Devtools must be open source
Five 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…