Extensibility is the precondition | ivan.codes

I wanted to see everything listening on my machine without running ss and reading the output, and to kill any of it from the top bar, so I said that in one sentence and a minute later it was there.

build me a bar widget listing my dev servers, click to kill

I used the dev servers example because it was the closest one to hand. In the few days since giving Omarchy a go I have also had it build me a Sonos remote in the bar and a panel for Encore's CI.

One sentence is enough because putting something in the bar on Omarchy, like most things on Linux, means a folder with two files and a line of config. On macOS the same thing is an Xcode project plus $99 a year to Apple before anybody else can run it without a security warning, on Windows an MSIX-packaged app, so a minute of description turns into a weekend of packaging and it never gets made.

The only non-OS product I experienced this with is Raycast, where an extension is TypeScript that Raycast builds and loads for me, and a script command is a shell script in a folder I point it at, the same arrangement one level up from the OS.

For fifteen years the software worth shipping was software for millions of people, so everything grew a store, a review queue and a signing key to make that scale work. People now build what they need on the day they notice they need it, and whatever sits between the description and a running tool ends up being skipped. Products that will not adapt to users showing up with their own agents will lose them. Extensibility is the precondition, and Omarchy and Raycast are both built that way.

PS. This post came out of the same agent conversation as the widget: it screenshotted what it had just built, then drafted the writeup while I argued with it about the wording.