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Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

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Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#81

I was nodding along enthusiastically right up until LLMs and that point we sharply diverge. For me, part of creating "perfect" software is that I am very much the one crafting the software. I'm learning while creating, but I find such learning is greatly diminished when I outsource building to AI. It's certainly harder and perhaps my software is worse, but for me the sense of achievement is also much greater.

What's alarming to me is this:

I remember some of the early phases of home computing. The whole point of owning a home computer was that in addition to using other people's software, you could write your own and put the machine to whatever use you could think of. And it was a machine you owned, not time on some big company's machine which, ultimately, was controlled, and uses approved, by that company. The whole point of the home computing market was to create an environment where people managed the machines, not the other way around. (Wozniak has said that this was one of his motivations for creating the Apple I and II.)

Now we have people like this guy who say we finally have autonomy in computing—by purchasing time on some big company's machine doing numberwang to write the software for you. Ultimately the big company, not you, controls the machine and the uses to which it may be put. What's worse is these companies are buying up all the manufacturing capacity, starving the consumer market and making it more difficult to acquire computing hardware! No, this is not the autonomy envisioned by Wozniak, Jobs, or even a young shithead Bill Gates.

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#82
post #73
post #71

100% agree with this. I have years of experience, but I never had the time (or will) to take on some _very minor nuisances_ or different areas of dev far from my day job expertise. LLMs solved this. I produced about 12 different things that "I needed" to improve aspects of my life. Each single took between a few hours to 3 days, and most of them I use daily, they are the most used applications (mobile, desktop and we…

> Each single took between a few hours to 3 days, and most of them I use daily, they are the most used applications (mobile, desktop and web) for my family. How have you done distribution and auth? I'm interested in doing something similar but not sure of the best way to approach that part, especially with the family/multiplatform angle as well.

as basic as needed, most of them don't even require this. They are not products and we know their limitations.

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at it this way. The carver doesn't have to grow the tree. Using an LLM for coding is a lot like being a carver. You can take broad or small strokes and discard what you don't like.

> Using an LLM for coding is a lot like being a carver. It’s nothing like being a carver. It’s like being a director; “Once more! With feeling!”. “Perfect, brilliant, just one more take, and I want you to consider…” A sculptor shapes with their hands, and there is pleasure in that. A director shapes with someone else’s hands.

Yet we see directors as artists. Kubrick, Coppola (both of them), Hitchcock, etc.

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#84

Before LLMs, “perfect software” was largely a myth. We know, your blog is the first static webpage in existence. Third, it brings back autonomy. This is the new talking point. Musk claims that cars that are always connected provide "autonomy", vibe coders claim that the stolen code distributed by Anthropic provides "autonomy". War is peace, freedom is slavery.

> vibe coders claim that the stolen code distributed by Anthropic

You could approach these topics with more nuance, and your posts would be stronger.

The current legal status is murky, and evolving!

https://ipwatchdog.com/2025/12/23/copyright-ai-collide-three...

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#85
I think we're going to see a lot more of this thanks to coding assistants, and it's going to get complicated when people start forking open-source programs and modifying them for their own personal use cases. I can see someone adding Feature X to their own fork of Project Y in a way that's incompatible with Project Y's roadmap, leading to drama between people who use the new fork vs people who are willing to wait for the "official" version.

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#86
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With AI agents, I can kickoff a task while I'm going to the park with my kids. Instead of scrolling HN, I look every now and then to what the agent is doing. How does that work? Are you running the agents on a server? Are you using gnu screen and termux? Can you respond to prompts asking for permission to e.g. run ls or grep?

All the big providers offer this. Usually they just work on your Github repo.

I see. So you're running an agent on a server against your github repo. Not working on your local machine. Thanks.

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#87
post #67

Of all the topics to judge LLM use, this seems the least appropriate. This is about people making software for themselves and no one else . Your opinion on the quality of their software is entirely beside the point. No one is ever going to force you to use an LLM to make personal software. And no one is ever going to force you to use LLM-generated software that was explicitely made and intended to be used only by the…

Thanks to LLMs, I have revived personal projects that became too time consuming and complex to familiarize myself with again. While I enjoy the challenge of writing software, I more enjoy having the thing which does exactly what I want. LLMs are amazing for this.

Cosigned. Vibe coding for a senior developer is just ... coding - except developing software while walking around with your phone talking to it.

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#88

I was nodding along enthusiastically right up until LLMs and that point we sharply diverge. For me, part of creating "perfect" software is that I am very much the one crafting the software. I'm learning while creating, but I find such learning is greatly diminished when I outsource building to AI. It's certainly harder and perhaps my software is worse, but for me the sense of achievement is also much greater.

Hard agree.

The first time I saw a computer, I saw a machine for making things. I once read a quote from actor Noel Coward who said that television was "for appearing on, not watching", and I immediately connected it to my own relationship with computers.

I don't want an LLM to write software or blog posts for me, for the same reason I don't want to hire an intern to do that for me: I enjoy the process.

Everything else, I'm in agreement on. Writing software for yourself - and only for yourself - is a wonderful superpower. You can define the ergonomics for yourself. There's lots of things that make writing software a little painful when you're the only customer: UX learning curves flatten, security concerns diminish a little, subscription costs evaporate...

I actually consider the ability to write software for yourself a more profound and important right over anything the open source movement offers. Of course, I want an environment which makes that easier, so it's this that makes me more concerned about closed ecosystems.

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#89
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have at least two projects that I estimated to take a week or two but aren't finished after years. There might be others that just got abandoned that should be included in the count. Then there are things that work but aren't polished enough or should really have documentation.

Why did you abandon them? Every time I ask this question, I get lots of sob stories, but not a single explanation.

I can’t (due to other priorities) give consistent time to a project unless it is very important. That lack of consistency means I have to spend time re-learning what I was thinking and doing which is both inefficient and not fun. Since the projects are either experimental or not that important, I’m generally more motivated to do something else.

Over time I’ve learned to not even start such projects, but LLMs have made it easier to complete such projects by making the work faster reducing the time variable in time over importance and easing the refamiliarization problem, adding to the set of such projects I’m willing to tackle.

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Using an LLM for coding is a lot like being a carver. It’s nothing like being a carver. It’s like being a director; “Once more! With feeling!”. “Perfect, brilliant, just one more take, and I want you to consider…” A sculptor shapes with their hands, and there is pleasure in that. A director shapes with someone else’s hands.

Yet we see directors as artists. Kubrick, Coppola (both of them), Hitchcock, etc.

We also see actors as artists, and pay them gorillions of dollars. AI is about using distilled human knowledge, while cutting the human out of the loop (and out of the payroll).
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