"Five years ago, most software engineers I spoke to had no programs they had written for themselves."

What happened five years ago? Before that everyone used tools they wrote themselves. I think the answer is nothing happened five years ago and everyone still uses tools they wrote themselves.

A bit idealistic for the crowd here but has some good points.

The other day I wanted to build personal apps for my Kobo device. It has a single ~800Mhz core and 512 MB of RAM, probably eight times less than a rasbperry pi, but runs a Linux.

I wanted to break free from watching my laptop screen for long Claude sessions partially due to degrading eyesight and have a sidekick for approvals streamed to the Kobo. Apart from the Claude and Codex permissions sidekick done via hooks, I ended up building an entire SDK, an HN client, an RSS discovery & reader and an audiobook generator using deep research and ElevenLabs API all running on it.

Anyone using an LLM can now personalize it for their own Kobo device, which might have some nuances over my Clara BW. Significantly less work I hope than doing it all from scratch even with a coding agent.

https://github.com/BandarLabs/Cobalt

exe dev is a VC-funded company reselling open source software.

Everyone's making cash from your open source code except you.

Like everything else, modifying code of open-source tools has its cons and pros. The biggest advantage is of course an ability to customize the tool exactly to your needs. The problem is that it makes patching and upgrading impossible. This is the reason plugins exist - they do not break ability to patch the host product. So, if customization cannot be avoided even at the cost of losing ability to patch/upgrade - that would definitely work. Otherwise, plugins is probably the best approach.

I think this became aparent with agentic coding CLIs. In my company, it was not encouraged to use claude code because they haven't open sourced it yet

In the spirit of open source devtools & personalized software, check out my digital garden / monorepo I've been working on for 5years! For self-hosting NextJS on k8s & related infra like cnpg.

https://peat.eth.demokluster.com https://peat.eth.limo https://peat.eth.link

git clone https://peat.eth.demokluster.com/peat0.git

(webpage itself incl ro-git is hosted/mirrored over IPFS/ENS)

LLMs make things easier but can we not advocate for making them a dependency to configure our tools?

Even open weight models aren't fully open source. It's basically like having the back end binary but not the source code.

Use em to make your life easier but I'd rather not we normalize LLMs becoming the primary way we interact with open source software.

I think there is an argument to be made for how this benefits projects too, like if you want distribution then be as unencumbered as possible.

I've been making a couple little utils like a Clock for AI with an open public endpoint [https://github.com/firasd/mcpclock], a text file sampler [https://github.com/firasd/vblinds] and I was noticing the MIT license seems too encumbered with the requirement to keep crediting authors downstream so I used the 'Unlicense' public domain license

(CC-0 seems to be side-eyed by open source orgs cause it preserves patent rights)

I like using exe but I’m not sure what to feel about this if exe itself isnt open source. Granted, their agent is OSS, but still feels somewhat ironic

Everything is now open-source by default. All features are replicable. I don’t really care that much any more that tools need to be OSS because I can make my copies when I want. And I do when I so desire.

Your feature page is your source code.