From 1978 until summer last year I had been programming in 30+ different languages, including Assembly and lots of Ruby. Then I got going with Claude Code (CC). Since then I have ported most of my Ruby tools to Rust and then started moving my most basic tools over to pure Assembly. I haven’t typed code in the past 9 months.
I am a long-time tweaker of my setup. Running Linux since 1999, I used to search extensively for the right tools to match my needs; VIM, i3 window manager, kitty terminal, conky, etc. I managed to tune my setup to fit me almost perfectly. Almost. I subtly adapted to the software, changing the way I would ideally work to work the way the software would let me.
I went from using Ranger as my file manager to writing RTFM to have it exactly the way I wanted it. Years of hand-coding Ruby. Then came a rush of applications, still hand-coding like mad; rcurses, astropanel, IMDB, rsh, and many more. While I love Ruby’s elegance, it is slow. And being a performance junkie, I decided to let CC loose and port my main Ruby tools to Rust with amazing speed boosts.
But that wasn’t enough. I still had stuff I wasn’t totally happy with and that still could use a speed increase. And so I got CC to churn out “bare” as my new login shell - a port of my Ruby Shell. I posted a link to lobste.rs about that that got some interesting reactions.
The resulting Assembly shell is a 150Kb executable with a 9 microsecond startup time.
But a super-fast shell in a slow terminal? I know kitty hacks speed with running in single-instance mode, but even that can be made to go faster (and the single instance mode of kitty does have some drawbacks). And so glass the terminal emulator was born.
How about a faster window manager that is tailored exactly to my needs? Yup, with CC anything is possible. Say hello to the new window manager, tile. And its companion strip (a replacement for i3bar and the like).
This makes my window/terminal/shell experience lightning fast with no wasted CPU cycles and minimum memory footprint. This has boosted the battery life of my Dell XPS14 laptop by a few hours (the noisy fan is mostly quiet now). The setup is doing precisely what I need it to do. And if I need something changed or new features, then that is only a prompt away and some minutes of tweaking.
The whole stack in a single screen: tile holding the layout, strip + chasm-bits along the top status row, glass in every pane (with pseudo-transparency picking up the wallpaper), bare behind every prompt, and show rendering syntax-highlighted source in the left and bottom-right panes. Every binary in that picture is pure x86_64 assembly talking straight to the kernel and the X server. No libc, no toolkit, nothing in between.
My central apps like pointer, kastrup, tock and nova can stay as single-binary executables written in Rust. They are fast enough (for now).
From what I can research, nobody has previously built shell, terminal emulator, and window manager in pure x86_64 Linux assembly.
This is a whole new world where I command my own environment in ways that was completely out of reach back in 2025. I foresee the death of software as we know it where people use general purpose apps. I expect AI to craft tailor-made solutions for anyone with the imagination to ask for it.