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A desktop made for one

isene.org

21–30 of 281 posts

Re: A desktop made for one

#21

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

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.

Re: A desktop made for one

#22
I (and I'm sure many others) have been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of months. I called it "Extremely Personal Software" in a blog post a few months ago (https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/14-releasing-software-now/) but there are lots of names and concepts floating about for the same basic idea.

I think it's possible the amount of new software that will be written for an audience of 1-10 will be greater in 2026 than in any previous year, and then the same again for many years to come. I also think a lot of this software will be essentially 'hidden' - people just writing this stuff for themselves because the cost to say things to an agent is very low compared with the cost of actually planning out a software design and so forth.

Interoperability will probably be important in the next few years and I wonder if this is something solvable at the agent/LLM level (standing instructions like 'typically, use sqlite, use plaintext, use open standards' or whatever). I also think observability and ops will be pretty important - many people who want personal software but don't care for the maintenance and upkeep.

Re: A desktop made for one

#23
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

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 ;)

Re: A desktop made for one

#24

I (and I'm sure many others) have been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of months. I called it "Extremely Personal Software" in a blog post a few months ago ( https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/14-releasing-software-now/ ) but there are lots of names and concepts floating about for the same basic idea. I think it's possible the amount of new software that will be written for an audience of 1-10 will be grea…

A really good and thoughtful response. Thanks.

Re: A desktop made for one

#25
I've been building an object oriented system re-imagined in a world with LLMs called Abject (https://abject.world) and one thought I had was to build an OS that boots into my project. One way to do it would be a minimal linux distro (think firefox os or similar). Has anyone done something like this with their projects?

Re: A desktop made for one

#26
post #14

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 lo…

Thanks. I'll look into it and borrow whatever is useful there into bolt.

Re: A desktop made for one

#27
post #14

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 lo…

Thanks. I'll look into it and borrow whatever is useful there into bolt.

[deleted]

Re: A desktop made for one

#28
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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]

Re: A desktop made for one

#29

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.

It feels very different. It's all damn instant. Me happy.

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!
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