Thursday: A SerenityOS for Myself

It all started when my last job kinda... evaporated, overnight, due to some funding troubles.

I was completely lost. It felt like an unraveling of who I was, for a little -- I hadn't realised how much importance I attached to my job, that superpower of being able to sit down, write code, and make my life better.

Coding used to be incredibly fun. I sank hours and hours everyday into coding even before I ever knew it was something I could make money doing. At my previous job, towards the end, something had changed for me. The coding wasn't fun anymore. I enjoyed working with my team. The perks were unbeatable. Why wasn't I having fun anymore?

At first I thought that having been researching Nostr and Bitcoin for so long for my job, what would help me was going back to basics - building something all for my own.

DeepSeek Harness had just come out. I was fascinated, since I had spent a long time by now building plugin systems. I worked on a complicated DeepSeek Harness distribution with a ticket board and lots of quality of life improvements. I vibe coded the whole thing, spending hundreds of dollars in AI credits. Why was it still not fun?

I coded and I coded and I coded. I was still nowhere close to done. I bought a domain, thinking that would create some pressure for me to finish the thing and put something online. Still no luck.

After enough introspection, and feeling like I had quite literally hit rock bottom, I realised that there was a big incentive misalignment here. I was treating the code as if it was the important part, but what I really wanted to experience again was the joy of building. The instant feedback I used to get from writing code and watching something pop up on screen.

It wasn't the money that was the superpower. The superpower was simply to build.

But I still wanted to use AI! I would fall behind my peers and colleagues if I didn't - there's no denying that AI is a force multiplier.

What I realised I wanted was an AI agent that just did what I said. Claude was not it. DeepSeek Harness was not it.

I just had to put on my crew-resource-management goggles - What did I do best? Think about software. What did the LLM do best? Transform text from one form into another.

After hundreds of dollars and thirty thousand lines of code, the first version of the coding agent Thursday ended up being a skill file. The goal: make vibe coding fun again.

Suddenly, coding was fun again. And I was spending less than $20 a month on AI inference, enabled by the absolute GOATs - DeepSeek v4 Flash and GLM 5.3.

I've been thinking a lot about Andreas Kling. Fresh out of rehab in Sweden, he decided to write a toy operating system, simultaneously a love letter to 90s UX, to keep away from falling into his old patterns.

Today, SerenityOS is very much a "serious project" and it even spawned a web browser, Ladybird. A competitor to the Chromium-Firefox duopoly! It inspired others to enter the field. All of that from one man's desire to improve himself and his life.

I am a boundlessly optimistic person. I believe we can make coding fun again. I believe we can build systems to responsibly use AI. I think we can correct the incentive misalignment the entire software industry is currently suffering from.

Thursday is my bet on that - a project to fix the world, by making coding fun again, just for myself.