Blog/2026-04-25/The rise of personal software
The promise of LLMs writing personal software has been quite realized for me. Almost every day I have a new piece of software whose user is likely to be only me. A few days ago, I had Claude and Codex work on Wikipen, a simple blogpost authoring client on MacOS.
Over the years that I've used Mediawiki as a CMS for this site I've grown to like it, but I don't like its editor that much. The primary problem is that the way that I've set up many things, it is slow to upload images (because I then store them on R2). This is annoying because it breaks my flow to have to do a slow uploader and then stick it in the page and all that sort of thing. Another annoyance is that linking other posts is a real pain, and the flow for using interwiki to link to Wikipedia is kind of slow because of the amount of manual action. Also, sometimes I think of posts and then I want to publish them later. I do have a Draft namespace but I never go back to it. The final complaint I have, which I think I'll solve later, is that setting the citation templates is time-consuming.
I've been using this little text editor and I can drop an image and it'll create some placeholder markup, it has auto-complete for links and let's me do an interwiki search, and it publishes all at once when it publishes. No one else would have enjoyed using this, and to make it work for more people you have to write it in a general way, but this software is only meant for me, and I don't need to make it configurable since I can just rewrite the code when I want it to be different. Marvelous!
