I am working on a project/essay/thoughtsphere that is beautifully illustrated by this thread. My project is to help automatically take your patches/workflows and package and rebase on top of upstream using quilt so I can get the latest greatest fixes while keeping my notafork. Forks are expensive, patches are easy.

That I think we're going to see much much more variation in design, software and interfaces as the labor to produce them become trivial. Everyone can patch software to do what they want. Yesterday I had claude rewrite xrdp to allow me to remote into my desktop session without having to deal with x11vnc, it lets me drop in, pick :0 or :1, auth's with PAM and gets me in. What I have always wanted with xrdp that never worked quite right. I have patches for i3, and for vim, and for xpdf, and bash, and mocp, and all sorts of tools and scripts I wrote.

Anyway, here's the site essay I am working up but yeah:

Right now, programming is rapidly becoming not expert work. Soon we could all be running (i think this unironically) practically our own distros if we want. Total customization of the stack.

I really feel that one positive thing AI can do is drive labor costs down enough to allow personal choice in the software we use. We have open source software, but it's channelized and controlled by a few companies who fund projects! That might change too!

AI can simply One Shot a lot of small problems i have. Like reading unfamiliar codebases, finding the relevant function, and writing the delta. The gap between "I want bash to do X" and "here's a patch" is shrinking fast. When that gap closes, a lot more people are going to start customizing their software - but we don't have a great wrapper for it yet.

The part that doesn't get easier is everything after. How many 'forks' exist on github but people havent had time to maintain, or worse, are being used in production with bugs? How much code have we lost out because of that? Do forks really help us? I don't know. Does everyone want to use shitlab? I don't know.

Building the package. Getting it on your machine or out to the fleet. Keeping it there when upstream ships a security fix.

That's an infrastructure problem, not an AI problem I needed a way to solve it now

________ is that little bit of software infrastructure i need . built now, for the world where i am right about my bet.