A desktop made for one

I (and I'm sure many others) have been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of months. I called it "Extremely Personal Software" in a blog post a few months ago (https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/14-releasing-software-now/) but there are lots of names and concepts floating about for the same basic idea.

I think it's possible the amount of new software that will be written for an audience of 1-10 will be greater in 2026 than in any previous year, and then the same again for many years to come. I also think a lot of this software will be essentially 'hidden' - people just writing this stuff for themselves because the cost to say things to an agent is very low compared with the cost of actually planning out a software design and so forth.

Interoperability will probably be important in the next few years and I wonder if this is something solvable at the agent/LLM level (standing instructions like 'typically, use sqlite, use plaintext, use open standards' or whatever). I also think observability and ops will be pretty important - many people who want personal software but don't care for the maintenance and upkeep.

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.

The agent sessions (traces) would be very educational too.

Would it be possible to share the jsonl files too, like how Mario Zechner shared his chats with the AI, while working on his Pi coding agent?

https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/2041151967695634619?s=46

This is very cool. I wonder how much time did it actually take, and how much did it cost, because Clause Code is very much not free [1] [2]. It's more like hiring a robotic contractor, very fast, but with a serious hourly rate.

[1]: https://fortune.com/2026/04/28/nvidia-executive-cost-of-ai-i...

[2]: https://www.briefs.co/news/uber-torches-entire-2026-ai-budge...

I think this is going to be the OS of the future. You tell the computer what you want to do, and it uses the OS's APIs to create your program for you. No more copilot embedded in notepad unless that what you ask for.

Most software is done after the first or second version and the developers just keep working on it to justify their job; adding features no one needs and just get in the way or make the program worse. It'll be nice when the software I have does exactly what I need and doesn't change until I tell it to change for something I need.

The only feature Macos has shipped in the past 10 years that I actually like is air-drop. Everything else is a PITA annoyance, or as I've found out from upgrading, just bug ridden slop that doesn't work well anymore.

I find this fascinating. I also like to customize my desktop experience with my own code, but it's more assembling stuff with some additional code as glue.

A word of warning: a reliable lock tool for X11 is difficult. You should look at XSecureLock, which uses a multiprocess approach to avoid leaving the desktop unprotected in case of crash. It also implements a number of countermeasure to ensure the desktop stays locked and the locker stays in the front of the display. It's small too, so easy to audit (but written in C).

I’m inspired by the message.

On this software itself: I’d like to know how this feels to use. It’s so very lightweight. Does it feel categorically different to what we are used to?

One of the things I miss about the 1980s home computers is that they booted into a usable command line in a handful of seconds, from a few KB in ROM. Imagine what today’s HW could do if we’d retained that level of efficiency.

Sorry I have a question that is a little off-topic: what's the value of generating an image of a laptop on a desk? That's not like it's particularly relevant, when you could have integrated a screen shot of your set-up (like the same one you put on a few of your repos) or something more unique, and even if you want to show that, it's easy to find similar images with the same vibe, so I guess it's for some fun I missed in the process?

Why did you choose to have Claude write it in assembly language?

There are big benefits to using a language that has good static analysis with LLMs.

Some screenies and the code at 0…

I struggle to understand why, though.

0: https://github.com/isene/chasm

So how productive are you now vs. before? I assume this was the reason for doing this?

Is this an advertisement for Claude Code? It sure seems like it.

I've been building an object oriented system re-imagined in a world with LLMs called Abject (https://abject.world) and one thought I had was to build an OS that boots into my project. One way to do it would be a minimal linux distro (think firefox os or similar). Has anyone done something like this with their projects?

Did OP write this by hand? It reads like language written by a human overfitted on GPT 4o or Claude.