GoKawiilFive years ago, most software engineers I spoke to had no programs they had written for themselves. (I was asking this question a lot as part of trying to understand how Tailscale could fit into engineers’ lives.) All day, every day, engineers use programs written by others to write programs for others. Many of us customized the programs we used, through config files or plugins or extensions, and many of us used the programs we wrote for others, as users. It was always an unusual treat to ask someone what they had written for themselves and learn about the bespoke software behind their blog, or their home automation, or their homelab, instead of an off-the-shelf, almost-the-right-size static site generator or Zigbee appliance.
This state of things made a lot of sense to me. Over the years I have written plenty of software for myself, and the return on doing so was always questionable. I could only write so much in a day. There were always more important things to do (Something Was Wrong At Work), and coming back to a project after a year to do maintenance on it was always extraordinarily painful. There were plenty of years in my career where I had thrown out all my custom software and used the most bog-standard environments I could to produce code. In my early years as an engineer at Google I did not even own a personal computer.
That was then. Things are different now.
How to Personalize Software
It is astonishingly easy to personalize software today. There are two general categories of prompts to an agent that make all of this possible:
Download the source for <software> and build it for local use. Modify <whatever memory your agent uses> to know that any future changes to this software mean changing the sources and replacing the current version. Record in version control the original motivation behind the change.
and, more importantly: Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the <software> and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version.
At the heart of this is the realization that agents can not only hack up some code for a specific use but also automatically manage the process of synchronizing changes with upstream releases. This means agents change the ROI on customizing software on two fronts simultaneously: it is much easier to get started personalizing, and much easier to keep going.
Another astonishing thing about the two prompts above for editing software is that you can build them right into an agent. As long as the agent is open source, it does not even require programming. The two prompts can be loaded into a skill (i.e., some text instructions) put somewhere discoverable to the agent. We built this into Shelley, so now if you want to edit Shelley you don’t even need the preamble or to configure the timer. It takes care of it for you. You can type in a prompt like “make Shelley’s UI high-contrast” and you have personalized your agent.
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