Software production is now so easy that everything is a .emacs file (pronounced "dot emacs" btw): meaning, each individual has their own entirely personal, endlessly customizable software cocoon. As tptacek says in the OP, it's "easier to build your own solution than to install an existing one" - or to learn an existing one.
Another good analogy, not by concidence, is to Lisp in general. The classic knock against it—one I never agreed with but used to hear all the time—is that Lisp with its macros is so malleable that every programmer ends up turning it into their own private language which no one else can read.
Tangential to that was Mark Tarver's 2007 piece "The Bipolar Lisp Programmer" which had much discussion over the years (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=comments%3E0%20The%20Bipolar%2...). He wrote about the "brilliant bipolar mind" (BBM) - I won't get into how he introduces that or whether fairly or not, but it's interesting given how "AI psychosis", in both ironic and unironic variants, is frequently mentioned these days.
From Tarver's article (https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html):
The phrase 'throw-away design' is absolutely made for the BBM and it comes from the Lisp community. Lisp allows you to just chuck things off so easily, and it is easy to take this for granted. I saw this 10 years ago when looking for a GUI to my Lisp [...] No problem, there were 9 different offerings. The trouble was that none of the 9 were properly documented and none were bug free. Basically each person had implemented his own solution and it worked for him so that was fine. This is a BBM attitude; it works for me and I understand it. It is also the product of not needing or wanting anybody else's help to do something.
Sounds pretty 2026, no? He goes on:
The C/C++ approach is quite different. It's so damn hard to do anything with tweezers and glue that anything significant you do will be a real achievement. You want to document it. Also you're liable to need help in any C project of significant size; so you're liable to be social and work with others. You need to, just to get somewhere. And all that, from the point of view of an employer, is attractive. Ten people who communicate, document things properly and work together are preferable to one BBM hacking Lisp who can only be replaced by another BBM (if you can find one).
---
When production is so easy, consumption becomes the bottleneck [1], and suddenly sharing is a problem. This is why the Emacs analogy is so good. A .emacs file is as personal as a fingerprint. You might copy snippets into yours, but why would you ever use another person's? (other than to get started as a noob). You just make your own.
The more customized these cocoons get, the harder they are for anybody else to understand—or to want to. It isn't just that another's cocoon has too high a cognitive cost to bother learning when you can just generate you own. It's also uncomfortable, like wearing someone else's clothes. The sense of smell somehow gets involved.
I would call this, maybe not AI psychosis, but AI solipsism.
In software it's fascinating how configuration management (that boringest of all phrases) is becoming the hard part. How do you share and version the source? What even is the source? Is it the prompts? That's where the OP heads at the end: "share it somewhere — or, better yet, just a screenshot and the prompts you used to make it." But when I floated a couple trial balloons about whether we might use this for Show HN—i.e., don't just share the code you generated, because that's not the source anymore; instead share the prompts—we got a lot of pushback from knowledgeable people (summarized here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47213630).
These dynamics can only be what's behind the pipe-bursting pressure that Github has been under. What a Github successor would look like is unclear, but as a clever friend points out, there will have to be one. Projects and startups along these lines are appearing, but we seem to be in the horseless carriage phase still.
Even more importantly, what happens to teamwork? If we are all a BBM now—or rather, if we all have personal armies of BBMs, locked in a manic state, primed at all hours to generate things for us-and-only-us—how do we work together? How do cocoons communicate, interoperate? What does a team of ai solipsists look like? It sounds oxymoronic.
My sense is that a lot of software teams, startups and so on, on the cutting edge of AI-driven / agentic development, are currently contending with this, not (only) philosophically but practically, e.g. how does my generated code compose with your generated code. With these frictions we presumably end up giving back some portion (how much? who can say?) of the productivity gains of generated code [2]. One would expect such effects to show up over time, as the systems being built this way grow in complexity and maintenance/development tradeoffs become things.
I don't see many talking about it publicly yet though, which is a pity. No one wants to be the first to stop clapping and sit down during an obligatory standing ovation, but it's a bummer if you can't (yet) tell interesting stories about downsides and instead have to pretend that this is the first free lunch, the only downsideless upside that ever existed. It makes the discussion performative and probably slows evolution, since the experiments, ironically, are happening in silos.
These are the people doing the most serious and real and advanced work with the new tools (edit: I mean in the field of software dev), so it sucks if all talk of downsides is left to the cynical/curmudgeonly contingent, who for whatever good points they may, er, generate along the way, are obviously wrong about AI having no value for software dev. It's easier to talk about AI wiping out the human race than, say, bug counts going up or productivity levelling off after a while.
Mostly I just want to know what's really going on! and how people are dealing with it and how it is developing over time. Do I have to like go to meetups or something?
[1] That's why a recent paper used the title "Easier to Write, Harder to Read" - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6726702
[2] Ran across this saying the same thing, a bit more strongly, the morning after I posted the above. https://x.com/fchollet/status/2054917282015445076. Maybe we'll get the conversation after all!
Same deal with a lot of this software. I guess there's some "taste" to it, but mostly what you care about are the ideas and the "recipe".
Also, you should just do a monthly "Vibe HN" thread.
> you should just do a monthly "Vibe HN" thread
It wouldn't stop people from feeding them into the Show HN stream, which is the problem. If we had a good enough way to tell them apart, we could factor them into two streams, but we don't yet.
1. erring on the side of sounding cooler
One example of teamwork is how the programmers and researchers worked together to build the UNIX SYSTEM (https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf). It is not a product but an environment optimized for building tools and solving practical problems with tools written in C (while BBMs were busy with Lisp in Boston .;-)
C++ is a totally different story and you need an IDE for that.
I can concur with that thought direction. We used to pair and group-program on my team, we have a "Zoom office". Now it has become "let me take this ticket and feed it to Claude, you try the same thing with Copilot, and then we compare the results", or "I'd make a PR with my clunker, you use yours to review it". This shit honestly feels almost pointless. The pair-programming is absolutely dead. Who wants to watch me run several agents, trying to fix multiple things in different work-trees, while I'm juggling them around and fixing inconsistencies in my agents.md?
I've been pushing the idea of building a self-governing, fully autonomous cloud pipelines so we'd stop playing "stupid tokenomy" games, and it seems my management is just quietly trying to "keep it down", because I think there's a simple understanding - the moment that shit proves airworthy and actually can fly, a bunch of them are guaranteed to lose their cushy seats.
It works, it’s powerful, and certainly one way to answer the question you pose. I would argue it’s the optimal answer, it’s an answer to RPC, REST, and MCP at the same time, but it’s definitely an example of an answer and approach. In any case it is a good question and something I’ve given a lot of thought to.
Unfortunately in the age we’re in now there’s something lackluster in sharing any solution or design you have. Though the architecture and design of what I’m describing came 0% from AI everything is assumed to be and therefore unimportant? But it is the direct answer to your question so if anyone’s curious lmk.
* Podcast apps
* Music listening apps
* Feed readers
* Bluesky clients
* Note-taking apps
* Desktop bookmarking/read-later apps
* Chat and instant messaging
* Time trackers
* Recipe managers
These are all things that you can get better-than-replacement-grade results from Claude on --- not necessarily the best, not necessarily the most globally competitive, but certainly an application more closely tailored to exactly what you want it to do for your own idiosyncratic work style.
Music.app is a miserable experience, and I can just tell as I use it that it's miserable trying to serve me. But Apple long ago factored all the meaningful bits out of Music.app into MusicKit. Why am I still using Music.app? MusicKit is the real product now. This is new.
But now it occurs to me: I know precisely how I work, I know what patterns are valuable to me, I know when and how I need to remind myself of things. I don't know why I haven't already started building my Things.app replacement. But I'd guess I have it to a place where I'm happy by this time Saturday.
Honestly, it's harder for me to think of daily-driver apps where this wouldn't be the case. I guess vector graphics editing? I'm not going to vibe up a vector editor. But I'll bet all the money in my pocket that 5 years from now, the real value in vector graphics tools will be their API/SDK, not the packaged application experience.
For example, we can "reclaim" non-DRM ebook readers, audiobooks, and music players that play local files or use an open API. But a company-specific walled garden streaming DRM'd ecosystem will be almost impossible to build around.
Ownership can have different forms. Slack.app that doesn't let me easily extract code snippets from a thread - owns me. Jira that forces me to use their imbecilic, quirky wysiwyg owns me. Note taking app that keeps the data in their db and not my files - ain't my friend. The friction is the ownership. When extraction requires effort, the tool has leverage over you. It's a subtler form than data lock-in - behavioral lock-in. You adapt your workflow to what the tool makes easy, and gradually the tool's affordances shape what you even think to do. information gets buried in threads, search is mediocre, export is hostile. The "solution" they offer is to stay in Slack/Jira/Dropbox/Evernote/Notion/etc. longer, search in Slack, link to Slack, screenshare in Slack, summarize with AI in Slack, don't ever leave Slack. The tool becomes the answer to the problems the tool creates.
Plain text, local files, standard formats - they don't fight you on extraction because there's nothing to protect. That's why investing in FOSS tools is almost always paying for your own liberation rather than your own imprisonment. Even when there isn't feature parity, even when the FOSS tool doesn't have a "polished UI" and it's "maintained by a teenager in Nebraska" - still a better choice.
This is an experiment towards that:
https://github.com/dharmatech/9social
The first client is written for plan9. This keeps the design honest. (If it can run on plan9/rc/acme...)
Video demo:
The current implementation is less than 3000 lines of code.
And speaking of Emacs... 9social was heavily inspired by an Emacs project called Org Social:
I've been thinking of this as well:
Something like old school Facebook in UI, but functions more like MSN Messenger. You connect to your contacts via P2P, and download/upload updates to your social media network.
Yup, local-first is central to the design.
And, you only see who you explicitly follow.
I hope there's a sympy-thagoras out there.
( • ‿ • )
Thanks for checking it out!
"There's a filesystem for that."
¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
Podcasts: audiobookshelf
Music: 500 different subsonic clients, many of which are good. Or some fun tuis
Feed readers: lol, more than there are grains of sand in Torvalds' flippers
Note taking: again innumerable, also, just use nvim or emacs of course
Chat: tons of very good self hosted options that can save orgs thousands a month.
Rather than build your own from scratch, rediscovering already solved issues, why not contribute to or fork a FOSS project? LLMs make it easy easier to get up to speed on large projects
The point of the post is the emacsification of the native macOS (and Windows, I assume) environment. Totally reasonable not to care that it's occurring, that's not really responsive to the post, is it?
Audiobookshelf has a native android app, not sure about desktop, I only use it on Android.
Anyone can build a TUI sure but why try to rebuild the whole mpd client/server stack that lets anyone on your network play music from the several TB collection of FLACs on your NAS? Same for subsonic, why reinvent the client server protocol there when it's already solved? And for subsonic clients, why reimplement streaming, offline downloads with de-duping, stream bitrate, album / artist handling... If there's something a subsonic client doesn't have that you want, fork it, point claude at it, done! That probably falls within the emacsification thing, right?
Email is right there waiting for disruption.
1. <https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html#ma...>
[0] https://applied-langua.ge/posts/lisp-curse-redemption-arc.ht...
But to be honest, my time using Emacs didn't teach me to "build personal software". My Emacs set up was extremely brittle, and it was a nightmare when I tried to use it across Windows & macOS. My university project was written using an unholy combination of org-mode & some workflow to create a beautiful LaTeX file, and I couldn't tell you how to recompile it (if I were to try, I'd probably get an LLM to literally translate it to LaTeX).
I want my life to have as little maintenance as possible, and making my own software for everything isn't always compatible with that.
[0]: A rewrite of a NETFX application in Rust, simply because the 20 minute installation time irked me: https://github.com/bevan-philip/wlan-optimizer
So LLMs are good enough to make personal software, but not good enough to maintain them?
That is, the idea that a non-expert might create interesting software in an authoring environment with good, well-thought-out building blocks and easy-to-grasp metaphors, shorn of layers of accidental or over-engineered complexity.
In this vision software still requires careful logical thinking, but it makes it much less cumbersome to translate that thinking into running code, with no tooling and build system nightmares.
Instead, we've invented such powerful models that they can regurgitate and recombine complex incantations on our behalf. The complexity is still there, though, and it's still inscrutable to non-experts.
But maybe they can help us eliminate some of it?
I think that path is still possible, and it may even nicely complement the LLM world, where LLMs help generate software that individual humans can still easily comprehend and manually modify.
I'm excited that the weird grey-zone of excel sheets with business critical logic is likely going to disappear as LLMs slowly make the logic driving those too complex to be comprehended and managed and those get foisted off onto actual engineering resources. It'll be painful but probably for the best... but for actual tools people need to use day-to-day I think the assurance that the tool will work has a lot more value than the AI hype has comprehended.
Oddly enough, Google’s LLM is the only one that has been answering my questions well on a research project these last weeks. I’m getting information from scanned text files that exist on the internet but were never adequately OCRed by other LLM companies (i.e. both OCRed at all, and moreover OCRed as the specific language in question that picks up all the diacritics). Google search results may be disappointing and polluted for years, but the company is still offering a useful product in another tab of its interface.
Arguably LLMs take us further away from that than we've ever been. All they do is automate copying and pasting in shit from StackOverflow.
We were closer to everyone being able to learn how to program computers in the mid-80s when everyone had one and they started up with a BASIC prompt.
There are no gatekeepers, no dependencies!
This, require you to have pay $20-$200 to a 3rd party corporation, or have a kind of beefy GPU (to run locally), run some instructions on text file, keep editing till it might does what you intend it to.
You are knowingly adding a dependency, which probably will become a hard dependency when everything goes jumbled up for human reviews, either on a beefy GPU or sending your data to a shareholder pleasing corporation.
Let's distinguish, how these are not the same, and the real price we pay
For CRUD apps, the API spec and UI mockups -- or even a photo of how it looks on the already coded platform -- would go a long way. That's exactly the kind of well defined task work LLMs do well with. It should be possible to automate a lot of the equivalence testing too.
Is there still an excuse for "maybe we'll add Android someday" or "not enough Mac/Linux users"? And is there still a justification for not building those less-used flows like password reset into the iOS app instead of throwing up random WebViews?
For those apps that do have non-trivial logic on device, LLMs have shown a lot of promise at rewriting to cross-compiling-is-easy languages like Go or Rust.
My original spicy take is: why learn SwiftUI at all at this point? It's a skill that, for most tasks, falls into the same kind of bucket as "learning Microsoft Word really, really well". I appreciate people who take the time to do that, but the outcomes are within millimeters of each other whether or not we do that.
I don't think that's true of programming generally. But I think there are languages now where the rationale in specializing in them has gotten, hrm, more complicated.
Over the years I've replaced 90% of the plugins I used when I started. Plus I get a nice outlet from any pesky NIH symptoms.
In all honesty, when you start up emacs for the first time with a blank config, it looks terrible. But then you start building it up with plugins and adding code to support your own quirky workflows and slowly it becomes too powerful in your life to ignore. I have not been able to drop it for 13 straight years. With AI taking over the development experience, emacs and neovim have only become even better, because now you can get AI to bake your custom workflows into the config for you.
Emacs/neovim should be the gold standard for all workflow tools.
I make small config changes every day and its super fun to use my computer this way. I wish everything was configurable like Emacs.
It is? Why? I read monospaced text all day long. I don't find it fatiguing in the least. In fact, I think I might prefer it to non-monospaced text.
edit: typo
A- The difficulty to publish the tool
B- The difficulty to create the tool
C- The usefulness of the tool to others
D- The social reward for publishing the tool
E- The negative incentive of adding a dependency
Difficulty to find a canned solution goes up with A (because someone needs to create it) and B (someone needs to figure out how to publish it), but, the more useful it is to the community (C), the easier it gets to find it, because people will tell you.
If A and B are substantially different, if A is much higher than B, people will tend to write their own and forget about it. If B is lower, there will be fewer solutions to your problem. If A and B are low, and the social reward (C) for A is higher than the price of depending on something else (E), you'll have a leftpad situation. A lot of NPM is made of packages with high C and D and low E.
In the case of Emacs Lisp, A used to be high, but now is low, B (once you climb the learning curve) is low, C, D, and E aren't high either way. This can lead to a scenario where you build the tool before you even look if there is a tool that does it (unlike it is with VSCode, and with Eclipse before it - both have a high B).
I see a thesis someone younger than me will want to bring out to this world.
Maybe it's best to call this movement in LLM-generated software "software individualism" rather than "personal software"?
[1] I don't know much as I haven't vibecoded before, and my .emacs is painfully crafted by hand.
Most other "knowledge" professions -- by which I mean teaching, programming, some engineering, and the arts -- are even further along into obsolescence. That said, you can still use the knowledge gained in a knowledge profession to convert into a more hands-on profession. We might have a bit longer before humanoid robots destroy all hands-on job opportunities as well. Once that happens, every person will be equally poor and destitute.
Took me 2 days to complete, did not even spend the whole day on it (more like a bit here'n'there while doing other work. Claude's a game changer for these small greenfield projects (probably for more types of prjects, but this is a really sweet spot).
I can see a table of contents being useful though. Perhaps if `:Toc` doesn’t exist yet, it should.
I'm using Emacs since last century and I've got 3 000+ lines of custom Elisp code I wrote (with maybe only a few hundred lines copy/pasta'ed from other configs).
I'm always using a recent Emacs compiled from source and now with LSP, org-mode, Magit, tree-sitter, ivy/avy/counsel/swiper with ripgrep (thanks burntsushi) integration etc.
I had zero frigging idea what gfm and gfm-view for Emacs were.
But I'll look into it now!
> they’re hamstrung by the terminal itself, which is almost always monospaced and thus fatiguing to read.
I recently re-built Blue, a minimalist text editor inspired by the Turbo Pascal and Turbo Basic editors of the late 1990's. It uses a fixed width font, because I prefer it.
I wanted to reference some TLA+ community stuff. I was initially just copy-pasting the specs into mine, and that worked well enough, but it was a little tedious and I was kind of afraid I might accidentally forget to give attribution to someone if I used their spec.
So I got Claude to build a TLA+ package manager for me. It's just a basic thing in Rust that allows me to plop a deps.json file into my TLA+ folder, and put a git repo url and commit hash, and then I use tree-sitter-tlaplus [1] to rename the modules to have a basic namespace to avoid collisions. It took about 30 minutes of fighting with Claude, but then it worked fine.
As AI gets better and better and cheaper and cheaper, I suspect it will be easy to have tons of custom apps for everything. It's a brave new world.
[1] https://github.com/tlaplus-community/tree-sitter-tlaplus
Please do not do this.
Per OurWorldInData, >50% of the world lives below $10/day in 2026.
A $200/mth AI subscription costs ~66% of that.
Generation costs still exceed distribution costs by a wide margin.
Uploading costs you nothing, and it can help the poor.
Could you expound more on this? Are you suggesting that less energy use in data centers would help the world's poor?
The reason people who like emacs write their one-off program in emacs is that it is an extraordinarily introspectable and debuggable programming environment. There is no "code, compile, run" loop - you just write code against the live running environment. Devoid of that fast feedback loop, writing code just isn't as much fun.
I think what we’re seeing quite a bit lately is developers are stepping back a bit from the development themselves because the AI does much of that part. So they’re managing the products for themselves, even when they are the only customer. The best people at doing this are going to be people who really understand what needs to be done, because that’s what the product manager/product owner/business analyst/customer liaison type of role has always been.
“Emacsification” clocks that everything now works this way, not just baroque text editors.It's not "about" Emacs, it's more about the vibe of personalized software in 2026 to someone who does a lot of Emacs stuff.
Another thing is configuration (which also ties to the previous statement). You have to be able to split the idea of the program (what it aims to do) and your personal preferences. Emacs make that easy by having a framework for user preferences. That makes for an extendable program.
The closest, but not as user friendly is unix and suckless philosophy combined. Small programs, easy to understand, configure, and extend.
Besides being an everything app for you, Emacs is an (unconventional) operating system with weak boundaries between user apps. It makes it easy to modify anything, write new things, or combine two existing ones with very little code, something that e.g. Microsoft could have only dreamed of in Office with its awkward embedding that barely worked. Emacs is one the few survivors of the idea that users should program what they need, which was popular during the personal computing revolution in the 80's. Two others are spreadsheets and BASIC.
Programming turned out to be too complex for the untrained users to handle, but AI makes the idea of custom one-off apps or weird hybrids pretty damn close, that is true in practice. I see a lot of people that vibe code their own little things to get things done. That's precisely what BASIC (often shipped in the stock ROM!) was supposed to be used for.
I think that "the number of programs" you're suggesting is arbitrary. It's kind of like calling an operating system one thing, when it's a lot of things. You can "count" the things different ways.
The bigger takeaway is "making your own programming things."
For example, in this particular case, a native app limits you to viewing Markdown on your laptop. If you work in a remote Linux VM, you can render to HTML and view Markdown on any device that has a web browser.
It's authenticated by default, making public websites is easy too.
When my Emacs opens a markdown file it immediately converts it into OrgMode format. I find that more readable, more navigable and more editable.
Now I'll have to go and meditate about Emacsification.
Fun anecdote - I once needed to sort some nested items in a big yaml file. After spending three minutes trying to understand sort-regexp-fields (or some other function), I cheated - I ran org-mode, and then org-sort and then went back to yaml-mode. So stupid, yet so brilliant. Why the heck would I ever want to use "first-class IDE" or "intuitive, plebeian editor" if Emacs has anything I could possibly imagine? Right at my fingertips.
___
¹ https://github.com/agzam/org-edit-indirect.el
² https://github.com/thanhvg/emacs-hnreader/
³ https://github.com/thanhvg/emacs-reddigg
⁴ https://github.com/agzam/slacko.el
My .emacs file is init.el which is actually init.org, which isn't an Emacs file but a literate program that's half a guix installation script and half a regular .emacs file.
Also kill all markdown. Replace it with xml or better yet SXML.
And as per the general theme of the post anyway: whatever. Because you can just work around it, whatever it is, by cobbling together some code, one way or another.
Right.
In a broad sense, programming is about managing complexity/information. Constructing interfaces/abstractions in order to choose which details are useful for an interface (& which can be ignored).
The 'magical' parts of LLMs is being able to get useful output from unstructured/messy inputs.
It's kindof surprising that this has an impact on programming: it changes a lot ("write me an app that does this" becomes feasible for 'small' things), but in some sense, the fundamental problems remain.
Not related to the main point of the article, but I find reading long form contnet in a mono font much easier.
I have my Obsidian vault synced to Google Drive, and it’s completely impossible to just look at the files in it via the web interface. iOS support is also more than lacking.
The "0% product hunt, 100% show and tell" bit is one of the benefits of an ecosystem with painfully high upfront entry costs.
Does anyone know of an active forum of any kind (discord, reddit, phpbb, mailing list, whatever) for people who are building personal applications like this for love of the game, which takes hardline stances about desirable vs undesirable motives and behaviors, and enforces high entry/participation costs in exchange for unusually low quantities of transient grifters and self-interested status seeking by day-old accounts?
> monospaced and thus fatiguing to read.
Monospaced text is fine. I don't see how people who read code (and code comments) all day care that strongly about this. Plaintext is king
But the beauty of this moment is that if you want a really good SwiftUI monospaced Markdown reader, you can have it before dinner. This is exactly what I'm talking about. You have an idiosyncratic personal preference, and it's now reasonable to expect software to shrink-wrap around that preference.
Also, are browser text area inputs monospaced by default for everyone? Or did I configure that for myself long ago and forget? If it's not just me, maybe the "reasons" you're alluding to are not so obvious. Anyway, I have no trouble at all reading the long comments I type into text areas.
And more power to people for embracing agency :)
You underestimate the number of HN users who are reading this site in their terminal. ;-)
Legacy decisions as a remnant from a time when taking more space on paper cost pages and therefore resources, remaining as a default from centuries of inertia in how text is printed?
But seriously: you do you. There are people who code in proportional typefaces and they're as baffling to me as you are right now. Let a thousand Markdown viewers bloom.
The whole entire point of computers in their best light is changeable software, the whole point should be "let people read how they want to."
I don’t think we’re at the point where any random stranger on the street can get Claude to make a perfect Electron app for their use case.
A month or so ago, I had claude write a visualizer for some data. There is an existing python viewer, but it bogs down & is painfully slow at the scale I need. So I asked Claude to port it to a compiled language. After 2 hours of iterating, I had the tool that I wanted.
Note that its throwaway, dumpster fire code. But for a one-off tool like that, its fine.
But...I like MDV.
If this is the starting thought, I don't know how you wrap back around to publishing and advertising the generated code.
Either you create the best possible mac markdown viewer and should share it as that, orthogonal to any statement of AI use. Or you're just adding to the noise of tools available online. Where other people should ignore your work, and go slopcode their own markdown viewer.
"With LLMs you can just make your own".
I read dogleash's comment as emphasising the bad parts of that. If everyone's just sharing their half-baked slop, it becomes harder for people to discover the good programs which are worth using, and harder for those quality programs to get social proof (or good direction).
"Content creation for an audience of one" is really the revolutionary change that is happening right now because of AI. Disposable apps, disposable books, disposable movies, disposable music. Things that are made for a single person, used once or a handful of times and then thrown away. The entire economic model of content creation and distribution is going to explode in the next 3 or 4 years, and very few people are prepared for it.
> The entire economic model of content creation and distribution is going to explode in the next 3 or 4 years
I think this is also inherently self-contradictory. What's the point of distributing content made for one? This gets into the same fallacy that people engage in w.r.t. "applications for one" displacing software developers. Yes, LLMs can pump out buggy software that suits one person's needs, and it doesn't need to be reliable enough to deploy at scale. It serves real utility here, because there was a gap between "the value of such software" and "what software developers are willing to work for", which meant that this software wasn't being created because there wasn't economic value in it. But then, how does one suppose software that has no economic value is going to replace all the professional software developers who were being paid to produce software that has economic value? LLMs filled a gap software developers weren't being paid to do, but given that they were not paid to do it, their jobs are not contingent on the existence of this niche. It simply doesn't follow that being able to produce content with zero economic value, whether that's applications or content for one, will cause an 'explosion' in the existing economic models.
So I asked my agent to write typst, ran "typst watch", and now I can look at a nice pdf file. it even auto-refreshes when the clanker changes it.
Edit: Sure there is some small overlap here, but it's really not comparable and definitely not like the way the author describes things. User personalization in Emacs has normally been on a much smaller scale than rewriting entire packages. Configuration is generally smaller tweaks or things on top of existing packages because Emacs provides cohesive extensibility to the point that it often doesn't require "rolling your own." Most packages are already extremely configurable and tailorable. You don't magically get that sort of environment with LLMs. Emacs is much more cooperative/generalized.
The scale and type of custom/personalized software we're seeing now with AI is completely different from how things have been in Emacs. I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing (I think it's both), but it's very different from Emacs and definitely more comparable to something like vim/neovim where (in part just because of the sheer popularity) you constantly have people "rolling their own" packages and a billion versions of everything. Even that is not a great analogy. This is something completely new.
Specifically the idea that people generally just ignore existing versions of packages and make their own has never been the case, especially compared to other editors (even VSCode).
> There are popular elisp packages lots of people use. But except for Magit, nerds are alarmingly apt to replace them with their own shinier versions (and then to show them off, transitioning to the spore-forming phase of the elisp lifecycle). Everything in Emacs is malleable.
> Until now, the Achilles heel of Emacs culture has been that, except for Magit, its packages tend to be wretched user experiences. Ugly, slow, and discoverable only after inflicting years of elisp cortical injuries on yourself.