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Posted by xngbuilds 22 hours ago

A desktop made for one(isene.org)
375 points | 205 commentspage 3
jstanley 21 hours ago|
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.

cultofmetatron 21 hours ago|
seriously.... we already have a constellation of good deterministic tooling for taking a relatively high concept spec to low level assembly. what does an llm offer in generating optimized asm that rust wouldn't??
geir_isene 20 hours ago||
Less memory footprint. No reliance on libs. Pure first-person control. No wasted CPU cycles is the target here for me. And if you read the post, the asm set is only for the desktop itself. The tools I use are in Rust. Result is: Laptop now runs at between 5-6W (down from ~9W) [XPS14 latest hw] on Ubuntu 26.04 - giving me around 3.5h extra battery life.
jstanley 19 hours ago|||
My guess is you're likely to waste more cycles on development time, and on suboptimal algorithms because the implementation is harder, than you would waste on rust-related bloat.

Still a cool project, thanks for sharing.

I have wondered about having LLMs output machine code directly and skipping the compiler/assembler altogether. Then you'd just commit your spec/prompt and run it through the LLM to get your binary.

cultofmetatron 20 hours ago||||
> Less memory footprint. No reliance on libs.

rust can do that. You can run a hyper stripped down rust that was made for embedded devices specifically because those devices don't have room for a runtime.

geir_isene 20 hours ago||
I'm sure I can. The original challenge was more in line of "I wonder if CC can do this now?"

And it apparently can. And very well.

One advantage seems to be that the complete asm file fits easily into CC context window.

cultofmetatron 19 hours ago||
> The original challenge was more in line of "I wonder if CC can do this now?"

well, I can respect that for sure

globalnode 10 hours ago|||
+3.5h extra battery life is a real measurable result! well done.
Kalabasa 14 hours ago||
One term for these is "home-cooked" software.

https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

soraminazuki 10 hours ago|
"Home" as in "phoning home"? Because Claude Code sure isn't local, privacy-respecting software.
theshrike79 3 hours ago||
No, but you can (and should) use VC-funded AIs to create local privacy-respecting software that will keep working when the bubble bursts.
cyberpunk 21 hours ago||
Some screenies and the code at 0…

I struggle to understand why, though.

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

thom 20 hours ago|
Same reason people muck about with knowledge management systems... to put off the day when you have to sit down at your desk and actually do something.
matheusmoreira 12 hours ago||
Respect. I want to do the same thing. I'm studying electronics, PCBs and CAD in order to build the literal computer that I've always wanted as well. It's my lifetime project. Who knows if I'll ever succeed? I think AI significantly upped my chances but still.
Antibabelic 7 hours ago||
> It used to be that writing your own editor, your own file manager, your own window manager, was a project of years.

This is... Not really true? Especially if you are writing just for yourself. These are week-long projects at most to get to a usable state, if you know what you're doing. This is why there are so many text editors and window managers in the first place.

paweladamczuk 8 hours ago||
What about the cybersecurity aspect of bespoke software?

A cybersecurity research company can now spend a small fortune on finding zero days in iOS because of the amount of people that use it. It basically guarantees there will be clients like government agencies willing to pay through the nose for the exploits.

Software made for one might disrupt this business model.

lionkor 4 hours ago|
Software made for one, made by LLMs which regurgitate the average of existing tools, are going to have more security issues, not less.
theshrike79 3 hours ago||
But how would you exploit them when every one of them is subtly different?

With software that's deployed to millions of computers you have an abundance of targets, but trying to target some random LLM average todo list at scale is hard, isn't it?

lionkor 15 minutes ago||
Yes, but it should be fairly easy to "simply" attack the common technologies that LLMs keep parroting. NextJS, or some Rust tools, or whatever other tools LLMs "love" using, are all great targets.

Once millions of completely unskilled developers have "workflows" that consist of asking an LLM to make a thing, followed by those LLMs pulling in the same 100 (often outdated versions of) dependencies, you have a beautiful attack vector.

Yes, it's "easy" to attack something like Obsidian. It's probably easier to attack a couple hundred dependencies LLMs like to use, or to test what LLMs commonly do to implement things from scratch, and attack those weaknesses.

We are just lucky that enough real, smart, people engineered things that actually work, are well understood, and keep us safe, like firewalls.

beanjuiceII 15 hours ago||
everyone is finally coming around to emacs way of doing things after all these years :D
onetom 18 hours ago||
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

geir_isene 18 hours ago|
That would be a huge payload with a few thousand prompts...
JHonaker 17 hours ago||
Even better!
noashavit 16 hours ago||
I feel like build vs buy is the conversation now. I’m not a developer but I’ve built agents I use daily. When most people can vibe code their way to a custom app, value will most likely hinge on support and other “services”. Just my 2 cents, feel free to tell me I’m wrong!
theshrike79 3 hours ago|
TBH this is a discussion companies are having internally. There are so many low/mid-tier SaaS systems people have bought because they need maybe one or two features from there. Maybe they're the only one that integrates with $vendor properly.

Now it's perfectly possible to do a "good enough" solution in-house for less than what we pay for the SaaS monthly. And as a bonus we own the full solution and can add any features we want without the SaaS provider gatekeeping it.

mettamage 17 hours ago|
I use code that hooks into existing programs so that I can customize the existing programs to what I want
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