Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

I like this article, I think it taps into something real.

I find myself scratching real itches that would otherwise have gone left un-scratched, because the hurdle to just getting started on something was too damn high.

For example I had need for an image contact-sheet. I'm sure there exist a lot of contact sheet generators out there, but I was able to just as quickly get claude to write me a set of scripts that took a bunch of raw images, resized them down to thumbnails, extracted their meta-data, and wrote a PDF (via Typst) with filenames and meta-data, in date order.

I got lost perfecting it, hand-picking fonts etc, but it still only took an hour or so from start to finish.

It's perfect for my need, I can customise it any time I want by simply asking claude to modify it.

Did I need to be a developer to do that? Arguably yes, to know the capabilities of the system, to know to ask it to leverage image-magick and typst, to understand what the failure-modes looked like, etc.

But I dind't need to be programmer, and over time people like the OP will learn the development side of software development without learning the programming side.

And that's okay.

The comparison to coffee is bad, since it's obvious the best coffee is with no sugar and no milk.

Someone just discovered why some of us enjoy shell scripts and Emacs so much. No need for LLM, just small hacks to solve specific problems in limited contexts that works well enough, most of the time, for one user.

Here is the demo of my perfect software.

https://play.tirreno.com

However, I'm skeptical about AI, because what I've understood about agentic processes is more about cheap dopamine.

When it comes to medium-sized software development (over 50k LOC), there is much less fun and much more pain, because a growing codebase doesn't allow you to make new features easily.

I believe it is important not to mix up a dose of dopamine gotten from agentic results, as in the article, with achievement from longstanding work, even if it's not so attractive from a short-term perspective.

This resonates with me. I'm not a programmer, and before LLM's I could only make basic hello world apps and simple websites. Now I am developing my own versions of various apps that I've used but maybe have limitations that I've become frustrated with. For example, I didn't like how the fitness tracker Strava didn't allow me to customize audio announcements, so now I have my own (and in my own eyes) better version of Strava that I use instead. It's absolutely blowing my mind that this is possible and available today, and not some tech-optimists wet dream about an impossible future.

I feel the same, I'm now building more side projects with the help of AI even if they're only for me

By the authors definition, I've been writing perfect software for over a decade.

It's never required LLMs. In fact, I think the idea that "LLMs allow us to write software for ourselves" borders on missing the point, for me at least. I write software for myself because I like the exploratory process .. figuring out how do do something such that it works with as little friction as possible from the side of the user; who is of course myself, in the future.

I like nitpicking the details, getting totally side-tracked on seemingly frivolous minutiae. Frequently enough, coming to the end of a month long yak-shave actually contributes meaningful insight to the problem at hand.

I guess what I'm trying to say is "you're allowed to just program .. for no other reason than the fun of it".

As evidence for my claims: a few of my 'perfect' projects

https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

https://scallywag.software

This article triggers all my “written by an LLM” spidey senses.

Which is ironic considering the subject matter. “Perfect”, but artificially constructed. “Just for me”, but algorithmic slop.

I agree that you can do so much more custom tailoring of bespoke software with the speed an LLM brings. But something inside of me still revolts at calling this anything other than “convenient”.

“Perfect” I will reserve for things I’ve made myself. However “imperfect” they may really be.

This has always been possible, even if you weren't a programmer. You just needed to have the desire to customize your computing environment, and the time and patience to do it.

There is so much software out there, written by people who wanted to solve their particular problem, just like you. Chances are that some of it will fit your needs, and, if the software is flexible enough, will allow you to customize it to make that fit even better.

This is why the Unix philosophy is so powerful. Small independent programs that do one thing well, which can be configured and composed in practically infinite number of ways. I don't need to write a file search or sorting program, nor does the file search program need to implement sorting. But as a user, I can compose both programs in a way to get a sorted list of files by any criteria I need. This is possible without either program being aware of the other, and I can compose programs written decades ago with ones written today.

You can extend this to other parts of your system as well. Instead of using a desktop environment like GNOME, try using a program that just manages windows. Then pick another program for launching applications. And so on. This is certainly more work than the alternative, but at the end of the day, you feel like you are in control of your computer, instead of the other way around.

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