AI coding assistance makes it possible (even relatively easy) to create applications for your own personal use. They can be weird, quirky, and “missing features.” It won’t have all those dozens of menu items, hundreds of icons, and thousands of features that commercial software contains in order to cater to every possible customer. Because there’s only one “customer” and it’s you.
I’ve occasionally created personal software. My applications have been things like Hypercard stacks (remember Hypercard?), shell scripts for managing to-to lists and schedules, and simple text editors. To be honest, I haven’t generally meant the text editors to be used; that’s just been the “sample app” I’ve used for learning a new programming platform.
Thinking about how long most of my personal software has stayed useful, I realized most of it has only lasted a short while. Not because it didn’t work, but because the platform I wrote it for, and with, didn’t last. When I left my Commodore 64 for an Apple //, I also left my C-64 software. Same thing happened in the transitions to Macintosh, SunOS/Solaris, HP-UX, MS-DOS, Linux, and OSX. I’m leaving out iOS because apart from a couple of early demos, I’ve stayed away from iOS development.
But the world of personal computing hardware has settled down a lot. Platforms last longer. If I wrote a personal program on my Mac 20 years ago, it would probably still work (or just need minor updates) on my Mac today. And a web app that works in a browser, depending on how you built it, might stay current that long too. The corollary of greater stability, though, is that there are more options available if you want a small program that does one specific thing very well. My personal software development has tapered off in recent years because there are great products that already do what I want without a lot of big-corporation cruft. Even if you know how to do it, developing personal software takes time and effort.
Things have changed again, though. Now if I want a personal schedule manager, Claude Code will do virtually all of the tedious work. All I have to do is be sufficiently clear and concise about what I want. And Shazam, I have it. Mostly, at least. The only thing is, I have to rethink what I might want, because by now I’ve collected a mostly open-source software set that I’m happy with.
Maybe I’ll return to the development genre I started with in the first place, with my old Commodore 64: games!
