While I wouldn't do asm, I love the approach and do much the same myself but in Ruby instead.

My wm, shell, terminal, editor, file manager, pop-up menu (dmenu-like) are all pure ruby (including font rendering and X11 bindings). These all started before I started using Claude to improve them, so they're still mostly hand-written, but that is changing.

They're messy, they have bugs and "misfeatures" that works for me but likely would be painful for others.

Like OP, I don't really recommend anyone else use my code, at least not directly, and that is extremely liberating.

Overall, the projects covers the largest surface of what I use beyond the kernel, a browser, and Xorg (I'm so, so tempted, but I think an LLM will need to get a lot further first before I could fit it into my schedule).

It doesn't need to be polished because it's mostly for me. It's okay for them to have bugs as long as they work better for me than the alternatives.

I strongly believe more people should do this. It's both a great learning experience, and it gives you a system that has exactly the features you actually want and use.

And it's only going to get easier to do this.