Surprisingly, we still don’t know how to build personal software.

Every tool, every convention, the whole default stack of auth and databases and deploys, is shaped for production systems serving strangers at scale. Almost nothing is shaped for what Shirky called situated software: built for a small group you actually know, where generality and robustness are the things you trade away on purpose.

You cannot put an app on your own phone without publishing it, as though you were a company shipping to the public.

It’s as if every cook on the planet knew how to run a restaurant kitchen, and struggled to make pasta for their own kids.