“Dad, I sent you a message.”
“Where? Discord? Messenger? Insta? WhatsApp? Email? Telepathy? Where??”
Back in 2007 I had an idea. Collect all messages from all sources into one communication hub. Email, chat, RSS, forums, news, everything. Then create special “views” into all of it, like a “family view” or a “project X view.” When you answer, it replies on the incoming channel. Simple concept.
I never built it. Too complex, too much effort.
Until now. With Claude Code.
After 16 hours of work, Heathrow was launched. A unified messaging terminal app, 19 years after I first had the idea.
But what about a terminal calendar app that unifies all my Google and Outlook calendars? Another 4 hours and we had Timely.
As you can see, I love the terminal. It is where I do more than 90% of my work.
I’ve built a shell, a file manager, a programming language, and a bunch of other terminal applications. Having now replaced mutt and newsboat with Heathrow, I wondered: “What else? What’s the most complex app task I can think of that I really could use?”
A better terminal browser. Having used w3m on and off for many years, I could use something much better.
I was prepared for weeks of work. Nope. Two hours of work brought about Brrowser. Two hours with Claude Code. This is patently silly.
Letting Go
The more I let go of my identity as a coder, the more I embrace the end result, the application, the solution itself, the faster I get there. Clinging to the task of writing code or holding onto the need for control is the bottleneck.
I used to get about one bug reported every 3 months on RTFM, an application with more than 100K downloads. Then last summer I let go of my OCD control of the code. Since then the feature set has grown substantially. The user base the same.
Without having read a single line of code in RTFM for 9 months, there has been 1 bug reported. That is a real code quality improvement.
Nothing Is Hard Anymore
Nothing is impossible or even hard to develop. The barrier has moved from “can I build this?” to “can I imagine this?” The skill space is automated. The idea space is where the game has moved to.
This is the endgame.
Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/03/Endgame.html