Geir Isene sat down at his computer last week and realised something unusual. Almost every program he touched - the window manager, the text editor, the file manager, the terminal, the email client, the calendar - was software he wrote himself. In a few weeks, with Claude Code as his engineering partner, he had replaced his entire desktop computing environment.
All of it command line. All of it terminal-native. All of it his.
Fair warning: the next bit gets technical in ways that will delight a certain kind of person and mean nothing to everyone else. Feel free to skim. The point lands either way.
The result is a two-layer stack he calls CHasm and Fe₂O₃. The first is pure x86_64 assembly - no system libraries, painting pixels directly. The second sits on top in Rust. Between them, they cover everything from the window manager to the screen locker to the text editor. The only surviving off-the-shelf programs are WeeChat for IRC and Firefox.
He put his account of the journey online this week. Worth reading for the vim story alone.
Vim - the modal text editor beloved by programmers and writers who’ve invested the muscle memory to use it - is not the kind of tool you replace. Geir had been using it since 2001. Twenty-five years. Every email, article, line of code and book went through vim. He thought he’d never replace it. He replaced it in seventy-two hours. His own editor, scribe, does everything he actually used in vim and none of what he didn’t. Twenty-five years of muscle memory rerouted in three days.
There’s a philosophical tradition this connects back to that predates software entirely. Before mass production, before village economies were fully established, people made their own tools. You forged your own knife, you shaped things to your hands rather than your hands to things. Then industrialisation made that inefficient and the skill slowly vanished.
Software industrialisation followed the same arc. General-purpose applications got powerful enough for most people most of the time, and the economics of building for yourself stopped making sense. Why write your own text editor when vim exists? Why write your own calendar when Google Calendar handles the whole family?
Geir’s story suggests the economics have flipped again.
It’s not that building your own tools has become trivial - Geir is technically sophisticated and the CHasm layer in pure assembly is genuinely serious work. But Claude Code dropped the cost dramatically. He would direct it between other tasks, it would build, he’d respond with the next requirement. The turnaround on features went from months of someone else’s roadmap to minutes.
And once you frame it that way, the efficiency question shifts. Yes, it took a few weeks of focused effort. But if you use those tools every day for the next ten years, that’s a different calculation. Especially when the alternative involves watching your tools get acquired, shut down, enshittified or quietly abandoned because they no longer fit a business model.
I’d be happy with the functionality of Microsoft Word 5.1 from 1989. Fast, functional, no subscription, no cloud sync, no feature bloat. Word 5.1 did everything most writers actually need. The only meaningful addition since then, for my purposes, is tables. The rest - collaboration features, AI integration, live cloud saving, the ribbon - is complexity that serves someone. It’s just often not me.
Geir calls his approach “design without committee.” No configurability for other users. No corner cases he’ll never hit. No documentation for users who don’t exist. The audience is one person, so decisions take seconds. Strip out the complexity of accommodating everyone else and what’s left is small, fast and exactly shaped.
Software exists on a spectrum from general to personal. At one end, operating systems and protocols. At the other, a text editor built to the precise dimensions of one person’s hands. Most commercial software clusters in the middle - general enough to sell to thousands, specific enough to feel useful. AI lowers the cost of the personal end so dramatically that the middle is no longer the obvious destination.
You probably won’t replace your whole desktop. But if you have one tool in your daily workflow that frustrates you - one thing you wish worked differently - the gap between “I wish this worked like this” and “it works like this” has never been smaller.
Geir calls himself a rabbit in spring. He’s having the time of his life.
So might you.
PS - Thanks to SmartFriend™ Peter Marks for sending me the original link. Peter is a man with too many hobbies. You can find him at blog.marxy.org.
Sources: