Post #1726628

I have a feeling that we're entering an era of "personal software" where people write and run their own tools just intended for their personal use. With all of the activity on coding agents like Claude code, it's interesting to see what impact it will have on the software market. It's always been a bit true that selling software to developers or IT professionals is tricky as they have the temptation to just build their own, and I can really see LLMs accelerating that trend. To provide a concrete example, a tool I've wanted for years is one that lets me create firecracker backed micro-VMs on my local host so I can test things out and try tools that might be malicious in a more isolated environment than you get with standard Linux container isolation. Unfortunately that's not a use-case that the firecracker project are really focused on and while there are some tools that look at this area, none of them really seem complete. It's also not an area of programming that I'm familiar enough with to try and code, but I know the problem domain well. So I thought I'd try out Claude code to see if it could work it out, and honestly it's gone surprisingly well. I've now got something that works for me and has pretty much all the functionality I need. I've probably spent half a day prompting, reviewing, and testing. Now is this a tool I'd recommend other people use.... no. But it does what I need and I'm expecting it to be pretty useful for my work! If you want to see it, the code is here https://github.com/raesene/baremetalvmm