themer, or one view of the future of vibe coded software

A tiny personal TUI for switching themes, and a small argument for delightful non-scalable software.

My desk faces outside, which sometimes has light and sun, but sometimes it’s night. My monitor is sometimes framed by bright blue, and sometimes inky black. When bright blue, I prefer light themes, and when inky black I prefer dark themes.*

It takes like four clicks to change ALL my stuff to dark/light themes, entering different menus. But vibe coding makes software infinitely easy, right? So I had 5.4 xhigh (or maybe 5.3) make:

Themer!

Here’s a screenshot.

Bascally it’s a TUI** that you can scroll through a set of system themes that you specify with a config.toml, and it sets a whole bunch of programs themes.

For NONE of these programs did I, or do I currently, know how to programmatically change the themes.

This is a really, really unimportant piece of software. This has probably taken longer for me (in terms of human-seconds eyeballing codex’s sloppy go code) to make than I’ll ever save switching themes around. BUT:

if I release it to the wide world, the total human-seconds saved can scale, since people can just download and use it.

and for me personally, it might change my behavior so I spend more of my time in nice cozy themes as opposed to it not being worth the mental overhead to switch. AS SUCH, it’s a no-brainer to release it, right?

Here’s one view of the future of vibe coded software. I wrote this for me, and it’s JUST for me. Do you want themer? Maybe? Do you use the exact combination of KDE plasma, kitty terminal (what a name! it’s not very cute though. Would I like it more if it were cute? They did some studies on robots to see if humans treat them better if cute, and they found that they did, so to make up for my fellow humans’ exploitability I have resolved to, as an antiparallel behavior pattern, be nasty to cute and cute to nasty things, but not people, since we’re talking about robots and software and it’s ok to not be nasty to people as a general rule.), fish shell (love fish shell, and what a name! synergizes with kitty, but see above paranthetical remark), nvim (*****), and cursor (not even going to footnote this)? Almost certainly not. It would be easy for codex to extend this to gnome, gnome-term, sublime, vscode, bash, rstudio, etc. (sampled from the two people flanking me as I write this RIGHT NOW who are currently fingers scrunched hunched over computers, hark! our lives are dominated, or maybe us three show that here we have reached the pinnacle of civilization, unclear)

• side note: I still remember a reader saying my writing has a tendency to repel eyes, or something, and I note and incorporate feedback, but sometimes it’s the eyeballs that are wrong, and here we allow eyeball training to help fight against eyeball lability.

BUT, I simply choose not to. Here’s the one view of many of the future of vibe coded software. The opposie of scale. Delightful fractal inneficiencies and software-as-a-diary of cool little internal tools that are fun just for the sake of fun. Industry may be different, but I personally, at this moment, am free from self-evaluation in terms of my industry.

I simply choose not to make this useful to the two people sitting next to me, one on the same exact damn ikea couch, who is currently fluttering between like four terminal windows (dark theme) and firefox (light theme), with some bioinformatcs program her’s staring at with tcuked fingers. He claims that some users are “beyond help”, and I think that cynicism is antithetical (or maybe exactly emblematic) of this post here.

Anyway what you y’all think, should I open source and make themer not some kludge of only personal useful stuff?

let me know in the comments below.

Also, in the time it took me to write this, codex just fixed an issue with fish changes not propagating in that same terminal window,

./bin/themer --config config.full.example.toml apply dracula now Just Works. (tm)

*Why? I like a consistent sort of iris-state, you know, like when I dart around my eyes I want my iris t not have to adjust to the brighter/dimmer screen/around screen. This maximizes productivity, which maximizes self worth and actualization, maximizes future salary and the quality of my votes in geneal elections, makes me a more robust human being, more ethical and attracti

**Much has been written about the permanent underclass, but by people who don’t read. I don’t read either, so here’s my take: TUI craftsmen -> ubermenschen, GUI consumers are poor damned cringing exploitables who will be damned for a thousand generations. Actually I don’t remotely believe any part of what I just wrote - civilization is volatile, and strong predictions about the future - actually wait this is worth a sub-footnote (*)

(*) Here’s my opinion about predictions about the future, no need for you to agree to it also my opinions are extremely fragile and change at any moment so if you ask me in person response might be different. People communicate certianty in different ways. Some people bristle and anyone saying “X is 100% certain”, and would blurt out something regarding the unreliability of qualia and sense percenptions, and we absolutely DO invite those people to parties, and your party-imagination that filters people on such qualities and thoughts is a poor party-imagination indeed, although I admit personally I am not an expert in parties as such my party-opinions-

predictions about the future: person: “I’m 100% certain”. Your response should be “great so can I kill you if you’re wrong?” Have tried this out personally to not great success but I think at scale it would work well.