Blog/2026-04-30/Personal Software - JSON Viewing
I recently talked about the rise of personal software and over the days since I've realized two things about personal software:
- Everyone's README.md or their feature list is the source code - we're open source by default now
- Configuration files are no longer necessary - you just rewrite the program
Recently, I've been wanting a high-speed text file viewer. I especially want to be able to look at massive JSON files or massive Markdown files and I want it to be instantaneous. Is that possible? I didn't know before I started, but now I do: it is not only possible, it's easy. And it is built to my idiosyncrasies. I want the JSON prettified super-fast. I want startup to be instantaneous. I want the ability to scroll-lock, and I want bread-crumb paths to a `jq` to the thing at my cursor. And it works.
This makes me wonder what problems we have to solve before we get software dispatched to people as just source READMEs. Currently that seems vanishingly improbably: you need datacenter-grade GPU clusters and a lot of time before the program is generated from the source README. But in the future, the latter might not be required. Future datacenter clusters might be insanely fast for our present standards, with 10x Cerebras/Groq inference speeds. And in that universe, all problems are shallow to the sufficiently smart compiler^W LLM!
