4 ms·

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

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"?
  - setopt 5mo ago
    I had to check it up too. Appears to be a synonym for "inverting" used in some fields like biology and medicine.
  - vessenes 5mo ago
    I learned it in the math context - a sphere eversion is a 3 dimensional process that ends with the inside of the sphere becoming the outside.
- blks 5mo ago
  > We're headed into a period where you can shape your tools exactly as you like the What period were we for the past 50 years?
  - vessenes 5mo ago
    Since roughly 1995 or so we've been in a world where quality tooling was provided by on the order of 1,000s of developers, mostly open source. GNU, Xorg, Apache, emacs, nginx, and so on. Or you could opt in to the Microsoft ecosystem. The ~20 years prior to that we were in a world where you chose to align with either Microsoft's tooling, IBM, or shops providing Unix tooling from proprietary vendors. I elide a nearly infinite amount of detail, obviously. What's new now is that you can get your own window manager written to spec in under a week, perhaps much more quickly, not just choose one of a few major window managers and configure it in accordance with the chosen configuration options delivered by the large developer team.
    - skydhash 5mo ago
      The reason I don’t bother writing code this days is because my use cases have been solved, and if they weren’t, I’d tweak the most suitable candidate. One of my principles is to keep my workload small. More often than not, things starts with a small script or plugin, and then grow according to my needs. Why replicate what others have already done?
      - josephg 5mo ago
        Because its fun. And because your experience using a tool is fundamentally different if you made it yourself, compared to if its something someone else made for you. I don't think I can explain the difference, but it feels really different. Even if you used claude.
        blks 5mo ago
        It never felt fun for me to write software fully with LLMs. It feels disorientating, it produces a lot of code that you have no familiarity with and no authorship. It feels like you’re a teenager again, copy pasting code from internet or journal and hoping it will work.
Agingcoder 5mo ago
Agreed I’ve already started writing software for myself using Claude. I would never have done this if it weren’t for AI - I simply don’t have the time otherwise . I now have tailor made apps with all kinds of bells and whistles that commercial products can’t offer easily ( I fall under non commercial usage which opens a lot of doors ), and that free software might offer, but later. I have also learnt a lot technically in the process, since I’ve been able to venture into what was for me unknown territory but at controlled cost I plan to create more such apps in the future. What is certain though is that my cooking app has immediately displaced all the others on the market , because none of the others cater to my requirements. The production side is indeed of specific interest - most users don’t run production software so I had to think about that one. Tailscale and Cloudflare came in quite handy and there is indeed a market here
- nz 5mo ago
  I don't know how to tell you this, but people have been writing custom software for personal use for decades. I've been doing it since at least 2009! I find it hard to believe that there is a demographic of people that were yearning to write code, but simply could not because they lacked LLMs. Is it the price? Are people simply too cheap to buy books? Or have they simply "forgotten" how to patiently and thoughtfully read them? Or has the quality of tutorials/documentation of languages/libraries/framework online decayed in the last decade? Or is it really that people have struggled to type characters of code into their text editors[1]? Basically, I am prepared to accept that there is a friction that LLMs lubricate away, but what is the source of the friction, and why am I (and a bunch of other colleagues) not feeling that friction daily in our practice? [1]: And if so, where did we programmers and computer scientists go wrong? Were subroutines and macros not sufficient for automating all of that excess typing? Were Emacs and Vim simply not saving enough keystrokes? Did people forget how to touch-type?
  - taude 5mo ago
    Not speaking for the OP. But my biggest constraint is time. Now with agentic coding, I can work in 5 to 15 minute bursts a few times/day, and make meaningful progress on projects, where as before I would have never been able to context shift from my day job long enough on a personal project.
sandworm101 5mo ago
I shudder to think about the security implications of everyone rolling thier own software. I trust my OS/browser/file system is secure because thousands of people are invovled in a complex network of interests in keeping it secure, from the kid contributing his first bit of code to the PHds at NSA writing encryption standards. The idea that any one person can replace that network is laughable.
- 9dev 5mo ago
  That seems like a naive view to me. Most modern software development is gluing vendor code and libraries into a CRUD app, and I don't see why that would change with agents doing the majority of programming. If anything, there's an even bigger market for solid libraries and interoperability, plugging things together like LEGO - only for real this time.
- jpease 5mo ago
  Just to be contrarian, perhaps some measure of risk is reduced by the scale of one. Identifying a vulnerability that can be exploited against many thousands or millions of targets is perhaps more attractive than a single one of individually low value. This of course would assume that vulnerabilities are in fact unique (which is admittedly questionable).
  - tonyarkles 5mo ago
    I had the exact same thought. Pretty low probability that there's going to be a script-kiddie exploit for your custom tools. Pretty decent probability that there will be vulnerabilities present if someone cares enough to target you.
    - girvo 5mo ago
      The counterpoint to that is that the exact same tools that are allowing this personal software creation at massive scale are also excellent at black box vulnerability analysis…
    - iugtmkbdfil834 5mo ago
theturtletalks 5mo ago
[dead]
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
quietthrow 5mo ago
This. I have written so much software recently to make my computer my own. It’s been so much fun to be able to borrow the the ideas from different tools I have used (eg vim modal behaviours etc ) and also bring them together with some completely novel ideas to produce tools for myself that are one of a kind and that “fits me like a glove“ Too bad this is all on the work computer and need to bring it to my personal one but can’t copy paste lol. It’s been thrilling building g and using them and the time from an ideating a small enhancement/ optimization to actually using it is like 5 to 15 minutes away. Soo cool.
dannyfritz07 5mo ago
Reminds me of this blog post and conference presentation on home cooked software by Maggie Appleton. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software
- redfloatplane 5mo ago
  Great post, thanks for sharing. Evidently I am far behind the real thinkers! The Robin Sloan post mentioned is also very good.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
jachauhan 5mo ago
[flagged]
stateofinquiry 5mo ago
Interesting points. With the extreme cheapening of the cost (time/skill) for software production, we can have "Extremely Personal Software", as you mention and as demonstrated by the source. I wonder if we will reach a stage where "software" is written by a computer for an audience of 1 and for a single task, to be run once only- via an interface that works for all tasks. The very concept of software as something that users have to learn to use (memorizing keybindings, for example), might go the way of the punch card. More like Star Trek, we would just ask "computer" to do things, and its machinations (and "software") will be invisible to us. We would just have output to deal with. I think this would mean a lot of things. I'm sure I can't fathom all of the implications, but it sure makes me feel old! Interesting times ahead.
- theshrike79 5mo ago
  More likely we'll have a library of skeletons for single task software, where the LLM can fill in the blanks as needed. Maybe it saves the script locally (invisible to the user) and reuses it if the user repeats the same request, the script is deleted if it's not needed for X amount of time.
- criddell 5mo ago
  LLMs seem to be great for speeding up the creation of things that aren't all that hard to write in the first place. They don't seem to be helping much with difficult tasks. Text editor? Easy. That used to be a rite of passage. Lots of people have written their own basic text editor. 3d solid modeler? It's always been difficult and AI coders aren't (yet?) up to the task. Most open source CAD projects that show up here are layers on top of OCCT (Open Cascade) which is pretty far behind what commercial geometry kernels are capable of.
dllu 5mo ago
I vibe coded an image viewer for myself to address a big pain point that had been annoying me for years. [1] [1] https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2025-10-22-sriv-simple-rust-image-viewer/ https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2025-10-22-sriv-simple-rust-...
paulhallett 5mo ago
I agree. I’ve noticed this phenomenon too as I’ve been building more and more tools for myself, and I’ve started calling it hyper personal software: https://paulwrites.software/articles/hyps/ https://paulwrites.software/articles/hyps/
utopiah 5mo ago
I called it "software". It's so strange to me that since the 1960s with BASIC then later on dozens of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_programming_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_programmin... including Logo by Feurzeig/Papert/Solomon there is effort to precisely help beginners program software. The effort was not to onboard future professional software developers but rather to make the personal in personal computer, or PC, meaningful. It's YOUR computer, you can put YOUR software on it. In fact even pocket calculator do that. We keep on re-discovering the foundations.
- Ygg2 5mo ago
  > It's YOUR computer, you can put YOUR software on it. In fact even pocket calculator do that. I'm pretty sure this exists. It's called OSS or, more ubiquitously, Linux. The problem is, of course, no one wants to publish software for your PC/handmade OS. Which makes it a huge problem. You can't write every piece of your OS, without wasting huge amount of time. Nor do people generally want this.
  - utopiah 5mo ago
    OSS/Linux is "our" software. It's made by us for us (or others if you don't contribute). Your software can be made by you, for you. It can be open source/free software if you want. Others can contribute to it, if you want but it can be open source without accepting external contributions also. My point was to highlight that having software made by you for your machine is not new. Arguably the way to do so changed but I would say the principle remains.
    - zx8080 5mo ago
      > OSS/Linux is "our" software. It's made by us for us If by "us" you mean big bucks corporations, then yes: ~80% is big corporations [0]. Unfortunately, it does not look like it's a personal OS. And we badly need the personal platform with the personal OS. 0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/za564c/is_it_true_that_huawei_and_google_are_among_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/za564c/is_i...
pamcake 5mo ago
I think I agree. But at the same time we have strength in numbers and people will find something close to what they want and fork off that. So I think the same thesis holds for audiences of 10-100 and 100-1000. A cambrian explosion of software.
trymamboapp 5mo ago
[dead]
jdright 5mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46334206#46376113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46334206#46376113
konschubert 5mo ago
I built an optimisation for charging my car. It’s very smart, looks multiple days ahead in weather and prices and predicts my driving habits. I tried to make it a product, but I didn’t find much interest. Maybe I’m just bad at marketing. With the help of Claude, it cost me years of experience and few weekends to build. So even if nobody other than me ever profits from it, it was still worth it!

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"?
- setopt 5mo ago
  I had to check it up too. Appears to be a synonym for "inverting" used in some fields like biology and medicine.
- vessenes 5mo ago
  I learned it in the math context - a sphere eversion is a 3 dimensional process that ends with the inside of the sphere becoming the outside.
blks 5mo ago
> We're headed into a period where you can shape your tools exactly as you like the What period were we for the past 50 years?
- vessenes 5mo ago
  Since roughly 1995 or so we've been in a world where quality tooling was provided by on the order of 1,000s of developers, mostly open source. GNU, Xorg, Apache, emacs, nginx, and so on. Or you could opt in to the Microsoft ecosystem. The ~20 years prior to that we were in a world where you chose to align with either Microsoft's tooling, IBM, or shops providing Unix tooling from proprietary vendors. I elide a nearly infinite amount of detail, obviously. What's new now is that you can get your own window manager written to spec in under a week, perhaps much more quickly, not just choose one of a few major window managers and configure it in accordance with the chosen configuration options delivered by the large developer team.
  - skydhash 5mo ago
    The reason I don’t bother writing code this days is because my use cases have been solved, and if they weren’t, I’d tweak the most suitable candidate. One of my principles is to keep my workload small. More often than not, things starts with a small script or plugin, and then grow according to my needs. Why replicate what others have already done?
    - josephg 5mo ago
      Because its fun. And because your experience using a tool is fundamentally different if you made it yourself, compared to if its something someone else made for you. I don't think I can explain the difference, but it feels really different. Even if you used claude.
      - blks 5mo ago
        It never felt fun for me to write software fully with LLMs. It feels disorientating, it produces a lot of code that you have no familiarity with and no authorship. It feels like you’re a teenager again, copy pasting code from internet or journal and hoping it will work.

Agingcoder 5mo ago

Agreed I’ve already started writing software for myself using Claude. I would never have done this if it weren’t for AI - I simply don’t have the time otherwise . I now have tailor made apps with all kinds of bells and whistles that commercial products can’t offer easily ( I fall under non commercial usage which opens a lot of doors ), and that free software might offer, but later. I have also learnt a lot technically in the process, since I’ve been able to venture into what was for me unknown territory but at controlled cost I plan to create more such apps in the future. What is certain though is that my cooking app has immediately displaced all the others on the market , because none of the others cater to my requirements. The production side is indeed of specific interest - most users don’t run production software so I had to think about that one. Tailscale and Cloudflare came in quite handy and there is indeed a market here

nz 5mo ago
I don't know how to tell you this, but people have been writing custom software for personal use for decades. I've been doing it since at least 2009! I find it hard to believe that there is a demographic of people that were yearning to write code, but simply could not because they lacked LLMs. Is it the price? Are people simply too cheap to buy books? Or have they simply "forgotten" how to patiently and thoughtfully read them? Or has the quality of tutorials/documentation of languages/libraries/framework online decayed in the last decade? Or is it really that people have struggled to type characters of code into their text editors[1]? Basically, I am prepared to accept that there is a friction that LLMs lubricate away, but what is the source of the friction, and why am I (and a bunch of other colleagues) not feeling that friction daily in our practice? [1]: And if so, where did we programmers and computer scientists go wrong? Were subroutines and macros not sufficient for automating all of that excess typing? Were Emacs and Vim simply not saving enough keystrokes? Did people forget how to touch-type?
- taude 5mo ago
  Not speaking for the OP. But my biggest constraint is time. Now with agentic coding, I can work in 5 to 15 minute bursts a few times/day, and make meaningful progress on projects, where as before I would have never been able to context shift from my day job long enough on a personal project.

sandworm101 5mo ago

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

9dev 5mo ago
That seems like a naive view to me. Most modern software development is gluing vendor code and libraries into a CRUD app, and I don't see why that would change with agents doing the majority of programming. If anything, there's an even bigger market for solid libraries and interoperability, plugging things together like LEGO - only for real this time.
jpease 5mo ago
Just to be contrarian, perhaps some measure of risk is reduced by the scale of one. Identifying a vulnerability that can be exploited against many thousands or millions of targets is perhaps more attractive than a single one of individually low value. This of course would assume that vulnerabilities are in fact unique (which is admittedly questionable).
- tonyarkles 5mo ago
  I had the exact same thought. Pretty low probability that there's going to be a script-kiddie exploit for your custom tools. Pretty decent probability that there will be vulnerabilities present if someone cares enough to target you.
  - girvo 5mo ago
    The counterpoint to that is that the exact same tools that are allowing this personal software creation at massive scale are also excellent at black box vulnerability analysis…
  - iugtmkbdfil834 5mo ago

theturtletalks 5mo ago

[dead]

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

quietthrow 5mo ago

This. I have written so much software recently to make my computer my own. It’s been so much fun to be able to borrow the the ideas from different tools I have used (eg vim modal behaviours etc ) and also bring them together with some completely novel ideas to produce tools for myself that are one of a kind and that “fits me like a glove“ Too bad this is all on the work computer and need to bring it to my personal one but can’t copy paste lol. It’s been thrilling building g and using them and the time from an ideating a small enhancement/ optimization to actually using it is like 5 to 15 minutes away. Soo cool.

dannyfritz07 5mo ago

Reminds me of this blog post and conference presentation on home cooked software by Maggie Appleton. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

redfloatplane 5mo ago
Great post, thanks for sharing. Evidently I am far behind the real thinkers! The Robin Sloan post mentioned is also very good.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

jachauhan 5mo ago

[flagged]

stateofinquiry 5mo ago

Interesting points. With the extreme cheapening of the cost (time/skill) for software production, we can have "Extremely Personal Software", as you mention and as demonstrated by the source. I wonder if we will reach a stage where "software" is written by a computer for an audience of 1 and for a single task, to be run once only- via an interface that works for all tasks. The very concept of software as something that users have to learn to use (memorizing keybindings, for example), might go the way of the punch card. More like Star Trek, we would just ask "computer" to do things, and its machinations (and "software") will be invisible to us. We would just have output to deal with. I think this would mean a lot of things. I'm sure I can't fathom all of the implications, but it sure makes me feel old! Interesting times ahead.

theshrike79 5mo ago
More likely we'll have a library of skeletons for single task software, where the LLM can fill in the blanks as needed. Maybe it saves the script locally (invisible to the user) and reuses it if the user repeats the same request, the script is deleted if it's not needed for X amount of time.
criddell 5mo ago
LLMs seem to be great for speeding up the creation of things that aren't all that hard to write in the first place. They don't seem to be helping much with difficult tasks. Text editor? Easy. That used to be a rite of passage. Lots of people have written their own basic text editor. 3d solid modeler? It's always been difficult and AI coders aren't (yet?) up to the task. Most open source CAD projects that show up here are layers on top of OCCT (Open Cascade) which is pretty far behind what commercial geometry kernels are capable of.

dllu 5mo ago

I vibe coded an image viewer for myself to address a big pain point that had been annoying me for years. [1] [1] https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2025-10-22-sriv-simple-rust-image-viewer/ https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2025-10-22-sriv-simple-rust-...

paulhallett 5mo ago

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

utopiah 5mo ago

I called it "software". It's so strange to me that since the 1960s with BASIC then later on dozens of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_programming_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_programmin... including Logo by Feurzeig/Papert/Solomon there is effort to precisely help beginners program software. The effort was not to onboard future professional software developers but rather to make the personal in personal computer, or PC, meaningful. It's YOUR computer, you can put YOUR software on it. In fact even pocket calculator do that. We keep on re-discovering the foundations.

Ygg2 5mo ago
> It's YOUR computer, you can put YOUR software on it. In fact even pocket calculator do that. I'm pretty sure this exists. It's called OSS or, more ubiquitously, Linux. The problem is, of course, no one wants to publish software for your PC/handmade OS. Which makes it a huge problem. You can't write every piece of your OS, without wasting huge amount of time. Nor do people generally want this.
- utopiah 5mo ago
  OSS/Linux is "our" software. It's made by us for us (or others if you don't contribute). Your software can be made by you, for you. It can be open source/free software if you want. Others can contribute to it, if you want but it can be open source without accepting external contributions also. My point was to highlight that having software made by you for your machine is not new. Arguably the way to do so changed but I would say the principle remains.
  - zx8080 5mo ago
    > OSS/Linux is "our" software. It's made by us for us If by "us" you mean big bucks corporations, then yes: ~80% is big corporations [0]. Unfortunately, it does not look like it's a personal OS. And we badly need the personal platform with the personal OS. 0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/za564c/is_it_true_that_huawei_and_google_are_among_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/za564c/is_i...

pamcake 5mo ago

I think I agree. But at the same time we have strength in numbers and people will find something close to what they want and fork off that. So I think the same thesis holds for audiences of 10-100 and 100-1000. A cambrian explosion of software.

trymamboapp 5mo ago

[dead]

jdright 5mo ago

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

konschubert 5mo ago

I built an optimisation for charging my car. It’s very smart, looks multiple days ahead in weather and prices and predicts my driving habits. I tried to make it a product, but I didn’t find much interest. Maybe I’m just bad at marketing. With the help of Claude, it cost me years of experience and few weekends to build. So even if nobody other than me ever profits from it, it was still worth it!