Former Microsoft dev built a 2.5KB Notepad clone

Dave Plummer is the software engineering equivalent of the Navy Seal copypasta.

Even funnier, if you take most direct quotes from the PCGamer article [0] and concatenate them, Pangram (which is quite reliable) marks it as 100% AI-generated, and it does indeed read as AI-written. Someone in that Reddit thread remarked "I began watching his video and could not cope with him reading AI content from a teleprompter." as well.

"""

If the system feels sick, if an app is hung, if the machine is gasping, Task Manager does not get to arrive fashionably late, staggering in under the weight of its dependencies.

It has to be there now, and it has to feel crisp. It has to look calm even when the rest of the system is not.

Once you spend your formative years on a machine where every instruction has to justify its existence like it's applying for a loan, you never fully recover from that. Every line has a cost. Every allocation leaves footprints. Every dependency is a roommate that eats your food and never pays rent.

I'm not here to say that modern engineers are just dumb because they're not. Their world is vastly more complicated now.

Old code, like Task Manager, has the opposite bias. Nothing got to tive in the hot path without a fight.

"""

[0]: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/windows/task-managers-creat...

See the author's video here:

The Challenge: Can we build Notepad in 3K in assembly language?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG91c7xsNMc

If this were on LinkedIn it would go straight to r/linkedinlunatics

> 2.5 kilobytes. No bloat, no telemetry, no nonsense. Just pure old-school Windows done right. Let's dive in and see how it's done.

> And today, we're going to answer the obvious question, which is not merely, "How is that possible?" The more interesting question is: "What does Windows already contain that lets a program that small behave like a real application?" Because the answer is hiding in plain sight, and it says something surprisingly important about native software, operating systems design, and why modern applications sometimes feel like they arrive towing a circus caravan.

> Suddenly, it wasn't just a stunt anymore; it was the beginning of something that could actually behave like actual software.

> A tiny native Windows program does not bring along its own entire civilization. It arrives with a lunchbox and a map of the city.

> And by the time the app even opens a blank document, it already has the gravitational field of a minor planet.

Those punchy comparisons, "not just" sentences are really a big tell of it being an AI-written script. I think a lot of people get fooled when YouTubers read AI-written text themselves, since you see it as a person talking, not as a pure text.

Some very ironic (unaware) comments from the video:

> It's so amazing to see this type of content in the era of AI slop where every app is just an Electron wrapper fighting for RAM with the other Electron wrappers. My favourite line from this "The OS is not just a bootloader for your browser and other apps, it's a giant library"

> Hey Dave, love all your videos, I'm curious how you manage not to fall into surrendering all your mental capacity to AI and what do you think of AI?

And other people noticing AI:

> Is it just me or does it feel like the script for the video was written by AI?

> I personally don’t like the style of narration used in this video, reminds me too much of AI generated fluff

> is it me or do daves scripts feel AI generated

> Is it just me or the whole script sounds like AI? It's not just x is, the comment about a compression goblin一 God, I have AI psychosis

> Why the AI text. You're a good storyteller.

> Dave, please tell me you are not using AI for your scripts... Your "it's not ____, it's ____", is making me worry