago
    "Everting"?
mempko 5mo ago
I've been building an object oriented system re-imagined in a world with LLMs called Abject (https://abject.world 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 5mo ago
So how productive are you now vs. before? I assume this was the reason for doing this?
- zem 5mo ago
  I would think the reason was to enjoy using their system as much as possible.
- sorenjan 5mo ago
  I think it's more like gardening.
vidarh 5mo 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.
- psychoslave 5mo 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 5mo ago
Is this an advertisement for Claude Code? It sure seems like it.
- uncircle 5mo ago
  They all are.
- badgersnake 5mo ago
  If it is, it’s not a good one. I just thought “You moron”.
- yrds96 5mo 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
onetom 5mo 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 https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/2041151967695634619?s=46
- geir_isene 5mo ago
  That would be a huge payload with a few thousand prompts...
  - JHonaker 5mo ago
    Even better!
analogpixel 5mo 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 5mo ago
I use code that hooks into existing programs so that I can customize the existing programs to what I want
nullsanity 5mo ago
[dead]
cloudhead 5mo 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_isene 5mo 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.
  - cloudhead 5mo ago
    Thanks for explaining!
  - ahaferburg 5mo ago
    I think some of these obstacles are documented here. https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode 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-asm/SKILL.md https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/skills/x86_64-... Thank you for sharing!
arjie 5mo 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_personal_software https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-25/The_rise_of_... 1: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-30/Personal_Software_-_JSON_Viewing https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-30/Personal_Sof... 2: Predictably, I have chosen to use the spare time on leisure
- geir_isene 5mo ago
  Cool reply & thanks for the links.
noashavit 5mo 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!
- theshrike79 5mo 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.
beanjuiceII 5mo ago
everyone is finally coming around to emacs way of doing things after all these years :D
Kalabasa 5mo ago
One term for these is "home-cooked" software. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software
- soraminazuki 5mo ago
  "Home" as in "phoning home"? Because Claude Code sure isn't local, privacy-respecting software.
  - theshrike79 5mo 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 5mo 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.
- deepfriedbits 5mo 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 5mo 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).
    - deepfriedbits 5mo ago
      Wait, are you implying I used an LLM to write my comment? Sorry if I'm misreading what you're saying.
    - deepfriedbits 5mo ago
      I wish you would have taken the time to reply and clarify your comment. I've been here for 16 years – my commenting history is readily available. My words and thoughts are my own.
blks 5mo 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 5mo 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.
- senbrow 5mo 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.
  - blks 5mo 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!
    - theshrike79 5mo ago
      You might find it fun to hack. Others don't. Also I don't want to take someone's existing project and change it. They have too much cruft and don't work Just The Way I Like It. That's why we create custom stuff from scratch.
    - senbrow 5mo ago
      It is significant if you don't want to sit at a computer all day just to MAYBE get basic functionality, then find you've backed yourself into a corner because you didn't know some esoteric detail and have to spend another day doing a refactor, etc etc I don't want to sift through docs and man pages and debug cryptic compiler and runtime errors in my spare time. There are far richer things for me to do with my life. I want to use my computer to get my tasks done and be done with it. Slogging through technical details an LLM could crush in minutes is a much better use of my resources.
blks 5mo ago
Also open source tools can be “hacked” to enable features you want.
btbuildem 5mo 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 5mo 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.
wyre 5mo 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_isene 5mo ago
  Hmmm
- techgnosis 5mo ago
  Can't use his Max sub with his own custom agent. No custom agent is worth per-token Opus pricing
  - wyre 5mo 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.
furyofantares 5mo 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.
- paweladamczuk 5mo 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 5mo ago
    You could always just use whisper as a keyboard on the phone: https://github.com/woheller69/whisperIME https://github.com/woheller69/whisperIME
  - protostork 5mo 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/ 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/ https://voiceinput.futo.org/
  - furyofantares 5mo ago
ilaksh 5mo ago
Is there a demo video? An installer or pre built package or ISO?
- geir_isene 5mo ago
  Nope. Probably never will be.
lichenwarp 5mo ago
ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE HAHA HE SAID THE THING
grodes 5mo ago
AI generated blog. Boring…
hum3hum3 5mo 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 5mo 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-topterm https://github.com/nurettin/gnome-extensions-toptop https://github.com/nurettin/gnome-extensions-toptop
paweladamczuk 5mo 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.
- lionkor 5mo ago
  Software made for one, made by LLMs which regurgitate the average of existing tools, are going to have more security issues, not less.
  - theshrike79 5mo 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?
    - lionkor 5mo ago
      Yes, but it should be fairly easy to "simply" attack the common technologies that LLMs keep parroting. NextJS, or some Rust tools, or whatever other tools LLMs "love" using, are all great targets. Once millions of completely unskilled developers have "workflows" that consist of asking an LLM to make a thing, followed by those LLMs pulling in the same 100 (often outdated versions of) dependencies, you have a beautiful attack vector. Yes, it's "easy" to attack something like Obsidian. It's probably easier to attack a couple hundred dependencies LLMs like to use, or to test what LLMs commonly do to implement things from scratch, and attack those weaknesses. We are just lucky that enough real, smart, people engineered things that actually work, are well understood, and keep us safe, like firewalls.
    - i_think_so 5mo ago
      I am imagining some poor sod working for NSA TAO trying to hack a bespoke web microservice stack. He spends dozens of hours slaving away at the keyboard, skipping sleep and eating terrible meals at his desk, desperate to get RCE as quickly as possible, because he needs to traverse all the way to the DB layer and exfil data or his boss will pass him over for his next promotion. At day 9, right as he is getting ready to deploy his beautifully crafted shell code, the clock hits midnight UTC. The website shuts down for maintenance. "This is it" he thinks. "As soon as the backups finish I'm getting in. No problem." Minutes tick by. He gets up, stretches, sits back down, watches the clock impatiently. Then, as he prepares to start refreshing the site he recollects, "I'm glad I begged so hard to get authorization to use this PHP 0day." His partially obscured terminal window has the script ready to launch, all arguments pre-populated, waiting for the link and session token to be pasted in and executed. The site comes back up. But the url of his launch point returns 404. Undaunted, he returns to a previous url. It is also 404. He curses aloud. Beginning to perspire, he goes to the homepage and prepares to navigate back to the launch point. The link isn't there. Well, it's there, but it has changed. "What the....!" The link is no longer a PHP url. He mouses over other links. NO links say PHP anymore. Starting to panic, he clicks on links at random. Not a single one appears to be PHP. The following morning he schedules an urgent meeting with his supervisor. "How's that project coming along. Got anything yet?" "No. I, uh...I'm going to need a bit more time." "Oh?" "Yeah. Uh. The site. It got..." He mutes his microphone and, for the 22nd time since midnight, he screams in frustration. Unmuting, he continues: "It got rewritten. Completely. In Nim." "What??" "Yeah. It's some esoteric language that just got a new web framework. I guess somebody decided they wanted to mess around with it. So they vibe coded a complete translation. The whole front end is nimlang now. None of the PHP attacks are going to work on it." His supervisor expresses his disgust and ends the call. 11 days later the process repeats itself, this time with Rust. The TAO engineer submits an application to change jobs to the DoD's procurement division, then requests an appointment with a mental health counselor.
ximm 5mo 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 5mo 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.
- dimator 5mo 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.
  - theshrike79 5mo ago
Antibabelic 5mo 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 5mo 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.
psychoslave 5mo 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 5mo 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 https://github.com/boxed/TurboKod Not sure I can use it as a daily driver yet, but it would be pretty cool!
voidUpdate 5mo 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...
- po1nt 5mo ago
  We still have crab puns. Then we're screwed
  - a96 5mo ago
    They might start looking at other fungi, but maybe that's for bigger projects.
po1nt 5mo 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 5mo ago
AI slop, pretty sad. Programmers turning into mindless slop feeders.
geir_isene 5mo 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 https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One-Numbers.html
- alchemist1e9 5mo 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 5mo ago
    I fuckin love this. It points toward the parts of "reduce, reuse, recycle" that capitalism has demonstrated no interest in serving
  - vidarh 5mo 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...
lionkor 5mo 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 https://github.com/isene/chasm
- lpcvoid 5mo ago
  I agree. I have no idea why this story is upvoted. Hacker culture is truely dead, it's all slop now.
abrookewood 5mo 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 https://github.com/isene/chasm
overfeed 5mo 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 5mo ago
  AGI or bust
Havoc 5mo 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
- theshrike79 5mo ago
  I like the simonw tools approach: https://tools.simonwillison.net/ 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 5mo 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 5mo 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_so 5mo ago
  Asking the real questions right here. ^ "Computer. Run program Riker omega six." <things happen>
ks2048 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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.
ekjhgkejhgk 5mo 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_isene 5mo ago
CHasm: https://isene.org/chasm/ https://isene.org/chasm/ Fe2O3: https://isene.org/fe2o3/ https://isene.org/fe2o3/
denniszelada 5mo ago
[flagged]
tmzt 5mo 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).
abhishekhsingh 5mo ago
[flagged]
YorkiRima 5mo ago
[dead]
KrisDavidson11 5mo ago
[flagged]

461 points by xngbuilds 5mo ago

thatxliner 5mo ago

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

geir_isene 5mo ago
Just goes to show how little I know about Rust.

cyberpunk 5mo ago

Some screenies and the code at 0… I struggle to understand why, though. 0: https://github.com/isene/chasm https://github.com/isene/chasm

thom 5mo 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.

gbgarbeb 5mo ago

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

jgilias 5mo 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 5mo 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_isene 5mo ago
    ^^ some anti-luddism right there
    - wiseowise 5mo ago
      Luddism is when you don't bother reading what someone didn't bother to write.
      - geir_isene 5mo ago
        Dictionaries on the second row down that aisle.
        gbgarbeb 5mo ago
        Not a good look to be here fighting in the comments when you could have been writing something that reads like anything other than Claudeslop.
        wiseowise 5mo ago
        Is that supposed to mean something?
  - jgilias 5mo ago
    I agree, yeah
  - gbgarbeb 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  - nullsanity 5mo ago
geir_isene 5mo 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.
- gbgarbeb 5mo 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.

robotresearcher 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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_isene 5mo ago
It feels very different. It's all damn instant. Me happy.
- robotresearcher 5mo 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!
  - chrisweekly 5mo ago

jstanley 5mo 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.

cultofmetatron 5mo 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_isene 5mo 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.
  - cultofmetatron 5mo ago
    > Less memory footprint. No reliance on libs. 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.
    - geir_isene 5mo ago
      I'm sure I can. The original challenge was more in line of "I wonder if CC can do this now?" And it apparently can. And very well. One advantage seems to be that the complete asm file fits easily into CC context window.
      - cultofmetatron 5mo ago
        > The original challenge was more in line of "I wonder if CC can do this now?" well, I can respect that for sure

nine_k 5mo 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-is-greater-than-cost-of-employees/ https://fortune.com/2026/04/28/nvidia-executive-cost-of-ai-i... [2]: https://www.briefs.co/news/uber-torches-entire-2026-ai-budget-on-claude-code-in-four-months/ https://www.briefs.co/news/uber-torches-entire-2026-ai-budge...

geir_isene 5mo 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_k 5mo 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.
  - geir_isene 5mo ago
    I need Claude Max in any case for my work, so the cost is effectively null. And I do creative stuff in my spare time regardless, and I don't really think about my hourly rate when I play with my kids either ;)
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - robotresearcher 5mo ago

vbernat 5mo 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_isene 5mo ago
Thanks. I'll look into it and borrow whatever is useful there into bolt.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]

dadoum 5mo 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_isene 5mo ago
I like the image. It was simple.
- gwern 5mo 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.
  - i_think_so 5mo ago
    Come on, bro. Why you gotta be like that? I mean, I'm a gwern fan, but...can't you just let people enjoy things?
    - AlecSchueler 5mo ago
      Consider the cost of generating the image.
    - gwern 5mo ago
      I didn't enjoy it. It flunks my criteria for good AI images, because there is no there there: https://gwern.net/blog/2025/good-ai-samples https://gwern.net/blog/2025/good-ai-samples It wasted my thoughts as I stared at it, trying to learn about the author and 'X uses this' and thinking about how moleskin notebooks related to personal computing etc... only to realize I had been lied to and my time wasted, as he took advantage of my good faith - the good faith I extend to a fellow hacker, that their images will be meaningful and worth reading. Just as their words are presumed to be meaningful and worth reading... but slightly less so every day, I fear.

redfloatplane 5mo 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/ 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_isene 5mo ago
A really good and thoughtful response. Thanks.
vessenes 5mo 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.
- chrisweekly 5mo ago
  "Everting"?

mempko 5mo ago

I've been building an object oriented system re-imagined in a world with LLMs called Abject (https://abject.world 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 5mo ago

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

zem 5mo ago
I would think the reason was to enjoy using their system as much as possible.
sorenjan 5mo ago
I think it's more like gardening.

vidarh 5mo 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.

psychoslave 5mo 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 5mo ago

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

uncircle 5mo ago
They all are.
badgersnake 5mo ago
If it is, it’s not a good one. I just thought “You moron”.
yrds96 5mo 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

onetom 5mo 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 https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/2041151967695634619?s=46

geir_isene 5mo ago
That would be a huge payload with a few thousand prompts...
- JHonaker 5mo ago
  Even better!

analogpixel 5mo 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 5mo ago

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

nullsanity 5mo ago

[dead]

cloudhead 5mo 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_isene 5mo 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.
- cloudhead 5mo ago
  Thanks for explaining!
- ahaferburg 5mo ago
  I think some of these obstacles are documented here. https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode 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-asm/SKILL.md https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/skills/x86_64-... Thank you for sharing!

arjie 5mo 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_personal_software https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-25/The_rise_of_... 1: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-30/Personal_Software_-_JSON_Viewing https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-30/Personal_Sof... 2: Predictably, I have chosen to use the spare time on leisure

geir_isene 5mo ago
Cool reply & thanks for the links.

noashavit 5mo 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!

theshrike79 5mo 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.

beanjuiceII 5mo ago

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

Kalabasa 5mo ago

One term for these is "home-cooked" software. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

soraminazuki 5mo ago
"Home" as in "phoning home"? Because Claude Code sure isn't local, privacy-respecting software.
- theshrike79 5mo 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 5mo 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.

deepfriedbits 5mo 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 5mo 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).
  - deepfriedbits 5mo ago
    Wait, are you implying I used an LLM to write my comment? Sorry if I'm misreading what you're saying.
  - deepfriedbits 5mo ago
    I wish you would have taken the time to reply and clarify your comment. I've been here for 16 years – my commenting history is readily available. My words and thoughts are my own.

blks 5mo 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 5mo 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.
senbrow 5mo 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.
- blks 5mo 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!
  - theshrike79 5mo ago
    You might find it fun to hack. Others don't. Also I don't want to take someone's existing project and change it. They have too much cruft and don't work Just The Way I Like It. That's why we create custom stuff from scratch.
  - senbrow 5mo ago
    It is significant if you don't want to sit at a computer all day just to MAYBE get basic functionality, then find you've backed yourself into a corner because you didn't know some esoteric detail and have to spend another day doing a refactor, etc etc I don't want to sift through docs and man pages and debug cryptic compiler and runtime errors in my spare time. There are far richer things for me to do with my life. I want to use my computer to get my tasks done and be done with it. Slogging through technical details an LLM could crush in minutes is a much better use of my resources.

blks 5mo ago

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

btbuildem 5mo 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 5mo 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.

wyre 5mo 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_isene 5mo ago
Hmmm
techgnosis 5mo ago
Can't use his Max sub with his own custom agent. No custom agent is worth per-token Opus pricing
- wyre 5mo 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.

furyofantares 5mo 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.

paweladamczuk 5mo 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 5mo ago
  You could always just use whisper as a keyboard on the phone: https://github.com/woheller69/whisperIME https://github.com/woheller69/whisperIME
- protostork 5mo 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/ 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/ https://voiceinput.futo.org/
- furyofantares 5mo ago

ilaksh 5mo ago

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

geir_isene 5mo ago
Nope. Probably never will be.

lichenwarp 5mo ago

ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE HAHA HE SAID THE THING

grodes 5mo ago

AI generated blog. Boring…

hum3hum3 5mo 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 5mo 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-topterm https://github.com/nurettin/gnome-extensions-toptop https://github.com/nurettin/gnome-extensions-toptop

paweladamczuk 5mo 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.

lionkor 5mo ago
Software made for one, made by LLMs which regurgitate the average of existing tools, are going to have more security issues, not less.
- theshrike79 5mo 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?
  - lionkor 5mo ago
    Yes, but it should be fairly easy to "simply" attack the common technologies that LLMs keep parroting. NextJS, or some Rust tools, or whatever other tools LLMs "love" using, are all great targets. Once millions of completely unskilled developers have "workflows" that consist of asking an LLM to make a thing, followed by those LLMs pulling in the same 100 (often outdated versions of) dependencies, you have a beautiful attack vector. Yes, it's "easy" to attack something like Obsidian. It's probably easier to attack a couple hundred dependencies LLMs like to use, or to test what LLMs commonly do to implement things from scratch, and attack those weaknesses. We are just lucky that enough real, smart, people engineered things that actually work, are well understood, and keep us safe, like firewalls.
  - i_think_so 5mo ago
    I am imagining some poor sod working for NSA TAO trying to hack a bespoke web microservice stack. He spends dozens of hours slaving away at the keyboard, skipping sleep and eating terrible meals at his desk, desperate to get RCE as quickly as possible, because he needs to traverse all the way to the DB layer and exfil data or his boss will pass him over for his next promotion. At day 9, right as he is getting ready to deploy his beautifully crafted shell code, the clock hits midnight UTC. The website shuts down for maintenance. "This is it" he thinks. "As soon as the backups finish I'm getting in. No problem." Minutes tick by. He gets up, stretches, sits back down, watches the clock impatiently. Then, as he prepares to start refreshing the site he recollects, "I'm glad I begged so hard to get authorization to use this PHP 0day." His partially obscured terminal window has the script ready to launch, all arguments pre-populated, waiting for the link and session token to be pasted in and executed. The site comes back up. But the url of his launch point returns 404. Undaunted, he returns to a previous url. It is also 404. He curses aloud. Beginning to perspire, he goes to the homepage and prepares to navigate back to the launch point. The link isn't there. Well, it's there, but it has changed. "What the....!" The link is no longer a PHP url. He mouses over other links. NO links say PHP anymore. Starting to panic, he clicks on links at random. Not a single one appears to be PHP. The following morning he schedules an urgent meeting with his supervisor. "How's that project coming along. Got anything yet?" "No. I, uh...I'm going to need a bit more time." "Oh?" "Yeah. Uh. The site. It got..." He mutes his microphone and, for the 22nd time since midnight, he screams in frustration. Unmuting, he continues: "It got rewritten. Completely. In Nim." "What??" "Yeah. It's some esoteric language that just got a new web framework. I guess somebody decided they wanted to mess around with it. So they vibe coded a complete translation. The whole front end is nimlang now. None of the PHP attacks are going to work on it." His supervisor expresses his disgust and ends the call. 11 days later the process repeats itself, this time with Rust. The TAO engineer submits an application to change jobs to the DoD's procurement division, then requests an appointment with a mental health counselor.

ximm 5mo 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 5mo 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.

dimator 5mo 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.
- theshrike79 5mo ago

Antibabelic 5mo 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 5mo 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.

psychoslave 5mo 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 5mo 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 https://github.com/boxed/TurboKod Not sure I can use it as a daily driver yet, but it would be pretty cool!

voidUpdate 5mo 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...

po1nt 5mo ago
We still have crab puns. Then we're screwed
- a96 5mo ago
  They might start looking at other fungi, but maybe that's for bigger projects.

po1nt 5mo 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 5mo ago

AI slop, pretty sad. Programmers turning into mindless slop feeders.

geir_isene 5mo 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 https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One-Numbers.html

alchemist1e9 5mo 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 5mo ago
  I fuckin love this. It points toward the parts of "reduce, reuse, recycle" that capitalism has demonstrated no interest in serving
- vidarh 5mo 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...

lionkor 5mo 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 https://github.com/isene/chasm

lpcvoid 5mo ago
I agree. I have no idea why this story is upvoted. Hacker culture is truely dead, it's all slop now.

abrookewood 5mo 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 https://github.com/isene/chasm

overfeed 5mo 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 5mo ago
AGI or bust

Havoc 5mo 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

theshrike79 5mo ago
I like the simonw tools approach: https://tools.simonwillison.net/ 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 5mo 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 5mo 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_so 5mo ago
Asking the real questions right here. ^ "Computer. Run program Riker omega six." <things happen>

ks2048 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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.

ekjhgkejhgk 5mo 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_isene 5mo ago

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

denniszelada 5mo ago

[flagged]

tmzt 5mo 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).

abhishekhsingh 5mo ago

[flagged]

YorkiRima 5mo ago

[dead]

KrisDavidson11 5mo ago

[flagged]