alt Hacker NewsTo 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.
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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/
> 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.
> 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 ;)
> 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.
Why would this new paradigm create interesting tooling? From your description I expect wrose not better tools.
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.
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"
I totally feel this. Prior I never had time for doing this but now I just do it without even thinking about contributing.
Funny, I just released my dev setup as “Open prompt”
And how great it will be to troubleshoot any issues because everyone is basically running a distinct piece of software
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.