This Is the Future, Mom
My earbuds know three battery levels: left, right, and the case. My desktop knew none of them. Three evenings later my bar shows all three, plus noise-cancelling modes, for two brands of headphones speaking two partially undocumented protocols that first had to be reverse engineered. Two years ago this would have cost a month of evenings. A month of evenings for a few numbers in a bar means: never.
Every programmer carries a list of ideas shaped like this: real itch, absurd cost. The list only ever grew. Then AI collapsed the cost. In 1865 Jevons noticed that as steam engines got more efficient, Britain burned more coal, not less. Make a resource cheaper to use and demand for it grows. Programming time just got an order of magnitude cheaper, and sure enough, I program more. At home that means projects straight off the never-worth-it list. At work it is the same: I run Trixbrix, a manufacturing business, but I am also its programmer, and I now ship things whose ambition used to require a ten-person team and a budget I would never have granted myself (being my own boss, I would know).
It also changes what a computer is. In 1984 Alan Kay wrote that we should edit our tools the way we edit our documents. Software, he said, should be like clay. The idea now goes by malleable software, and for forty years it stayed a dream, because reshaping software cost too much for anyone but its makers. That constraint just fell. When my headphones annoy me, I no longer send a feature request to Sony or JBL and hope somebody there finds my itch worth a sprint. I write the feature. And the reason I could is the desktop I run: Omarchy, DHH’s take on Linux, Arch underneath, tiling windows, every setting a plain text file, and the code itself open, written to be read and inviting you to edit it. My headphones menu is a plugin for its bar. Reshaping the system is not a hack there; it is the culture.
The feeling is familiar. I was nine when I saw a magazine cover with screenshots of GEOS, a windowed operating system for the Commodore 64. I dragged my mom over and told her, with full conviction: this is the future. Years later came Windows 95. In early post-communist Poland hardware was scarce and money more so, but software, thanks to piracy, arrived instantly, so I had it right away. Windows 3.1 had skipped me entirely, and even with 95 installed I kept living in DOS half the time, because games ran better there and so did my hobby of the moment, programming in 386 assembler. Still, the feeling repeated: the ground was moving. Then it stopped. Computers kept improving. USB, hardware that configured itself instead of asking for jumper settings, the internet everywhere. But the desktop itself, the windows-icons-pointer picture Xerox drew in the seventies, froze. Every release since has repainted the same picture in flatter colors. Omarchy gives me the nine-year-old feeling back. It changes how I work month to month, and I show it to people uninvited, the way I showed my mom.
Which brings me to thanking DHH for the second time in my life. The first was in 2004. I was writing Java and shopping for an ORM when I found a 15-minute video of a guy building a blog in something called Rails, version 0.6 if I recall correctly. That video defined my career. Rails, Ruby, and the people around them set the direction for the next twenty years of my work: DHH, _why, and Matz, who made the language itself. Now DHH has done it again, this time with an operating system.
They promised us the year of Linux on the desktop for so long it became a punchline. Well, I’m 46, I’m typing this on it, and my earbuds, both of them, report the correct battery. The computer is finally clay. The ground is moving again, and with it comes that rare feeling of watching the future arrive. I had it at nine, in front of a magazine cover. I have it now. Mom, come look. This is the future.