Karri Saarinen: Someone behind the software:

I think good products carry something of the people who make them. Their experience, what they care about, and how they think things should work. You might not know who those people are, but you can feel their perspective in the product.

…

So eventually the products develops a character through what its makers pay attention to, what they decide not to do and what they keep working on after it technically works. I sometimes think of this as the soul of a product. You feel that someone cares about how the whole thing comes together.

The incredible advances in LLMs and agents has caused an explosion of software. But from the samples I’ve been downloading and trying out, a lot of them have no depth. They look gorgeous, but quality is completely missing. One beautiful app I tried recently didn’t even close windows when ⌘W was used.

The craft seems to be missing, and that makes me sad. Just because you‘re using an LLM to help you write your software, doesn’t mean you no longer sweat the details. Personality in software still matters, at least it does to me.

I wish I could be optimistic, and say "I’ll be just fine because I care". But there‘s an ocean of software out there now, and I’m not sure how an indie developer gets noticed anymore.

Strange times.