N° 013Planted 2026

Note · in bloom

Bespoke Software

Robin Sloan in February of 2020:

This messaging app I built for, and with, my family, it won’t change unless we want it to change. There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a userbase inscrutable to us. It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision. What is this feeling? Independence? Security? Sovereignty?
Is it simply … the feeling of being home?

again Robin Sloan in an update September of 2026:

The AI industry’s immediate future has more to do with exotic finance and gnarly politics than the underlying technology. I’m not invested in that future; most days, I think a minor bust would be a good thing. But, that underlying technology, in its development and flourishing this past year — yes, really that recently — is profound. It reframes computing entirely, replaces a stack of API reference docs with this simple invitation:
Ask for what you want.

My alternative: get your wish, then stuff the genie back into the lamp.

The launch of Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 model on 2026-10-22 has made the pipe dream of bespoke software even more possible. You can theorize, plan, design, build, and launch your very own custom app just for you in a single sitting.

Over the course of my first two weeks planning, designing, building, and deploying The Dashboard with this model, I've found this to be right on the money.

David P. Reichert via Jason Kottke on 2026-08-23:

As a case study, I’ll be reporting on a series of small machine learning experiments, executed with various degrees of autonomy by Anthropic’s Claude. If you’re sceptical of claims around AI, but also haven’t really engaged with recent developments in agentic coding… continue on! (If not, also continue on).

David's article is a long read but worth every second to get a sense of where things stand.

To begin to answer the questions posed by Sloan, for me the things I've built recently (The Dashboard, the Whisky page, this garden) more so than any software I've built before (and I've built a few things) absolutely provide that feeling of being home.

They all come with a semblance of independence (all can be redeployed anywhere I want whenever I want because they're built in a way that enables such transportability, avoiding platform lock-in), security (nobody can make my content disappear without warning or recourse), and sovereignty (I decide what does and does not change, and how often) that other platforms, and even other projects I've helped build in the past haven't.

However, not everyone sees it as coming home, instead offering tempering perspectives: Maggie Appleton in Building Lodestone:

Without them, you are no more capable than when you started. You may even be less skilled as you slowly forget how to do tasks without the help of AI assistance.

Mandy Brown in Toolmen:

if those in power cannot prove that a great many people are already inferior then they will bring that inferiority about by forcing them to use a tool that diminishes their intellectual and creative capacity

Where I've landed, for now: I use the new tools to build faster with the tools I already know and rely on, not to replace them. This garden is built on Eleventy, the Whisky page is HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript, and I understand how both of them work.

Matt Webb, in A few technical words about Upsideclown, chooses his tech with one test:

will I be able to fix it, half drunk, ten years after I've lost all the tooling.

For these, the answer is yes. If the AI tools went away tomorrow, the garden would still build, and the Whisky page could go back to the plain HTML list I wrote by hand for years before I made it more interactive. The new tools make the work easier and faster, but nothing depends on them. That's a personal preference based on the past couple decades of enjoying using and working on the open web.

Questions

  • What does it mean to have software that is mine?
  • Is that Sloan's feeling of being home?
  • And if asking for what I want lets my programming muscles wither, as Sloan worried in Ideas and their origins, what am I trading for it?

Paths from here