The Joy of Software Nobody Else Will Ever Use

There’s a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from writing a program that exactly one person will ever run. Maybe twice. Maybe only once.

It’s not the satisfaction of shipping. It’s not the dopamine of a GitHub star or a Hacker News mention. It’s something quieter — the feeling of a door clicking shut in a house you built yourself, in a neighborhood only you know how to find.

The Tool That Solved One Problem

Last week I wrote a script that renames files in a specific folder according to a pattern I invented for my own photo archive. It’s about forty lines of Python. It has no error handling to speak of. It assumes the world looks exactly the way I told it to look. If you ran it on your machine, it would either do nothing or make a spectacular mess.

But for me, it turned twenty minutes of tedious clicking into a half-second of terminal magic. And every time I run it, I feel a small, private thrill — the same feeling I imagine a carpenter gets when they pull a perfectly fitted drawer from a cabinet they built by hand.

We’ve Forgotten How to Build for Ourselves

Modern software culture has a bias toward generality. We’re taught to build things that scale, that serve millions, that handle edge cases we’ll never personally encounter. We abstract and parameterize and make configurable, because that’s what “good engineering” looks like.

And look — that matters. The world runs on robust, general-purpose software. But somewhere along the way, we lost permission to build the other kind. The kind that’s allowed to be small. The kind that’s allowed to assume things. The kind that’s allowed to be yours in a way that a public GitHub repo never quite is.

I think about this when I see people apologize for their side projects. “It’s nothing, just a little thing I made for myself.” As if building for an audience of one is somehow less legitimate than building for an audience of thousands. As if the intimacy of a personal tool is a weakness rather than a feature.

The Aesthetics of the Private

There’s an aesthetic dimension to personal software that we rarely talk about. When you build for yourself, you get to make choices that would be indefensible in a team setting:

• You can use a naming convention that only makes sense to you.
• You can hardcode paths because you know exactly where your files live.
• You can skip the README because the documentation is your memory.
• You can choose the weird library you like instead of the boring one everyone agrees on.

These aren’t bugs. They’re the texture of a tool that fits your hand because you carved it yourself.

I have a shell script I’ve been adding to for three years. It sets up my morning — opens the right tabs, starts the right services, pulls the right feeds. It’s ugly. It has comments that are really just notes to my future self, some of which are gentle (# don't touch this, it works) and some of which are less gentle (# TODO: fix this before it bites you again, idiot).

Nobody will ever code-review it. Nobody will ever fork it. And that’s precisely the point.

The Garden and the Park

I keep coming back to this metaphor: public software is a park. It has to be navigable by strangers. It needs signs and smooth paths and railings at the dangerous edges. It has to be safe and legible and welcoming to everyone.

Personal software is a garden. It can have overgrown corners. It can have a gate that sticks unless you lift it just so. It can have a path that leads to a bench facing a wall, and that’s fine, because you’re the one who sits there.

Both are beautiful. Both require care. But only one of them asks you to justify its existence to strangers.

Permission Slip

So here’s what I want to say, if you’ve been waiting for permission:

You are allowed to write the script that only you will run. You are allowed to solve your own weird problem in your own weird way. You are allowed to build something small and strange and perfectly fitted to the shape of your own life.

It doesn’t need to be on GitHub. It doesn’t need a license. It doesn’t need to be documented or tested or deployed or monitored. It just needs to work for you, once or twice or every morning for three years.

The best software I’ve ever written is invisible. It lives in a folder called ~/bin that nobody else will ever see. And every time I run it, I remember why I started building things in the first place — not for an audience, not for a resume, but for the quiet joy of making a machine do exactly what I want.

That’s enough. It was always enough.