The Emacsification of Software

I've absolutely engaged in making personal software [0] thanks to the age of LLMs.

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

"Personal Software" i.e. programs that one writes for oneself, was the original vision of home computing back in the 1960s. The PC wasn't really anticipated, but the thought was that everyone would have a computer terminal at home, and write programs to do whatever was needed. It was imagined that programming would become easy enough that anyone could learn to do it. We're not there yet but with LLMs we're getting closer.

This article hints at what I feel is one of the not-yet-realized transformations that LLM coding brings: can we finally drop Electron/React Native and just have LLMs automate the work of transforming Figma/wireframes and behavior specs into truly native apps for each platform?

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.

I know the article is mostly about making stand-alone software, but this type of thing is why one of the things I value most when looking workflow tools I will be using heavily is extensibility. I can try put someone's neovim plugin for a second, figure out if it's something I actually need, and if so make my own personal version that matches my mental model perfectly, adds all the dumb little bells I want, and removes all the useful features I don't personally care about. Plus I no longer need to worry nearly as much about supply chain issues.

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.

I feel as though the author really missed an opportunity here: "The Emacsulation of Software"

Interesting article.

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.

"the terminal itself, which is almost always monospaced and thus fatiguing to read"

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.

Enjoyable article. I've had the same feeling about native software becoming more accessible with the help of llms. However, I tried the app and opened a large-ish markdown file and immediately had scroll hangs and then the app crashed. Making a small proof of concept is easy, but performance and reliability are still hard.

edit: typo

Ok, not the article I thought it was going to be. In fact it's the complete opposite of what Emacs means to me. For me, the point of Emacs is that I use one program to do everything. Why would I want a special bit of software just to view Markdown? I can view it in Emacs, and then it works with everything else I do. Developing lots of custom applications, AI assisted or not, is not replacing how I use Emacs.

I remember how just 5 years ago the majority of speakers were saying how absolutely everyone should learn computer programming. Already many years ago VBA was built to bridge the gap between engineers and other professions. Well, the gap is completely closed now, everyone can do what has been talked about for decades: programming computers. And I suspect even markdown will become obsolete very soon, eliminating this very last remnant of what programming used to be.

Ehmm, weird, I can't be the only one in the room. You guys didn't know about gfm and gfm-view Emacs modes?

Speaking of which, Emacs’es markdown-mode is pretty good. :^)

This is so exactly right and I've been saying it to whoever will put up with hearing it...(and now am embarrassed I have no link to prove it. oh well.)

Software production is so trivial now that everything is becoming a .emacs file: meaning, each individual living in their own entirely personal, endlessly customizable software cocoon. As the OP says, it's "easier to build your own solution than to install an existing one" - or to learn an existing one.

The other analogy that works here, not by concidence, is 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 understand.

Then there 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...). For example:

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:

Now in contrast, 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)

By BBM he means "brilliant bipolar mind" - I won't get into how he connects these things or whether fairly or not, but it's interesting how mental illness comes up, given how the phrase "AI psychosis", in both ironic and unironic variants, is so popular right now.

The other clear trend is the flip side: as production is so easy, the bottleneck is now consumption, and sharing software becomes an unsolved problem. This is why the Emacs analogy is so good. A .emacs file is as personal as a fingerprint. You might copy snippets from elsewhere into your .emacs file, but you'd never just use another person's - (besides maybe as a way to get started as a noob).

The more customized these things get, the harder it is for anyone else to understand them, or to want to understand them, and this distinction isn't important. It isn't just the cognitive cost of understanding the details of someone else's cocoon—it's also uncomfortable, like wearing someone else's clothes. One could even say it smells strange.

[editing - bear with me...]

I agree, experience this, love it, etc.

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?

i've made maybe 20 personal LLM tools this year. 3 survived past the first week. not because the rest weren't useful, just wasn't willing to debug them when something broke.

> You want a good Markdown viewer more than you think you do.

> 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

Terrible analogy. Emacs has always had comparably fewer major options for packages compared to other tools, there is often an obvious option based on your needs, and it has never been my experience that people decide to just roll their own versions of everything. The author has clearly never used neovim or now pi. NPM packages in general would have also been a way better example.

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.

Very cool read, kudos

I came here to recommend Marked: https://marked2app.com

But...I like MDV.

I love this and I have a handful of tools like this that I built for myself (I had claude write me a TUI crossplane kcl function renderer, for example -- something whose total addressable audience in the world is probably 20 people).

"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.

> Suddenly, I realized: a good Markdown viewer was a dumb thing to waste time looking for. It’s 2026. I can just have one extruded for me.

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.

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No, I don't. I don't want anything that has to do with John Gruber, ever.