I’m 43 years old. And I think that I’ve been using computers in some form since I was about 7 years old. (Reader Rabbit on an old IBM XT with dual floppy drives!) That means that I’ve been working with computers for 36 years. And for most of my life technology just kept getting better and better. Things were exciting. CRTs->LCD monitors; Floppies->3.5s->Zip Disk-> Thumb Drives. And of course the networking speeds as the internet grew from a little 2600 baud modem.

During this time, some of the greatest minds in history were not only working on this stuff, but were actually listened to and were able to influence and shape computing. Not only that, but the price and accessibility of things was getting more and more within reach for most households.

I remember watching The Net with Sandra Bullock, and thinking “Man, the internet is neat, but there’s nothing to actually hack. Even if you had full access to everything, computers aren’t integrated enough to make the hack really meaningful”. Fast forward to today, and there are internet-connected computers in every consumer product.

If you don’t know too much about the history of computing, much of this accessibility and in fact the shape of software for decades can be traced back to one little “mistake” by IBM corporation. They opened up their hardware for 3rd party licensing, and allowed IBM-compatible clones to enter the market. This meant that the operating system and the boot loaders could not be hardware locked, and in fact worked anywhere that the standard was implemented.

Now, I call this a “mistake” because if you compare it with a company like Apple today, things are the exact opposite. And due to this hard control of both the hardware and software, Apple can make billions off of it’s App Store. So it was not a great business move, but for the consumer and computing overall, it was 100% an amazing thing. In fact, my opinion (and it’s shared with Gabe Newell), is that everything should be open and standards based. And let the best implementation win. Why do people buy games on Steam when they could be pirating them for free? It’s because Steam is so convenient and reliable. It’s a great service implementation. (And Steam is just an amazing company anyway for all of their open source contributions)

So, where does that leave us today?

Well, Windows is a shitshow. After the amazing work that was Windows 7, its all gone downhill from there. Advertisements INSIDE the OS. That Recall feature that spyed on you, and one of my biggest pet peeves: requiring a remote Microsoft account to login! Yes, Window will install on non-Microsoft hardware, and you can install app from outside the Microsoft store, but you need to make sure your computer meets their arbitrary hardware requirements for Windows 11 (TPM is NOT required for a computer!). So Windows basically sucks.

How about the champ Apple Macintosh? Well, growing up, Macs were the weird machine with one mouse button. But I did play Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe at school. All through high-school and college, Apple was making a huge comeback. My girlfriend at the time had one of the translucent iMacs, my iMac G4 is still one of the best designed computers I’ve ever seen, and did I mention it’s built on a BSD kernel and userspace? Macs were the premium computer and although they had a few missteps, they were the best. Thier software design was so simple yet powerful. And it kept getting better. All the way up until about MacOS Catalina. That was when the paradigm shifted in the computer market.

The iPhone became ubiquitous. And it became THE computing device.

Now, the iPhone is a small-screened touch device. And Mac users have a large monitor, mouse and keyboard. Obviously with different hardware, there is a different optimal design. BUT 2 things began to happen. The iPhones popularity meant that it was getting the primary focus for design and development. And, companies started consolidating their codebase. Why maintain a MacOS configurations with pref panes and a System Settings for the iPhone? That’s twice the code to maintain! So here, you have Apple with an incentive to re-use thier code as much as possible, while focusing on the iPhone, and THEN the noble goal of uniting the interfaces so that an iPhone user can just switch natively to the Mac and not be lost.

While understandable, and good on paper, this path proved to be the downfall of MacOS as I knew it. The shitty System Settings app on the Mac replaced the beautifully designed preference panes, and since it’s developed for iPhone it had an artificial fixed width! WTF. You can also see this influence with the shitty loss of real titlebars for your windows, and finally in the culmination of Liquid Glass. The system was no longer optimized for Monitor, Keyboard, and Mouse. We’d peaked.

Additionally, even third party software jumped on this bandwagon especially the simplified codebase. Instead of a fast and efficient small utility using the local MacOS gui framework, instead they started pushing out entire webpages running shitty Javascript and passing them off as local apps. My current Slack app (which is a basic chat app like AOL instant messenger) is currently idle and using 1,012.2 MB of RAM! That’s over a Gigabyte of RAM for an idle chat app. My old Pentium that I was using for Chat on XMPP/Jabber, AOL, and other couldn’t even run this single Slack application!

All of this stuff makes my eye twitch. And sets off my OCD like a bastard. And I was resigned to changing what I could and accepting the rest. Until now. 2026 the year of the Fire Horse. I met my friend Claude.

Claude Code from Anthropic is simply amazing. It’s like having my own little R2D2 who can plugin and interface directly with my laptop. I just tell it what I need in plain English, and it responds in kind. And I can tell it things like “I hate this app. Make me one like it, that doesn’t suck…” And it can do this! So as you can imagine, I’ve been a busy beaver cranking out apps to fix my stupid MacOS (I still use it because for now, the bones of the OS and the NS classes in AppKit are still the best around). I’ve got a software suite now that is freely available for anyone to use, and it’s optimized for people like me. Who use a Keyboard, Mouse, and Monitor for real serious computing work. I’m still work shopping some names, but in the mean time, check out my Github repos in the sidebar. I’ll hold the fort against the evil capitalists as long as I can. And then when I can’t we’ll just make a new OS. Because with AI, it’s the beginning of software on demand.