What does it mean to release software now? I built a little chromatic sampler called Ayay with Claude in about an hour, time mostly spent noodling around trying to find a nice interaction method that worked for my intuition. To me this software is valuable(-ish), but anyone could build the same thing, tailored exactly to their own specific needs, in the same amount of time. All you need is Claude Code and a rough spec. So what’s the point of publishing software, especially open source, in the age of AI?
I’ve been thinking about this since I left some comments on Hacker News about a Show HN. The specific product doesn’t matter, but Show HN has been utterly inundated with slop over the last few months. Nearly every day there’s a post up with a variation of “Use it. Break it. Hack on it.” as a lovely shibboleth to indicate that even the post was written by AI to try and Maximise Engagement.
For ages I’ve been wondering - qui bono? And then Peter Steinberger got hired by OpenAI and it made a bit more sense. (No shade, Peter, congratulations on buying the winning hype train lottery ticket!)
However, I think this hype-train-driven-development cycle is a short-to-medium-term thing. I think that the real gold is what I’m calling Extremely Personal Computing, which is overlapping but not the same as the Claw-type personal agent stuff we’ve been seeing lately. (Coining names is fun!)
In the spirit of the whole nobody-knows-how-to-define-agent thing, I won’t define Extremely Personal Computing directly, I’ll just do it by example. I love Formula E and I read all the Formula E news there is out there. I check the Formula E news websites multiple times a day. Sometimes, I don’t get to watch the race live, and out of habit, I check the news websites and spoil myself on the result. So now, I have Claude read the news sites for me and send me the articles when they’re published - but when there are spoilers, it’ll rewrite the headline and include a big spoiler warning.
I’d be deeply surprised if basically anybody in the entire world has this specific problem. There’s essentially no point in sharing the solution in any way. Even telling people about it almost doesn’t make any sense. That’s what I think is Extremely Personal Computing - something like the equivalent of cooking a meal for myself with the ingredients in my fridge on a Tuesday last month.
I think the amount of software that exists is going to utterly explode. I think it’s likely more software is going to be written (for some value of written) in 2026 than in all of the 20th Century combined. I’m sure I myself have caused more code to exist in the last 6 weeks than the entirety of my life up to now, and I’m a career software engineer. But I also think the vast majority of software, in the medium-to-long term, is going to be practically unseen, just like the vast majority of all meals cooked. Although I suppose people do post pictures of their dinner on social media. Is that the future of software development?
Appendix: My Show HN comments
Some related comments on a Show HN thread that got me thinking about this. I haven’t reread them - maybe my viewpoint has changed since I wrote them.
From this thread:
I think these days if I’m going to be actively promoting code I’ve created (with Claude, no shade for that), I’ll make sure to write the documentation, or at the very least the readme, by hand. The smell of LLM from the docs of any project puts me off even when I like the idea of the project itself, as in this case. It’s hard to describe why - maybe it feels like if you care enough to promote it, you should care to try and actually communicate, person to person, to the human being promoted at. Dunno, just my 2c and maybe just my own preference. I’d rather read a typo-ridden five line readme explaining the problem the code is there to solve for you and me, the humans, not dozens of lines of perfectly penned marketing with just the right number of emoji. We all know how easy it is to write code these days. Maybe use some of that extra time to communicate with the humans. I dunno.
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I don’t want to come off like I’m shitting on the poster here. I’ve definitely made that kind of careless mistake, probably a dozen times this week. And maybe we’re heading to a future where nobody even reads the readme anymore because they won’t be needed because an agent can just conjure one from the source code at will, so maybe it actually straight up doesn’t matter. I’ve just been thinking about what it means to release software nowadays, and I think the window for releasing software for clout and credit is closing, since creating software basically requires a Claude subscription and an idea now, so fewer people are impressed by the thing simply existing, and the standard of care for a project released for that aim (of clout) needs to be higher than it maybe needed to be in the past. But who knows, I’m probably already a dinosaur in today’s world, and I really don’t mean to shit on the OP - it’s a good idea for a project and it makes a lot of sense for it to exist. I just can’t tell if any actual care has gone into it, and if not, why promote?
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I wasn’t “irked” by the readme, and I did read it. But it didn’t give me a sense that you had put in “time and effort” because it felt deeply LLM-authored, and my comment was trying to explore that and how it made me feel. I had little meaningful data on whether you put in that effort because the readme - the only thing I could really judge the project by - sounded vibe coded too. And if I can’t tell if there has been care put into something like the readme how can I tell if there’s been care put into any part of the project? If there has and if that matters - say, I put care into this and that’s why I’m doing a show HN about it - then it should be evident and not hidden behind a wall of LLM-speak! Or at least; that’s what I think. As I said in a sibling comment, maybe I’m already a dinosaur and this entire topic won’t matter in a few years anyway.
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