It's so strange to me that since the 1960s with BASIC then later on dozens of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_programmin... including Logo by Feurzeig/Papert/Solomon there is effort to precisely help beginners program software.
The effort was not to onboard future professional software developers but rather to make the personal in personal computer, or PC, meaningful. It's YOUR computer, you can put YOUR software on it. In fact even pocket calculator do that.
We keep on re-discovering the foundations.
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.
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 I would say the principle remains.
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...
The question is what does it change? Are the contributions from those corporations irreversible or are they targeting their own products for e.g. virtualization for cloud computing which doesn't affect the typical personal OS user?
Anyway the kernel itself was still started by a random student in his dorm. GNU was just started by another student. That possibility still exists today. It's also possible to trim that kernel with e.g. Linux-libre or even run Hurd.
One can use Debian with KDE today and see nor be subject to any corporate impact in terms of arbitrary limits to their usage. If they decide to not personalize it more it is most likely because they didn't consider it, not because they can't.
Don't fall into the trap of assuming "A big company did it / paid for it to be done, therefore it must be bad". I see that mindset (which I'll call anti-corporatist) on HN from time to time. Companies are made up of people, and it's the people that make the decisions. Some people are good-natured, some are greedy and grasping. And the company that acted one way one decade can turn around and act completely differently the next decade, because a different person was at the helm.
Fundamentally, it's about the people, not the companies. The anti-corporatist mindset is prone to forgetting that.
Yeah, but it's probably derived from OSS software anyway either via license or LLM. That said, you can customize your Linux/BSD/Haiku/TempleOS as much as you want.
But consider the following: even in the better case of an OS making 1% of OS userbase (vs. 0.0000001%) no one wants to support it.
Want to play Diablo? Better to sit down and waste your time.
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 technically in the process, since I’ve been able to venture into what was for me unknown territory but at controlled cost
I plan to create more such apps in the future. What is certain though is that my cooking app has immediately displaced all the others on the market , because none of the others cater to my requirements.
The production side is indeed of specific interest - most users don’t run production software so I had to think about that one. Tailscale and Cloudflare came in quite handy and there is indeed a market here
Basically, I am prepared to accept that there is a friction that LLMs lubricate away, but what is the source of the friction, and why am I (and a bunch of other colleagues) not feeling that friction daily in our practice?
[1]: And if so, where did we programmers and computer scientists go wrong? Were subroutines and macros not sufficient for automating all of that excess typing? Were Emacs and Vim simply not saving enough keystrokes? Did people forget how to touch-type?
You must be extremely talented and fast if LLMs make no difference for you.
For people like me though, it's another story: I've been doing this professionally for 25 years and of course, like many, I have been writing custom software for my own use all this time, on personal time. But with LLMs I get better results, faster and with very little effort. And that is the difference between another item in my list of unfinished software that consumed too much of my weekends and a cool utility/toy/useful thing I got after a few fun and interesting chat sessions.
> 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.
We didn't lack LLMs, we lacked time and energy.
I know how to do all of these things and even find them easy, but it's just much faster now. These are personal one task toy apps, but they are useful.
Interestingly, I also converged on the "reverse dictionary" usage of LLMs, in around 2024[1], mostly to indulge in (human) language-learning.
An excerpt from the post below:
``` It is a phenomenal reverse dictionary (i.e. which English words mean "of a specific but unspecified character, quality, or degree"). It not only works for English, but also for Esperanto (i.e. which Esperanto words mean "of a specific but unspecified character, quality, or degree"), as well as my own obscure native language. This is a huge time-saver when learning languages (normal dictionaries won't cut it, and bi-lingual dictionaries are limited, if they are available at all). Even if you are just using a language you are fluent in, a reverse-dictionary-prompt can help you find words and usages, and can also help you find "dark spots" in the language's lexicon. ```
[1]: https://galacticbeyond.com/chat-room-dispatches-intelligence...
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 (?!).
Well. You should have seen the look on their faces. I might as well have morphed into the Steve Buscemi meme "How do you do, fellow kids?" They looked at me like I was a total relic or greybeard and said things like "Nah, nobody reads tech books anymore; I learned Typescript from YouTube videos."
I think every generation feels like their way of learning was the best, but we all make it work. There was a time when the architects of systems directly tutored programmers on how to write programs.
Yes, because the price is measured in time.
With LLM tooling I’ve churned out idiosyncratic tools that fit my use cases quickly. Takes maybe a day instead of a week. A week instead of months. The fast turnaround changes the economics of writing custom tools for myself.
I also know that these days, for all kinds of reasons, I do not have the time to write the tools I’m writing now without AI. I don’t lack the ability, and I could - it will simply be multi months side projects that I can’t / won’t complete.
Have I tried to write my own IRC client yet? Nope. Because even though I know how to, the time spent wouldn't have been worth it. Getting from zero to feature parity would've taken me weeks or months of evenings doing nothing else.
I've got my own irccloud/thelounge clone running now, took me two weeks of calendar time and I spent maybe 6-7 evenings on it and a few hare-brained ideas with Claude on my phone.
The amount of "lubrication" LLMs have given me in going from idea to something good enough just for me is completely bonkers.
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.
If its not for fun, what's it for? It doesn't really seem like anyone is making stuff they are going to use next month anyway? But, I totally get how its recreational, and can be fun in the "computer, make my program" kind of way.
Otherwise, why not, e.g., just use or fork vim?
I'm a long time ops guy. I script, but I spend most of my time configuring, patch testing, and keeping the low level infra running much of which doesn't require "coding" per say. Infra as code is in the grand scheme relatively new and still not ubiquitous despite what silicon valley would have you believe. I never had a need to learn to code to a level to do many of the things I'd like to see happen and find useful. Now I can make those software desires a reality without having to alter my career, preferred hobbies, or much of anything else about my life.
I write plenty of code at my job, and generally don't have the desire to write more code as a hobby, except in rare cases when the mood really strikes.
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.
I think the instinct that APIs, validation layers, and so on take on a much higher importance is right.. I have a few internal tools that made sense to make libraries out of, and once the first library is good, and a test suite is comprehensive, porting to a bunch of different languages is extremely simple.
Everting that, it's also going to be simple for someone to hook up to this library with custom tooling.
Really interesting period in computing, for sure.
What period were we for the past 50 years?
The ~20 years prior to that we were in a world where you chose to align with either Microsoft's tooling, IBM, or shops providing Unix tooling from proprietary vendors.
I elide a nearly infinite amount of detail, obviously.
What's new now is that you can get your own window manager written to spec in under a week, perhaps much more quickly, not just choose one of a few major window managers and configure it in accordance with the chosen configuration options delivered by the large developer team.
Now I can build a bespoke table in an evening or two and it fits my stuff just perfectly.
I could do it before too, but it would've taken too long for me to bother, so I dealt with the whole house along with the table.
I don't think I can explain the difference, but it feels really different. Even if you used claude.
More like Star Trek, we would just ask "computer" to do things, and its machinations (and "software") will be invisible to us. We would just have output to deal with.
I think this would mean a lot of things. I'm sure I can't fathom all of the implications, but it sure makes me feel old! Interesting times ahead.
They don't seem to be helping much with difficult tasks.
Text editor? Easy. That used to be a rite of passage. Lots of people have written their own basic text editor.
3d solid modeler? It's always been difficult and AI coders aren't (yet?) up to the task. Most open source CAD projects that show up here are layers on top of OCCT (Open Cascade) which is pretty far behind what commercial geometry kernels are capable of.
Maybe it saves the script locally (invisible to the user) and reuses it if the user repeats the same request, the script is deleted if it's not needed for X amount of time.
So I think the same thesis holds for audiences of 10-100 and 100-1000.
A cambrian explosion of software.
[1] https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2025-10-22-sriv-simple-rust-...
Too bad this is all on the work computer and need to bring it to my personal one but can’t copy paste lol. It’s been thrilling building g and using them and the time from an ideating a small enhancement/ optimization to actually using it is like 5 to 15 minutes away. Soo cool.
Identifying a vulnerability that can be exploited against many thousands or millions of targets is perhaps more attractive than a single one of individually low value.
This of course would assume that vulnerabilities are in fact unique (which is admittedly questionable).
Besides that, one could easily imagine software created for similar purposes ("make me a file editor") by the same tool or handful thereof (claude and a very small "etc" for completeness) might share similar vulnerabilities, so this kind of broad net might be even cheaper to cast than one might imagine at first.
Yeah, I don't think all that generated software will be as unique as people expect.
Considering it will be generated with the same LLMs that all share roughly the same training data we will se patterns of vulnerabilities will also be similar and so easily exploitable.
See e.g the lock screen gap that another commenter noted in a nearby thread.
Although everyone might use their own flavor of "database" or "REST API", I can't imagine every layout to be unique enough to not have similar exploit classes entirely. AI isn't known for being super original after all...
(Appreciate your counterpoint for its own sake. It’s an interesting idea.)
(Note: I’m not an LLM fan, don’t vibe code myself at all. But I would be unconcerned about security for the kind of things I would create if I did start doing so.)
Rolling your own might make you more vulnerable to targetted attacks, but less vulnerable to automated attacks looking for known weaknesses. Most people will not publish their code. The article says "It’s not an invitation to use my software. Honestly, please don’t. None of it is built for you.".
You can roll your own software and still use libraries for security sensitive things like encryption.
Even the author of this article (who is taking it much further than most people will) still uses Firefox, Weechat, and X11.
I trust my Browser, OS and file system too.
But I'm also pretty sure none of the bespoke software I have will get any kind of security implications. The chance of my own file manager having a buffer overflow RCE triggered by a random file is practically zero.