K Srinivas Rao
667 posts

K Srinivas Rao
@sriniously
I teach backend stuff. yt - https://t.co/wF1Ayi2jsw

🚨 ANTHROPIC CEO WARNS: THE COMPANY IS NO LONGER SURE CLAUDE ISN’T CONSCIOUS.








What is extremely unhygienic but everyone seems to do it anyway???

Lately, as a developer, especially with the advent of agentic ai tools, there's no denying that the amount of "joy" in writing code at work has significantly gone down. I mean yes, we are more productive than ever, we have more power and time to build anything we want, but iykyk. Which brings to my point of this post. I was never into building personal software, meaning, creating tools/automation workflows for MYSELF. I never felt the need and it always was a drag. So this is a particular unexplored area of life that is proving to be the number one contributor to bring that "joy" back, with this feeling of building software for yourself that nobody else will ever use, or rather I won't LET anybody use. So embarrassing. When you are the only user, you make a lot of "interesting" tradeoffs, not the ones I would be proud to discuss amongst my peers in any professional setup. Things like, skipping the auth layer, why? Well, because if you don't trust yourself in your own machine, then my friend you have a bigger problem at hand. There will be this VERY important CLI flag that you use all the time, but instead of making it a default, you depend on your zsh suggestions and auto-completions to write it out for you, who cares. And man don't get me started on the db schemas and indices? Index? What's that? And the classic, git push origin main. God, the satisfaction I get from that, EVERY SINGLE TIME. Personal software also frees you to be maximally weird. I have a script that parses my browser history, runs it through embedding models, and clusters my research sessions. It's held together with string and shell scripts. It would never pass code review, lol, I would fire me if I saw that code in ANY kind of context. But it's grown to be so useful to me in a way that polished tools aren't, because I built it around my exact mental model of how I work. The reason for this feeling, for the most part, is professional software development often optimizes for the wrong things. Well not really wrong, they are the necessary evils, but wrong in this context. We build for hypothetical users, imaginary scale, theoretical maintainability by future developers who may never exist, atleast in the initial phase. Personal tools revert this formula. You build for one real user with real needs right now. And the needs that you have a 200% understanding of. So build something small and ugly for yourself. Use it every day. Let it evolve based on actual friction and use rather than anticipated requirements. You'll develop intuitions that no tutorial can teach you and also find a little more joy.









