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.
The whole point of this sentiment is that the personal tools wouldn't EXIST due to the time sink needed.
The tradeoff makes sense for a lot of people even if it's not a good fit for you.
Also I don't want to take someone's existing project and change it. They have too much cruft and don't work Just The Way I Like It.
That's why we create custom stuff from scratch.
Its fun, and a lot more rewarding than replacing tool X with tool Y, realizing you actually hate it.
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.
The other thing is that other people's applications are rarely useful. Their libraries are, the feature description READMEs are, but the software itself is full of attempts at generality that make them overly annoying for me to use. Instead I have extremely idiosyncratic software - anyone else would find it insufferable.
The wild thing, though, is that my software is outrageously useful for me. I can see why Anthropic and OpenAI are (or shortly will be) the trillion-dollar behemoths they are. They are enabling a personal productivity increase of epic proportions[2]. The highly specific functionality also means strange things performance wise. I don't need to use Electron or Tauri or whatever. Instead, my thing is Rust with objc2 and it starts instantaneously. On my M1 Max, it's the fastest text viewer I can start. 100s of megabytes of JSON and it's launching is imperceptible for my tool, pretty-printing is instantaneous, breadcrumbs are live.
Because I can make it do only the thing I want it to do. It can't do other things. I cannot edit or auto-complete or anything. And this is great. Useless to others and fantastic to me.
Likewise, my blog is on Mediawiki (which I like so anyone can edit) but the authoring flow is kind of annoying. Uploading images causes a break from writing, and requires a lot of form-filling that interrupts my thought. So I now have this software that does everything I want: link autocompletion, background image uploads, post-hoc publishing, previews and diffs, built-in Wikipedia search to interwiki link. Who would want this but me? It only brings me pleasure.
What a revolution in software.
0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-25/The_rise_of_...
1: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-30/Personal_Sof...
2: Predictably, I have chosen to use the spare time on leisure