GoKawiilPerspective
Software already got personal. People build their own applications now, for their work and their lives: a dashboard for one team, an app that tracks a personal collection, an agent wired to your own notes, the one tool you kept wishing existed. With an agent sitting in the editor, this has become ordinary. The gap between "I wish this existed" and "I built it" keeps shrinking.
The devices around us are heading the same way, and someone is going to write the software for them.
Small devices are multiplying anyway
This part is already happening, and we aren't the ones making it happen. Vendors and the hardware industry are flooding the world with small personal devices: watches and bands, AI glasses, e-paper dashboards, room controllers, health displays, desk companions. Wearables alone ship more than 600 million units a year, and that number keeps growing. A capable ESP32 board costs about seven dollars, and the silicon keeps getting cheaper. The hardware is arriving on its own, in volume, cheaply.
So the interesting question isn't whether personal hardware is coming. It's who gets to write the software that runs on it. Right now the manufacturer decides that once, ships it, and moves on. You wear a watch against your skin all day and you don't get to say what it does. That's an odd situation in 2026, when a junior developer can reshape a CRM in an afternoon but the gadget on the wrist is sealed shut.
Agents want to run where the sensors are
There's a second reason the software is about to matter more. The interesting agents want to see and hear and sense the world: camera, microphone, motion, location, presence, a pulse. None of that lives in a browser tab. It lives on devices. An agent that only knows what you typed is worse than one that knows you're in the workshop with your hands full. Physical context is the next thing agents are reaching for, and reaching for it means more software that has to run on personal hardware, close to the sensors, not in a data center.
That's a lot of software waiting to be written, for a lot of small devices, each doing one thing for one person. Not one universal gadget that does everything. Many small ones, each with its own interface, its own purpose, its own handful of people who care.
The door is opening from several directions
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