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A desktop made for one

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Re: A desktop made for one

#141

Post by prplxd_nihilist »

mrob wrote: post #85
nz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I still vaguely remember how difficult man pages were to understand when I first started reading them. I'm pretty sure the biggest obstacle is the fact that most documentation is written for people who already know the standard computer science terminology. I have a generally negative opinion of LLMs, but one thing they do very well is function as a "reverse dictionary". You can input a idiosyncratic description of s…

This is the best use case of LLMs, the one I use it the most for.

Re: A desktop made for one

#142

Post by paulhallett »

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 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/

Re: A desktop made for one

#143

Post by geir_isene »

topaz0 wrote: post #75
geir_isene wrote: post #15

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…

Do you know how much it would have been at API prices?

No idea. Probably quite expensive. I usually run 4-5 concurrent CC sessions, so hard to pinpoint for just CHasm and Fe2O3

Re: A desktop made for one

#144

Post by redfloatplane »

dannyfritz07 wrote: post #87
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…

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

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

Re: A desktop made for one

#145

Post by geir_isene »

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…

I do the same also

Re: A desktop made for one

#147

Post by dimator »

aorth wrote: post #138

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…

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.

Re: A desktop made for one

#148

Post by boesboes »

topaz0 wrote: post #75
geir_isene wrote: post #15

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…

Do you know how much it would have been at API prices?

Can't speak for their usage, but I calculated my token use with Copilot, my employer paid 22$ for >2000$ in tokens. Given estimates margins, Github is paying 98-99% of the costs for us. I imagine Claude max etc is similar. So it's not sustainable at all

Re: A desktop made for one

#149

Post by protostork »

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.

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/

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/

Re: A desktop made for one

#150

Post by theshrike79 »

nine_k wrote: post #13

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-i... [2]: https://www.briefs.co/news/uber-torches-entire-2026-ai-budge...

My irccloud.com subscription is about 60€/year.

I've spent two weeks with the cheapest tiers of Claude Pro + pi.dev+GPT-5.5 (+ some deepseek-v4 via openrouter recently) to create my own bespoke version.

I'm at 90% feature parity currently and surpassed on some levels. For ~20€-ish I've soon replaced a 60€/year subscription service.

I haven't spent a single second thinking about how someone else might run it, it doesn't have logins, security or anything - because I'm going to run it 100% behind a Tailscale node with no external access. The release and deployment processes are exactly how I like it, other people might not. I don't need to care, it's mine =)

A few months ago I did the same with Hazel[0]. That took maybe one evening to get an MVP and a week of casual updates to make it pretty. Now I have my own macOS application that does the exact things I needed Hazel for. It's mine forever and I can add or remove features as I feel like it.

[0] https://www.noodlesoft.com/whats-new-in-hazel-6/

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