AI is driving a boom in modestly successful software projects
seangoedecke.comWhen the November 2025 coding agent inflection point happened, the first thing I did was to solve all the niggling little problems I have with the software I use on the daily. Think shell scripts, Alfred workflows, Elisp functions, and Obsidian plugins.
Claude Code/Codex has made my entire macOS environment as malleable as Emacs. That’s huge! Everyday automation continues to be one of my top uses for coding agents.
Most of the automations I’ve built make sense only for my own personal workflows, so I haven’t released them for anyone else to use. But I did build an Obsidian plugin that seemed generally useful, so I put it on the Obsidian Directory. It has a whopping sixty five users at the moment. I suspect there are many others like me driving this growth in plugins and mods and other extensions.
Maybe one day I’ll build an “ambitious” piece of software with an LLM. But that day is not today. I’m currently working on some open source projects that discourage LLM use. I’m also trying to learn a new domain, so using LLMs would sort of defeat the point. It’ll be a while before I put generated code in production.
In the meantime, I’m very happy building my little scripts and extensions and such.