Someone just discovered why some of us enjoy shell scripts and Emacs so much. No need for LLM, just small hacks to solve specific problems in limited contexts that works well enough, most of the time, for one user.
Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One
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Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One
#12Here is the demo of my perfect software. https://play.tirreno.com However, I'm skeptical about AI, because what I've understood about agentic processes is more about cheap dopamine. When it comes to medium-sized software development (over 50k LOC), there is much less fun and much more pain, because a growing codebase doesn't allow you to make new features easily. I believe it is important not to mix up a dose of dopa…
I use Claude Code on a 900kloc Rails/JS monolith and it’s still pretty pleasant. However if it wasn’t already structured well, I could see that being a worse experience.
Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One
#13Here is the demo of my perfect software. https://play.tirreno.com However, I'm skeptical about AI, because what I've understood about agentic processes is more about cheap dopamine. When it comes to medium-sized software development (over 50k LOC), there is much less fun and much more pain, because a growing codebase doesn't allow you to make new features easily. I believe it is important not to mix up a dose of dopa…
I use Claude Code on a 900kloc Rails/JS monolith and it’s still pretty pleasant. However if it wasn’t already structured well, I could see that being a worse experience.
The article is about the pleasure of creating new software (occasionally with AI help), so I hope that the 900k LOC in your case doesn't come from Claude Code.
Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One
#14This article triggers all my “written by an LLM” spidey senses.
Which is ironic considering the subject matter. “Perfect”, but artificially constructed. “Just for me”, but algorithmic slop.
I agree that you can do so much more custom tailoring of bespoke software with the speed an LLM brings. But something inside of me still revolts at calling this anything other than “convenient”.
“Perfect” I will reserve for things I’ve made myself. However “imperfect” they may really be.
Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One
#15This has always been possible, even if you weren't a programmer. You just needed to have the desire to customize your computing environment, and the time and patience to do it.
There is so much software out there, written by people who wanted to solve their particular problem, just like you. Chances are that some of it will fit your needs, and, if the software is flexible enough, will allow you to customize it to make that fit even better.
This is why the Unix philosophy is so powerful. Small independent programs that do one thing well, which can be configured and composed in practically infinite number of ways. I don't need to write a file search or sorting program, nor does the file search program need to implement sorting. But as a user, I can compose both programs in a way to get a sorted list of files by any criteria I need. This is possible without either program being aware of the other, and I can compose programs written decades ago with ones written today.
You can extend this to other parts of your system as well. Instead of using a desktop environment like GNOME, try using a program that just manages windows. Then pick another program for launching applications. And so on. This is certainly more work than the alternative, but at the end of the day, you feel like you are in control of your computer, instead of the other way around.
Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One
#16I like this article, I think it taps into something real.
I find myself scratching real itches that would otherwise have gone left un-scratched, because the hurdle to just getting started on something was too damn high.
For example I had need for an image contact-sheet. I'm sure there exist a lot of contact sheet generators out there, but I was able to just as quickly get claude to write me a set of scripts that took a bunch of raw images, resized them down to thumbnails, extracted their meta-data, and wrote a PDF (via Typst) with filenames and meta-data, in date order.
I got lost perfecting it, hand-picking fonts etc, but it still only took an hour or so from start to finish.
It's perfect for my need, I can customise it any time I want by simply asking claude to modify it.
Did I need to be a developer to do that? Arguably yes, to know the capabilities of the system, to know to ask it to leverage image-magick and typst, to understand what the failure-modes looked like, etc.
But I dind't need to be programmer, and over time people like the OP will learn the development side of software development without learning the programming side.
And that's okay.
Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One
#17The comparison to coffee is bad, since it's obvious the best coffee is with no sugar and no milk.
Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One
#18 > The Extended Mind Theory argues that our tools are not just accessories, but literal extensions of our cognitive process. Viewed this way, a generic tool like a one-size-fits-all app, feels like a prosthetic that doesn’t quite fit.
We started with Google Sheets (way too cumbersome), then Docs (cumbersome in a different way), then a simple app using Firebase + the Google Maps embedded API built over a weekend, and then ended up building a full blown planning app and eventually a Chrome extension[0] that hooks directly into Google Maps (our preferred tool for exploring).
We are meticulous planners so I totally get the author's sentiment here. Many people see the app the first time and feel overwhelmed, but for us, it's hard to imagine using other tools now because this one fits "just right" having been built specifically for our planning process.
[0] For anyone interested: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turasapp/lpfijfdbgo...
Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One
#19I’ve always been somewhat dissatisfied with image viewing/browsing software. Gqview and Sequential came close to being what I wanted, but there were things about both that I didn’t like. I finally just wrote my own custom viewer using pyqt. For me, it is perfect software!
Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One
#20The comparison to coffee is bad, since it's obvious the best coffee is with no sugar and no milk.
I agree, but it is there: perfect amount of sugar: 0, perfect milk-to-coffee ratio: 0 to 1.
What really gets on my nerves is the justified text...