I agree. For many people, LLMs are the first time that computers do what they tell them to. Not what some big tech PM has decided is or isn’t possible.

At the same time, OP is in the right to reject contributions they don’t want. Nobody providing open-source software is under any obligations to take changes. Forking is still a viable option in 2026. And I don’t think we need an on-demand app store either because the trust issues will still exist for good reason. We can have highly produced software coexisting with LLM agents.

Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend

If you scroll through any personal finance forum every year someone will discover the forum and excitedly share their customised budget tracking sheet they built from scratch and it works exactly as they wanted to. How many do you think even get 1 upvote?

Everyone building a software will just mean people can produce code which others might not really care for and might even be particularly be mean. That’s how the Internet works unfortunately.

The current logic seem to be confusing two things. One AI as a technology and wisdom of the crowd using AI. One might ground breaking tech and improve over time while the other might not move the needle at all.

What is the kind of person who would use such software? What you’re describing is the need for a two sided market where really only one side exists.

A user would have to be someone who doesn’t have access to an LLM to make bespoke software themselves, and isn’t able to use existing software. I think that’s a vanishingly small segment of people.

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ This has never been truer than right now. What we need isn't app store ecoystems but to eliminate the friction for distributing apps to your inner circle. We're entering the WhatsApp era of software, where everyone is going to be using a home cooked version of every piece of software that can conceivably exist on an island, and it's going to be a vibe coded mess, but it's going to be lovingly maintained by the people that use it every day. This is why I'm bullish on things like https://sprites.dev/ (not affiliated, just a customer). I have a little self replicating starter template that lets me quickly stand up new sprites with all my stuff logged in, ttyd + tmux so I can run claude code in the browser from my phone, and a caddy reverse proxy so I can also host a little starter app behind the fly io relay that sprites get out of the box so I don't have to do any extra work to have a publicly accessible https url I can send to people. Using this set up I've created dozens of little silly web applications for my family and friends, none of them were more complicated than little sketches but we've gotten some real pleasure out of them. There's still quite a bit of friction here though and I think if someone can really make this seamless for people they'll have something really special.

As an example, the android options for printing to my outdated brother printer were all terrible (ad supported nokoprint for example), so I used my template to create https://print.walden-gabrielw.workers.dev/ (This one a put a cloudflare worker in front of because it's just a static html+js page and I didn't want to pay for uncached traffic but the principal is basically the same). No one will likely ever use this but me and my wife, but the cost to keep it up is basically 0, the cost to build it was very reasonable, and if it ever breaks I'm fairly confident the latest LLM will be able to debug it without too much trouble.

> We almost need like ... noncanonical software?

You mean some modern version of vb or php?

That is the entire point of low-code and no-code.

> The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to.

You absolutely don't need LLMs for that.

Its the very description of most corporate JavaScript developers, and probably most Java developers. I say that as somebody who wrote corporate JavaScript full time from 2008-2023. Most of these people had no idea what they are doing. They could throw something together using their favorite abstraction library/framework but then struggled to maintain it. If there were performance or accessibility problems that came up there were only three outputs: hostility, crying, or starting over from scratch. The insecurity was real. You can still see it today. As an experiment take React away and note the response.

An ecosystem on shared formats can exist hapily

There's a billion ways of opening a markdown and doing things with it and generally they all coexist hapily

> I hope we can think about some answers and not get tribal though because this is really a huge problem and also a huge opportunity and so a minor reminder that there is a baby in that bathwater?

I think no answers are needed.

If anyone can build the software they need, no ecosystem will be needed. There will be no maintainers because no one will be using his thing.

If it makes sense (economical, but no limited to it), then it will progress in that direction. If it makes no sense it is a fad that eventually dies out.

There may or may not be a baby in the bathwater. In truth nothing in this bathtub matter too much.

I do a bit in my IT classes where I show a "spectrum" of computer activities, from "changing a screensaver" to "Assembly" and then challenge people to find the line where "using a computer" stops and "programming a computer" starts.

It was already very fuzzy (Excel?). Soon, this line be non-existent.

...maybe some sort of "Software Bazaar", where the users of the software can edit their own software and make local modifications that they need to it, probably with NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License

It'd also be really nice that if you received some such software that you'd have the right to run the program as you wish, study how the program works and change it to make it do what you wish, and the freedom to redistribute either the original, or your modifications to the software?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T...

...we can dream though, can't we?

> The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to.

There was nothing stopping them from making software before... Over the past ~15 years, the amount of resources to learn programming, and to make the whole process approachable, is staggering. It just took some time and effort. People are just excited that they can skip past the effort part now. But we've lost something in the process.

it's called plugins, lots of end user facing OSS have vibrant plugin ecosystems.

maintainers like the sense of power and it's not really more complicated than that. perfectly valid emotion to chase!

> sense of pride and accomplishment

What? Pride of what? What accomplishment?

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So I am thinking this is like an army of plebs going to Home Depot, buying power tools, and building a house with no experience. Oh what fun—we can finally build a house the barrier has been broken.

I don’t want software written by plebs.

When they shoot a little artistic clip with their nice modern iPhone camera, it does not mean they get to insert it into a Hollywood movie.