A desktop made for one • Hacker News Board

Re: A desktop made for one

#131

Post by josephg » Mon, May 04, 2026, 5:32 AM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #125

vessenes wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

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.

Re: A desktop made for one

#132

Post by paweladamczuk » Mon, May 04, 2026, 5:34 AM UTC

furyofantares wrote: post #107

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 bu…

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.

Re: A desktop made for one

#133

Post by paweladamczuk » Mon, May 04, 2026, 5:40 AM UTC

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.

Re: A desktop made for one

#134

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Mon, May 04, 2026, 5:41 AM UTC

paweladamczuk wrote: post #132

furyofantares wrote: post #107

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 bu…

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.

You could always just use whisper as a keyboard on the phone: https://github.com/woheller69/whisperIME

Re: A desktop made for one

#135

Post by ximm » Mon, May 04, 2026, 5:50 AM UTC

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.

Re: A desktop made for one

#136

Post by dllu » Mon, May 04, 2026, 5:51 AM UTC

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 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-...

Re: A desktop made for one

#137

Post by blharr » Mon, May 04, 2026, 6:07 AM UTC

tonyarkles wrote: post #67

jpease wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

But the exploits can use AI custom tools too. "Script Kiddie" is just now "Prompt Kiddie"

Although everyone might use their own flavor of "database" or "REST API", I can't imagine every layout to be unique enough to not have similar exploit classes entirely. AI isn't known for being super original after all...

Re: A desktop made for one

#138

Post by aorth » Mon, May 04, 2026, 6:10 AM UTC

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.

Re: A desktop made for one

#139

Post by Antibabelic » Mon, May 04, 2026, 6:13 AM UTC

> 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.

Re: A desktop made for one

#140

Post by ramon156 » Mon, May 04, 2026, 6:21 AM UTC

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.