An hour, a Claude sub-agent, and a weird world

My Rabbit R1 now plays Grateful Dead shows on demand. I built it in an hour last night using a Claude sub-agent and SpecKit. It is completely useless. It might also be a small window into where software is heading.

Here's what I mean.

On Tuesday I wrote about open source software changing in front of us. The argument was pretty simple: when a language model can help you spin up a custom version of almost any tool for your specific needs, the traditional reason to open source something gets murkier. Why share your code when everyone can just build their own?

But then the other half of the argument kicked in. Anthropic's Mythos and models like it represent a new kind of attack surface. The vulnerabilities a sophisticated LLM can exploit, at scale, across networked systems, are genuinely different from what we've dealt with before. When the threat gets that big, the case for collective defense gets stronger. You want audited code, shared security research, pooled resources. You want open source – not because it feels ideologically right, but because no single team can see everything a distributed community of thousands can see.

So we end up with two simultaneous pulls on software culture. One toward the bespoke and personal, one toward the communal and fortified.

That tension got me thinking about a question: what's the most hyper-personal piece of software I could actually build for myself? Not something I'd ship. Not something that scales. Something that exists purely because I want it to exist.

Last night I had an hour. I created a Claude sub-agent with knowledge of how to build Rabbit R1 creations – the little app-like programs that run on the Rabbit device. Then I asked it to build me one that would pull the Today in Grateful Dead show from ReListen and stream it directly from the Rabbit. Between the sub-agent and SpecKit, I one-shotted it. One pass, no debugging spiral, no Stack Overflow detours. The Rabbit plays the Dead now.

None of this is practical. I could just open a browser. The whole thing probably took more effort than it saved for the next decade of use.

But that's kind of the point.

The era of software you build for an audience of one is here, and it's strange. The activation energy has dropped so low that a weird bedtime project can become a working thing before you run out of motivation. There's no product-market fit to consider. There's no user research. There's just: I want this, and now I have it.

That story probably plays out millions of times over the next few years. A lot of hyper-local, hyper-personal software that will never see a GitHub repo, never get a README, never get maintained. It just sits there doing its thing for whoever built it.

Meanwhile, serious teams will lean harder into open source for the parts of the stack that need collective attention. Security primitives. Foundational models. Infrastructure that everyone depends on and everyone benefits from hardening together.

Personal software gets more personal. Shared software gets more deliberately shared.

We live in a weird world.

You can install it here: https://mattfinlayson.github.io/shakedown/qr.html

The repo lives here: https://github.com/mattfinlayson/shakedown