Personal Software
by Gordon Weakliem
Xuanwo discusses a couple of articles on the idea of “personal software” or “selfish software”.
I dislike the term “selfish”. Selfishness is putting your needs at the expense of others’. Writing software to accomplish some particular task is self-sufficiency.
AI didn’t make this possible, it just made it faster and more accessible. The Linux origin story that I’ve heard was that Linus had bought a new PC with an 80386 processor and hated the idea of wasting that power running MS-DOS (that alone is a very geeky thing to think), so he wrote an OS that ended up as the engine of the Internet. Less consequential, but when I worked at VRBO, what I sussed out was that VRBO started in the mid 90’s because Dave Clouse owned a ski condo in Breckenridge, CO. At the time, people would rent their condos, but you did it either through a Realtor or leasing agent, who took a healthy cut, or by placing a newspaper classified ad, which was expensive (memory says it was $30-50 for an ad that would run for the weekend). So he created a website to advertise his property, but then he realized that other people might have this problem too.
That’s enough of my old man nitpicking. The important thing is that the spirit of both articles is on point: you can and should write one-off or one-shot software. There’s a lot going on lately to reinforce this trend. I love the fact that uv has built in mini-environments that make creating one-shot scripts with dependencies a trivial thing. Sure, use an LLM to expand your horizons, but write software without caring if it’s any good, if anyone will like it, or if your repo will get any stars or PRs. The 2010s were the decade of bullshit metrics and performative software development. We’re well into the 2020’s now, let’s do some useful work.