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A desktop made for one

isene.org

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Re: A desktop made for one

#201

Post by theshrike79 »

noashavit wrote: post #62

I feel like build vs buy is the conversation now. I’m not a developer but I’ve built agents I use daily. When most people can vibe code their way to a custom app, value will most likely hinge on support and other “services”. Just my 2 cents, feel free to tell me I’m wrong!

TBH this is a discussion companies are having internally. There are so many low/mid-tier SaaS systems people have bought because they need maybe one or two features from there. Maybe they're the only one that integrates with $vendor properly.

Now it's perfectly possible to do a "good enough" solution in-house for less than what we pay for the SaaS monthly. And as a bonus we own the full solution and can add any features we want without the SaaS provider gatekeeping it.

Re: A desktop made for one

#202

Post by skydhash »

theshrike79 wrote: post #194
skydhash wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If others have built a whole-ass house and I just occasionally need the kitchen table I had to just deal with the hassle of having a whole house and just used the table. And even the table was the wrong shape, but I could deal with it. Asking the Others to make the table modifiable would've been a massive effort of PRs and mailing lists I didn't want to get into. Now I can build a bespoke table in an evening or two a…

There’s a lot of small programs out there. Especially if you go to the BSDs where small programs are the norm.

Re: A desktop made for one

#203

Post by psychoslave »

nz wrote: post #81
Agingcoder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 technicall…

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…

>Are people simply too cheap to buy books?

Yes, definitely, though I'm unsure what it means being cheap here.

Not everyone has SV incomes and infinite time to read all the books that would allow to buy, let alone integrate the lessons at a practical implementation level. Plus people might have other interest in life, and family and friends they want to dedicate time and warm attention to.

Re: A desktop made for one

#204

Post by zx8080 »

utopiah wrote: post #169
Ygg2 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's YOUR computer, you can put YOUR software on it. In fact even pocket calculator do that. I'm pretty sure this exists. It's called OSS or, more ubiquitously, Linux. The problem is, of course, no one wants to publish software for your PC/handmade OS. Which makes it a huge problem. You can't write every piece of your OS, without wasting huge amount of time. Nor do people generally want this.

OSS/Linux is "our" software. It's made by us for us (or others if you don't contribute). Your software can be made by you, for you. It can be open source/free software if you want. Others can contribute to it, if you want but it can be open source without accepting external contributions also. My point was to highlight that having software made by you for your machine is not new. Arguably the way to do so changed but…

> OSS/Linux is "our" software. It's made by us for us

If by "us" you mean big bucks corporations, then yes: ~80% is big corporations [0]. Unfortunately, it does not look like it's a personal OS.

And we badly need the personal platform with the personal OS.

0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/za564c/is_i...

Re: A desktop made for one

#205

Post by noisy_boy »

Havoc wrote: post #192

I like this as a concept & have been pushing towards similar (though more in homelab/webapp space than desktop). In particular I've found that if you have a good infrastructure layer available on which you can deploy then it's much easier to throw small purpose built webtools on there that solves personal problems. Infra here being fixed IP, mTLS reverse proxy, k3s/container, S3 etc. Basic building blocks like that -…

> Infra here being fixed IP, mTLS reverse proxy, k3s/container, S3 etc. Basic building blocks like that - store data, run app & safe gateway to access it

Or a regularly backed up raspberry pi running services in lightweight docker containers exposed over tailscale.

Re: A desktop made for one

#206

Post by zx8080 »

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…

> most documentation is written for people who already know the standard computer science terminology

Not really. It's probably complexity for the sake of it in some cases. Also it's frequently ambiguous, and I'm really not sure why: it looks like some developers lack the basic logic (?!).

Re: A desktop made for one

#207

Post by alchemist1e9 »

geir_isene wrote: post #176

For those who may be interested - I broke down some numbers for my CHasm and Fe2O3 efforts in a new blog post: https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One-Numbers.html

You’ve reduce the memory requirements so much that it could all run on an early 90s computer easily. When I see such extreme examples I think back to the OLPC machines and this idea of how can extremely cheap but with useful software computers be available in very impoverished areas. I understand this has nothing to do with your argument or anything you’re writing about. It just made me think if LLM assisted software production might make the failed OLPC idea viable again. Could a minimalist but useful set of tools be created to run on old chromebooks for example.

Re: A desktop made for one

#208

Post by monooso »

nz wrote: post #81
Agingcoder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 technicall…

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 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!

GP never claimed otherwise.

As for the rest of your comment, it's frankly a bit patronising: are people too cheap, are people too lazy to read, are people unable to type...?

No, people are busy, a fact which GP made abundantly clear in the very first paragraph.

> I would never have done this if it weren’t for AI - I simply don’t have the time otherwise.

Re: A desktop made for one

#209

Post by enneff »

nz wrote: post #81
Agingcoder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 technicall…

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 have been writing my own custom software for myself for over 30 years. But in the last six months I have written a lot more of it because the language models make it so much faster and easier to do so.

Re: A desktop made for one

#210

Post by laszlokorte »

Semi-honest question: What do you need a window manager, code editor, chat app, etc for if claude is so awesome that it can do everything for you? Why spend 400$ on making tools that you wont use in any workflow because the only workflow that will be left is prompting and agent to run in a loop
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