I (and I'm sure many others) have been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of months. I called it "Extremely Personal Software" in a blog post a few months ago (https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/14-releasing-software-now/) but there are lots of names and concepts floating about for the same basic idea.
I think it's possible the amount of new software that will be written for an audience of 1-10 will be greater in 2026 than in any previous year, and then the same again for many years to come. I also think a lot of this software will be essentially 'hidden' - people just writing this stuff for themselves because the cost to say things to an agent is very low compared with the cost of actually planning out a software design and so forth.
Interoperability will probably be important in the next few years and I wonder if this is something solvable at the agent/LLM level (standing instructions like 'typically, use sqlite, use plaintext, use open standards' or whatever). I also think observability and ops will be pretty important - many people who want personal software but don't care for the maintenance and upkeep.
I called it "software".
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.
> 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 I would say the principle remains.
> 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...
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 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
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 read them? Or has the quality of tutorials/documentation of languages/libraries/framework online decayed in the last decade? Or is it really that people have struggled to type characters of code into their text editors[1]?
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?
> 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.
> 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?
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 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 something you want and get the standard terminology. This is a new and valuable capability.
> 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 (?!).
There is a universe out there, where most of the world is reading Solaris man pages, instead of Linux man pages. Whatever your thoughts on the Solaris OS, I think it is fair to say that no operating system has ever matched the quality of its man pages.
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...
I've commented on this subject before, but the fact of the matter is that kids getting into high tech and programming mostly don't read books anymore. How do I know? Recently I was hanging out with a bunch of high school students who asked me how I learned. I said it was mostly via books and man pages. "Yeah, don't sleep on high quality written material. O'Reilly. Wiley. Addison-Wesley. Manning. MIT. No Starch Press. &c..."
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."
Already in 2008, as a millennial teen without internet at home, I was learning C# and XNA without a single book, just tutorials and official docs I downloaded from the library alongside Visual Studio Express. I couldn't have afforded books on it anyway, but I can't imagine teens in 2026 using anything other than Youtube and some tutorials to learn this stuff.
I learned programming from tutorials :) Only after I kept encountering terms in tutorials (long after I was building (badly organized) programs) that I didn't understand well did I decide to read my first book, K&R's C. This was when animated gifs were a novelty not worth the data transfer time.
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.
That has been the case for a decade
This is the best use case of LLMs, the one I use it the most for.
> 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?
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.
Not speaking for the OP. But my biggest constraint is time. Now with agentic coding, I can work in 5 to 15 minute bursts a few times/day, and make meaningful progress on projects, where as before I would have never been able to context shift from my day job long enough on a personal project.
Yep! Time was the biggest factor. I could have created that one tool I had for years been wanting to make, but tech moves fast, and I have a job and a family and a passion for music and yadda yadda yadda. AI has been a game changer for actually accomplishing big dreams I just didn't have the time to bring about to fruition.
Well, I’ve been writing code for decades so I know because there was a time ( when I was younger ) where I did just this.
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.
Given how often younger people find my typing speed startling, I think it has been somewhat forgotten (US high schools had "keyboarding" classes at one point but that seems to have fallen off...)
Seriously agree. I am wildly overeducated and I often think the most useful class I ever took in high school was my senior year elective for a typing class. On old IBM typewriters. And the only class I took in high school with non-honors kids. Typing insanely fast, especially for someone who is a fast thinker, is a bit of a magic power in itself.
>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.
I have written multiple IRC bots in the last 20+ years. It's my go-to project to test a new language, mostly because I know the protocol inside and out and it has some gotchas that languages can't handle comfortably (managing a bunch of open TCP sockets with threads/subprocesses mostly).
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.
There's a whole lot of people who want software to do certain things but whos job isn't programming and life requirements don't allow the time for all the book reading, tutorial running, and practice to write useful code.
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.
Speaking for myself, it's less of a yearning to write more code, than it is a yearning for tools that work a specific way.
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.
I had the same reaction. We're headed into a period where you can shape your tools exactly as you like them; artisanal rather than factory-created workshops, essentially.
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.
> We're headed into a period where you can shape your tools exactly as you like the
What period were we for the past 50 years?
Since roughly 1995 or so we've been in a world where quality tooling was provided by on the order of 1,000s of developers, mostly open source. GNU, Xorg, Apache, emacs, nginx, and so on. Or you could opt in to the Microsoft ecosystem.
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.
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 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.
There’s a lot of small programs out there. Especially if you go to the BSDs where small programs are the norm.
Because its fun. And because your experience using a tool is fundamentally different if you made it yourself, compared to if its something someone else made for you.
I don't think I can explain the difference, but it feels really different. Even if you used claude.
It never felt fun for me to write software fully with LLMs. It feels disorientating, it produces a lot of code that you have no familiarity with and no authorship. It feels like you’re a teenager again, copy pasting code from internet or journal and hoping it will work.
"Everting"?
I learned it in the math context - a sphere eversion is a 3 dimensional process that ends with the inside of the sphere becoming the outside.
I had to check it up too. Appears to be a synonym for "inverting" used in some fields like biology and medicine.
Interesting points. With the extreme cheapening of the cost (time/skill) for software production, we can have "Extremely Personal Software", as you mention and as demonstrated by the source. I wonder if we will reach a stage where "software" is written by a computer for an audience of 1 and for a single task, to be run once only- via an interface that works for all tasks. The very concept of software as something that users have to learn to use (memorizing keybindings, for example), might go the way of the punch card.
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.
More likely we'll have a library of skeletons for single task software, where the LLM can fill in the blanks as needed.
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.
Reminds me of this blog post and conference presentation on home cooked software by Maggie Appleton.
Great post, thanks for sharing. Evidently I am far behind the real thinkers! The Robin Sloan post mentioned is also very good.
This. I have written so much software recently to make my computer my own. It’s been so much fun to be able to borrow the the ideas from different tools I have used (eg vim modal behaviours etc ) and also bring them together with some completely novel ideas to produce tools for myself that are one of a kind and that “fits me like a glove“
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.
I think I agree. But at the same time we have strength in numbers and people will find something close to what they want and fork off that.
So I think the same thesis holds for audiences of 10-100 and 100-1000.
A cambrian explosion of software.
I agree. I’ve noticed this phenomenon too as I’ve been building more and more tools for myself, and I’ve started calling it hyper personal software: https://paulwrites.software/articles/hyps/
I vibe coded an image viewer for myself to address a big pain point that had been annoying me for years. [1]
[1] https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2025-10-22-sriv-simple-rust-...
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A really good and thoughtful response. Thanks.
I shudder to think about the security implications of everyone rolling thier own software. I trust my OS/browser/file system is secure because thousands of people are invovled in a complex network of interests in keeping it secure, from the kid contributing his first bit of code to the PHds at NSA writing encryption standards. The idea that any one person can replace that network is laughable.
Just to be contrarian, perhaps some measure of risk is reduced by the scale of one.
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).
> This of course would assume that vulnerabilities are in fact unique (which is admittedly questionable).
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.
I had the exact same thought. Pretty low probability that there's going to be a script-kiddie exploit for your custom tools. Pretty decent probability that there will be vulnerabilities present if someone cares enough to target you.
The counterpoint to that is that the exact same tools that are allowing this personal software creation at massive scale are also excellent at black box vulnerability analysis…
There are entire vulnerability/fault/misdesign classes that are fairly general and appear to naturally emerge.
See e.g the lock screen gap that another commenter noted in a nearby thread.
But the exploits can use AI custom tools too. "Script Kiddie" is just now "Prompt Kiddie"
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...
Otoh, TAU will bound to get really personal now:D
We should expect the same automated personalization to be used offensively and for that personalization to be packaged into tools anyone can run (natural language interface, likely.)
(Appreciate your counterpoint for its own sake. It’s an interesting idea.)
If a vulnerability of the common not individualized ancestor software is found, how quickly do people patch their individual versions of the software?
The article is about desktop software. If it does not accept network connections what is the risk? If it needs to do so you can run restrict it to you LAN or a VPN or over access it an ssh tunnel. If it replaces something you use over the public internet (e.g. SaaS) it might even be more secure.
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.
Not everyone's "personal software" runs on a publicly accessible host on the internet.
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.
If they’re hosting network services, sure. I wouldn’t put vibe-coded software outside a home network, ever. But it seems low risk if people are just creating their own desktop software: especially since it’s less likely to be vulnerable to widespread malware.
(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.)
But your browser will invite outside software into your network, to run on your machine. So you have to be up to speed with community knowledge.
That seems like a naive view to me. Most modern software development is gluing vendor code and libraries into a CRUD app, and I don't see why that would change with agents doing the majority of programming. If anything, there's an even bigger market for solid libraries and interoperability, plugging things together like LEGO - only for real this time.
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