Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A desktop made for one

isene.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 281 posts

Re: A desktop made for one

#51

Post by Agingcoder »

redfloatplane wrote: post #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 grea…

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

Re: A desktop made for one

#52

Post by nine_k »

robotresearcher wrote: post #43
nine_k wrote: 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.

Did you miss a factor of 10 in that time-cost calculation? As a hobby, normal rates don’t apply, but just not to be misleading on the equivalent cost.

Indeed, I forgot it. Must be $10-20k worth of human engineering time.

Re: A desktop made for one

#53

Post by cloudhead »

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?

Re: A desktop made for one

#54

Post by sandworm101 »

redfloatplane wrote: post #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 grea…

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.

Re: A desktop made for one

#55

Post by 9dev »

sandworm101 wrote: post #54
redfloatplane wrote: post #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 grea…

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.

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.

Re: A desktop made for one

#56

Post by nananana9 »

swaits wrote: post #18
jgilias wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

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.

Many people care, with good reason. We learned to notice LLM-isms is because they are, in fact, a very strong predictor that a piece of text is in fact garbage that's not worth your time reading.

I usually stop reading at the first LLM-ism, but I found the premise of this post interesting enough to keep going - and guess what, the entire article was literally just "I prompt CC to make software tailored for me" blown out to 8 sections.

Re: A desktop made for one

#57

Post by JHonaker »

geir_isene wrote: post #42
onetom wrote: post #41

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

That would be a huge payload with a few thousand prompts...

Even better!

Re: A desktop made for one

#58

Post by geir_isene »

cloudhead wrote: post #53

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?

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.

Re: A desktop made for one

#60

Post by arjie »

Haha, it's funny that we've all reached the same conclusion. I, too, believe in the same idea[0][1]. What is fascinating to me is how many things can now be elided from software. I don't use configuration files or things like that. I can simply hardcode everything in because there is only one user. If I want to configure it the other way, I just modify it and rebuild it.

The other thing is that other people's applications are rarely useful. Their libraries are, the feature description READMEs are, but the software itself is full of attempts at generality that make them overly annoying for me to use. Instead I have extremely idiosyncratic software - anyone else would find it insufferable.

The wild thing, though, is that my software is outrageously useful for me. I can see why Anthropic and OpenAI are (or shortly will be) the trillion-dollar behemoths they are. They are enabling a personal productivity increase of epic proportions[2]. The highly specific functionality also means strange things performance wise. I don't need to use Electron or Tauri or whatever. Instead, my thing is Rust with objc2 and it starts instantaneously. On my M1 Max, it's the fastest text viewer I can start. 100s of megabytes of JSON and it's launching is imperceptible for my tool, pretty-printing is instantaneous, breadcrumbs are live.

Because I can make it do only the thing I want it to do. It can't do other things. I cannot edit or auto-complete or anything. And this is great. Useless to others and fantastic to me.

Likewise, my blog is on Mediawiki (which I like so anyone can edit) but the authoring flow is kind of annoying. Uploading images causes a break from writing, and requires a lot of form-filling that interrupts my thought. So I now have this software that does everything I want: link autocompletion, background image uploads, post-hoc publishing, previews and diffs, built-in Wikipedia search to interwiki link. Who would want this but me? It only brings me pleasure.

What a revolution in software.

0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-25/The_rise_of_...

1: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-30/Personal_Sof...

2: Predictably, I have chosen to use the spare time on leisure

Post reply on HN