"Shop jigs" is a great way to put it. I think a lot of software has gone from being made for general use to extremely individualised use. Before the Age of AI, it took so much human effort to write something that solved your problem that you might often go the extra mile so that others could re-use it. Now, it takes almost no effort, so the software stays ungeneralised. Some of the incentive has changed, I think. Most of the time I no longer share the things I've been building[0] because, for one thing they simply couldn't possibly have any benefit for others, and if they need something like it, they can build exactly the thing they want instead of having to extend or modify my thing. Like a jig!

0: https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/17-why-share/ (and related posts, I guess)

This is exactly it.

I've said many times that I believe "using the computer will transparently involve having it write and run code for you" (and if you're not technical you won't even know it!). What you're saying goes in that direction as well.

I feel that it's often better for us to create purpose-built tools for our lives, and with every model release, the complexity of those tools grows.

These are really personal tools: they solve a problem that other people might have, but are very tied to your own specific way of working, and would be hard to explain or adapt to someone else. So: shop jigs.

I have about 10 custom scripts and programs that are like this -- I haven't felt like this since college! Back then I had all the time in the world to customize my setup...now I have agents!

In a way, I want to show this to all my friends, but whenever I mentally trace how that would go, I realize they wouldn't really understand a bunch of the quirks they have, because they are _my_ quirks. They're reasonably complex pieces of tech that solve my problems very well, which are themselves particular versions of broader problems, and which I (at least for now) have no interest in supporting.

It's so clear we're heading in this direction, and yet so many people still believe code will be for the elites. Maybe production-code...As for the rest, I think soon your mom and dad are going to have their computer running code it wrote to serve them. Security-wise it's scary, but it's exciting to think about!

Sure it’s possible for anyone to build a harness if they had the inclination, but most people don’t have the inclination to do that.

And even if you did… I spent months refining AI workflows that were just obsoleted by ultracode.

I’ve been looking for a way to articulate this shift, and your analogy nails it. The value of libraries and infrastructure components in software engineering is eroding fast.

I am sure that in many organizations, teams responsible for this sort of work have less and less users coming to them.

In general this is the way I see open source going.

We won't reuse open source libraries as libraries we import, but as design inspiration for the bespoke tools we make.

It's too cheap to make your own stuff and too expensive to be stuck with someone else primitives.

But grounding AI Coding in existing tools is incredibly powerful.

100% concur and if you dig into any of these tools they are all frameworks and wrappers with prompt injections

I agree with this wholeheartedly.

[flagged]

[dead]

[flagged]