alt Hacker NewsPerfect Software – Software for an Audience of One
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I was nodding along enthusiastically right up until LLMs and that point we sharply diverge.
For me, part of creating "perfect" software is that I am very much the one crafting the software. I'm learning while creating, but I find such learning is greatly diminished when I outsource building to AI. It's certainly harder and perhaps my software is worse, but for me the sense of achievement is also much greater.
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.
I guess software is going to be like furniture - there was some (possibly imagined) period where it was very well made and bought for the long term, and (obvious where this is going) now there’s lots of ikea crap that is easy and cheap but doesn’t survive a move or getting water spilled on it, and is essentially Formica over cardboard.
Overall both are net positives, I have some nice wood furniture and also a $7 Lack bedside table, and of course I rely on some industrial long term software (Linux e.g.) but almost every day vibe code some throwaway thing for a specific task.
What we really need is well-built open source software base with flexible and well-documented plugin SDKs where people can just vibecode their own extensions on top of them. The software needs to be designed from scratch expressly for the purpose of being extended in this way, and the SDK should place appropriate limits to allow multiple extensions to be combined easily.
Otherwise, there is too much you have to do right before you have a suitable software base to start building your extra personalized features on. Building on existing open-source software (not designed to be extended on) isn't great either because you would need to merge any changes from the original software into your fork, as opposed to a purpose-built SDK that would better tolerate plugins on different base software versions.
I'm working on this for gaming but the idea is really applicable to any kind of software, if the goal is to allow people to easily create and run personalized versions of them without as much effort and chance for things to go wrong.
About 15 years ago I thought of writing custom software for friends and family instead of paying for gifts in order to save money (and give something more “meaningful”). For instance a fun guessing game using photos from a group holiday.
I never did it because I imagined the pain of supporting every device or screen size, or dealing with someone who wants to know why their gift stopped working 6 months later.
The gains I’ve seen from LLM code - making me personally more productive in languages I’ve never used before - don’t erase the support burden so I think I’d still avoid this.
Still, I wonder if soon ordinary people will find it easy enough to make software for their own amusement (not just us nerds doing side projects to stay current), and will my job ever morph into being a software “mechanic“ who is paid to fix what someone else built? Not just “someone else working at the company who owns the software”, but a different company or individual entirely?
Will software maintenance become the job that big industry stops wanting to take because it’s so cheap to write something new that they’ll never fix this year’s model?
Or is software maintenance being democratised by LLMs such that a corner software shop could realistically offer maintenance for this one copy of a piece of software on this one device that the customer brings in?
I think we’ve never discussed a “software right to repair” because changing software is expensive, but we might see that change.
> The Extended Mind Theory argues that our tools are not just accessories, but literal extensions of our cognitive process. Viewed this way, a generic tool like a one-size-fits-all app, feels like a prosthetic that doesn’t quite fit.
We started with Google Sheets (way too cumbersome), then Docs (cumbersome in a different way), then a simple app using Firebase + the Google Maps embedded API built over a weekend, and then ended up building a full blown planning app and eventually a Chrome extension[0] that hooks directly into Google Maps (our preferred tool for exploring).
We are meticulous planners so I totally get the author's sentiment here. Many people see the app the first time and feel overwhelmed, but for us, it's hard to imagine using other tools now because this one fits "just right" having been built specifically for our planning process.
[0] For anyone interested: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turasapp/lpfijfdbgo...
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.
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.
I feel the same, I'm now building more side projects with the help of AI even if they're only for me
Very OT, and this betrays my age, but...
When I saw "Perfect Software" in the title, I thought it referred to Perfect Software, the developer who produced the Perfect Writer word processor, Perfect Calc spreadsheet, and Perfect Filer database. These were a suite of office software products developed in the early '80s for CP/M and MS-DOS computers.
I only read this because while messing around with learning some basic VPS and NGINX, I used Claude to spin up some quick frontends. One ended up being a geocities hackernews clone. Then while getting some basic process and terminal experience, I piped into Codex CLI to generate a summary modal to my visual liking. All of that to say that while I could have done it on my own, I likely wouldn't have because it allowed me a low friction path to implementing the bits that weren't crucial for what I was trying to learn.
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’ve always been somewhat dissatisfied with image viewing/browsing software. Gqview and Sequential came close to being what I wanted, but there were things about both that I didn’t like. I finally just wrote my own custom viewer using pyqt. For me, it is perfect software!
Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing right now—building my own software to restructure my work and life.
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.
Great vision for 2030.
But as for today, have we all just collectively decided to pretend that the LLMs we have are capable of writing good software?
I use LLMs a lot in my workflow, I probably spend a whole day per week learning and fiddling with new tools, techniques, etc. and trying to integrate them in all sorts of ways. Been at it for about a year and a half, mainly because I’m intrigued.
I’m sorry but it still very much sucks.
There are things it’s pretty good at, but writing software, especially in large brownfield projects, is not one of them. Not yet, at least.
I’m starting to believe many are just faking it.
I disagree.
How do we work together when we all have our own unilateral views of software?
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
Before LLMs, software wasn't just some artifact like a painting, a ladder, or a bloviating Facebook post—something ordinary humans made to suit their own purposes. It could only be made by the mutant lizard people from space who walk among us, wearing human skins, yet somehow having the innate ability to program. But by good old fashioned human ingenuity and manipulation tactics (aka marketing), we managed to trick the lizard people into building LLMs! Think of an LLM as an electronic genie that has, among other abilities, the lizard person's ability to write computer programs—and puts that power in the hands of ordinary human beings like you! Finally, after eight decades of computers—infernal machines built by the lizard people to enslave us all—the computer now does exactly what you want!
I see it as just another tool. Like any other tool, you have to learn it and integrate it into your workflow.
And as a learning tool, it’s extraordinary. Not because it replaces understanding, but because it accelerates it: you can explore unfamiliar domains, compare approaches, and iterate with feedback that used to take days or weeks.
The responsibility to think, judge, and decide still sits entirely with the developer.
Before LLMs, “perfect software” was largely a myth.
We know, your blog is the first static webpage in existence.
Third, it brings back autonomy.
This is the new talking point. Musk claims that cars that are always connected provide "autonomy", vibe coders claim that the stolen code distributed by Anthropic provides "autonomy".
War is peace, freedom is slavery.
What seems perfect is the adaptability & changeability, the suiting to fit.
We see LLMs as a huge opportunity here, to self define.
And existing software as too limberous & weighty.
But there are so many other dimensions and levels of how and why the past hasn't let us situate our software and us together effectively. The architecture of software doesn't have this grow-in-ability to it.
I love the Home-cooked Software and Barefoot Developers material. But neither of those ideas nor perfect software nor audience of one actually appeal to me that strongly. They are all very positive enormous breaks from bad software and bad times where we didn't have basic liberty over systems. But they all strike me as valorizing a particularly isolated rejectionist view of software, that ultimately is rude to the protocols & affordances building that a good healthy and connected form of software that we might and perhaps SHOULD aspire to.
But anything unjamming is from the inflexible unarticulated illegible mess of systems we can at best endure today is doing great work. Many positive steps into greater beyonds out of bad tar pits. 2025 has amazing hope amid all this.
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.
The comparison to coffee is bad, since it's obvious the best coffee is with no sugar and no milk.
Of all the topics to judge LLM use, this seems the least appropriate. This is about people making software for themselves and no one else. Your opinion on the quality of their software is entirely beside the point. No one is ever going to force you to use an LLM to make personal software. And no one is ever going to force you to use LLM-generated software that was explicitely made and intended to be used only by the one person.
There are a lot of contexts where I can understand arguing against LLM use (even in cases where I might not entirely agree, I can understand the objection), but this is not one of them.
Don't think this will improve your life? Great, don't do it. But this is also the most classic case of "don't yuck other people's yum". If someone tells you they used an LLM to make some piece of software for themselves and they like it or that it improved some aspect of their life or workflow, what on earth is gained by trying to convince them that no, actually, it's not good and isn't improving their lives and is in fact garbage?