On home-cooked software

25 Oct 2025

I’d run into this presentation and blog post from Maggie Appleton before but just this weekend finally had a chance to sit down and really digest it. My opinion? The short version, the verdict, is that I could not agree more. Go read it or watch it. It’s worth it.

Her thesis is that the barefoot developer, the person at home writing software to scratch a particular itch, will see a rennaissance now that they are further enabled to write their “home-cooked” software with large language models. The barriers are now less fortified, the hoops to jump through are larger and less numerous.

I, for one, welcome this. C’mon in, the water’s warm!

To take it one step further, in addition to the novices (the “barefoot developers”) being able to do more with LLM’s, what about the professional engineers? Sure, there are ways where these tools can help at our day jobs. (Some ways better than others.) Consider those same coders - what about when they get home from their day job and want to deploy their skills but don’t want to be beholden to the long list of (necessary! VERY necessary) processes, checks, and balances that they adhere to at work?

Look - If you just want to whip up a slack bot for your friends to do some silly little thing? The barrier to getting that done in the past had been time and effort. I’ll speak for myself, but - the hours to assess, plan, choose the right stack, libraries, tools, code, document, package, etc … had been enough to discourage my (ADD-addled) brain from opening up my editor.

Now?

No problem.

It’s fun. It’s refreshing. It’s educational. It’s productive.

It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to do that dumb thing in Slack for me and my friends.

(Note: not a word of this was written or edited with “AI”.)