logoalt Hacker News

arjieyesterday at 9:08 PM1 replyview on HN

Haha, it's funny that we've all reached the same conclusion. I, too, believe in the same idea[0][1]. What is fascinating to me is how many things can now be elided from software. I don't use configuration files or things like that. I can simply hardcode everything in because there is only one user. If I want to configure it the other way, I just modify it and rebuild it.

The other thing is that other people's applications are rarely useful. Their libraries are, the feature description READMEs are, but the software itself is full of attempts at generality that make them overly annoying for me to use. Instead I have extremely idiosyncratic software - anyone else would find it insufferable.

The wild thing, though, is that my software is outrageously useful for me. I can see why Anthropic and OpenAI are (or shortly will be) the trillion-dollar behemoths they are. They are enabling a personal productivity increase of epic proportions[2]. The highly specific functionality also means strange things performance wise. I don't need to use Electron or Tauri or whatever. Instead, my thing is Rust with objc2 and it starts instantaneously. On my M1 Max, it's the fastest text viewer I can start. 100s of megabytes of JSON and it's launching is imperceptible for my tool, pretty-printing is instantaneous, breadcrumbs are live.

Because I can make it do only the thing I want it to do. It can't do other things. I cannot edit or auto-complete or anything. And this is great. Useless to others and fantastic to me.

Likewise, my blog is on Mediawiki (which I like so anyone can edit) but the authoring flow is kind of annoying. Uploading images causes a break from writing, and requires a lot of form-filling that interrupts my thought. So I now have this software that does everything I want: link autocompletion, background image uploads, post-hoc publishing, previews and diffs, built-in Wikipedia search to interwiki link. Who would want this but me? It only brings me pleasure.

What a revolution in software.

0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-25/The_rise_of_...

1: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-30/Personal_Sof...

2: Predictably, I have chosen to use the spare time on leisure


Replies

geir_iseneyesterday at 9:10 PM

Cool reply & thanks for the links.