[CGamesPlay]

To me, the most interesting thing about Pi and the "claw" phenomenon is what it means for open source. It's becoming passé to ask for feature requests and even to submit PRs to open source repos. Instead of extensions you install, you download a skill file that tells a coding agent how to add a feature. The software stops being an artifact and starts being a living tool that isn't the same as anyone else's copy. I'm curious to see what tooling will emerge for collaborating with this new paradigm.

[throwaway13337]

I see this happening, too.

We know that a lack of control over their environment makes animals, including humans, depressed.

The software we use has so much of this lack of control. It's their way, their branding, their ads, their app. You're the guest on your own device.

It's no wonder everyone hates technology.

A world with software that is malleable, personal, and cheap - this could do a lot of good. Real ownership.

The nerds could always make a home with their linux desktop. Now everyone can. It'll change the equation.

I'm quite optimistic for this future.

[h14h]

I'm presently in the process of building (read: directing claude/codex to build) my own AI agent from the ground up, and it's been an absolute blast.

Building it exactly to my design specs, giving it only the tool calls I need, owning all the data it stores about me for RAG, integrating it to the exact services/pipelines I care about... It's nothing short of invigorating to have this degree of control over something so powerful.

In a couple of days work, I have a discord bot that's about as useful as chatgpt, using open models, running on a VPS I manage, for less than $20/mo (including inference). And I have full control over what capabilities I add to it in the future. Truly wild.

[GTP]

> The nerds could always make a home with their linux desktop. Now everyone can. It'll change the equation.

Probelm is, to be able to do what you're describing, you still need the source code and the permission to modify it. So you will need to switch to the FOSS tools the nerds are using.

[cedws]

We’re off to a great start then with Anthropic banning users who use alternative clients with their Claude subscription.

[hdjrudni]

That's just because corporations got greedy and made their apps suck.

Strip away the ads, the data harvesting, add back the power features, and we'll be happy again. I'm more willing than ever to pay a one-time fee good software. I've started donating to all the free apps I use on a regular basis.

I don't want to own my own slop. That doesn't help me. Use your AI tools to build out the software if you want, but make sure it does a good job. Don't make me fiddle with indeterministic flavor-of-the-month AI gents.

[redfloatplane]

I've been thinking about this lately too. I think we're going to see the rise of Extremely Personal Software, software that barely makes any sense outside of someone's personal context. I think there is going to be _so_ much software written for an audience of 1-10 people in the next year. I've had Claude create so much tooling for me and a small number of others in the last few months. A DnD schedule app; a spoiler-free formula e news checker; a single-use voting site for a climbing co-op; tools to access other tools that I don't like using by hand; just absolutely tons of stuff that would never have made any sense to spend time on before. It's a new world. https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/14-releasing-software-now/

[boh]

I think people overestimate the general population's ability and interest in vibe coding. Open source tools are still a small niche. Vibe code customized apps are an even bigger niche.

[bandrami]

> a living tool that isn't the same as anyone else's copy

Yes, which is why this model of development is basically dead-in-the-water in terms of institutional adoption. No large firm or government is going to allow that.

[raincole]

Large institutions and governments had been pushing back against open source too until it became obviously inevitable.

[GTP]

> It's becoming passé to ask for feature requests and even to submit PRs to open source repos.

Yet, the first impact on FOSS seems to be quite the opposite: maintainers complaining about PRs and vulnerability disclosures that turn out to be AI hallucinations, wasting their time. It seems to be so bad that now GitHub is offering the possibility of turning off pull requests for repositories. What you present here is an optimistic view, and I would be happy for it to be correct, but what we've seen so far unfortunately seems to point in a different direction.

[brandensilva]

We might be witnessing some survivor bias here based on our own human conditioning. Successful PRs aren't going to make the news like the bad ones do.

With that said, we are all dealing with AI still convincingly writing code that doesn't work despite passing tests or introducing hard to find bugs. It will be some time until we iron that out fully for more reliable output I suspect.

Unfortunately we won't be able to stop humans thinking they are software engineers when they are not now that the abstraction language is the human language so guarding from spam will be more important than ever.

[lugao]

Why would this new paradigm create interesting tooling? From your description I expect wrose not better tools.

[vidarh]

Worse it better for you when it meets your needs better.

I use a lot of my own software. Most of it is strictly worse both in terms of features and bugs than more intentional, planned projects. The reason I do it is because each of those tools solve my specific pain points in ways that makes my life better.

A concrete example: I have a personal dashboard. It was written by Claude in its entirety. I've skimmed the code, but no more than that. I don't review individual changes. It works for me. It pulls in my calendar, my fitbit data, my TODO list, various custom reminders to work around my tendency to procrastinate, it surfaces data from my coding agents, it provides a nice interface for me to browse various documentation I keep to hand, and a lot more.

I could write a "proper" dashboard system with cleanly pluggable modules. If I were to write it manually I probably would because I'd want something I could easily dip in and out of working on. But when I've started doing stuff like that in the past I quickly put it aside because it cost more effort than I got out of it. The benefit it provides is low enough that even a team effort would be difficult to make pay off.

Now that equation has fundamentally changed. If there's something I don't like, I tell Claude, and a few minutes - or more - later, I reload the dashboard and 90% of the time it's improved.

I have no illusions that code is generic enough to be usable for others, and that's fine, because the cost of maintaining it in my time is so low that I have no need to share that burden with others.

I think this will change how a lot of software is written. A "dashboard toolkit" for example would still have value to my "project". But for my agent to pull in and use to put together my dashboard faster.

A lot of "finished products" will be a lot less valuable because it'll become easier to get exactly what you want by having your agent assemble what is out there, and write what isn't out there from scratch.

[rbren]

Funny, I just released my dev setup as “Open prompt”

https://github.com/rbren/personal-ai-devbox

[giancarlostoro]

> Instead of extensions you install, you download a skill file that tells a coding agent how to add a feature. The software stops being an artifact and starts being a living tool that isn't the same as anyone else's copy. I'm curious to see what tooling will emerge for collaborating with this new paradigm.

I build my own inspired by Beads, not quite as you're describing, but I store todo's in a SQLite database (beads used SQLite AND git hooks, I didn't want to be married to git), and I let them sync to and from GitHub Issues, so in theory I can fork a GitHub repo, and have my tool pull down issues from the original repo (havent tried it when its a fork, so that's a new task for the task pile).

https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails/issues

You can see me dogfeeding my tool to my tools codebase and having my issues on the github for anyone to see, you can see the closed ones. I do think we will see an increase in local dev tooling that is tried and tested by its own creators, which will yield better purpose driven tooling that is generic enough to be useful to others.

I used to use Beads for all my Claude Code projects, now I just use GuardRails because it has safety nets and works without git which is what I wanted.

I could have forked Beads, but the other thing is Beads is a behemoth of code, it was much easier to start from nothing but a very detailed spec and Claude Code ;)

[thierrydamiba]

I actually look at this another way. I think we’re going to see a lot more open source. Before you had to get your pr merged into main. Now people will just ask ai to build the tool they need and then open source it.

Maintainers won’t have to deal with an endless stream of PRs. Now people will just clone your library the second it has traction and make it perfect for their specific use case.

Cherry pick the best features and build something perfect for them. They’ll be able to do things your product can’t, and individual users will probably find a better fit in these spinoffs than in the original app.

[davej]

Patrick Collison said this yesterday on TBPN, "Software is becoming like pizza […] It should be cooked right then and there at the moment of use"

[dTal]

  Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

  --Alan Perlis

[brandensilva]

I totally feel this. Prior I never had time for doing this but now I just do it without even thinking about contributing.

[axelthegerman]

And how great it will be to troubleshoot any issues because everyone is basically running a distinct piece of software

[theshrike79]

It's like the dude who monkey-patches their car and goes to the dealer to complain why the suspension is stiff.

It's because you put 2by4's in place of the shocks, you absolute muppet. And then they either give them a massive bill to fix it properly or politely show them out.

Same will happen in self-modifying software. Some people are self-aware enough to know that "I made this, it's my problem to fix", some will complain to the maker of the harness they used and will be summarily shown the door.

[wrxd]

I don’t want to be the one who has to upgrade this software + vibe coded patches.

It’s going to be very likely that once something is patched is to be considered as diverged and very hard to upgrade

[sshine]

... made minutes ago.

[CuriouslyC]

[flagged]

[theshrike79]

Think of skills more like Excel macros (or any other software with robust macro support). It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to provide the specific workflow you need, but your own sheet needs it.