I have been around long enough to see the life cycle of software shrink. What used to take a decade to establish can be born, mature, and die in the span of two summers. You can go to sleep loving a tool and wake up to find it acquired by a VC-funded shell company, rebranded into oblivion, or “sunsetted” because it did not fit some new strategic vision. It is the rhythm of modern computing: release, hype, growth, buyout, bloat, death.
And yet, the most reliable, most brutally good pieces of software I have ever touched never had a marketing team, a roadmap slide deck, or a product manager making decisions. They were written by one person. One developer, one designer, one obsessive with a narrow beam of focus so hot it cut straight through all the noise.
I am not romanticizing the lone hacker myth because it makes for good cinema. I am telling you the truth: the best code I have ever used came from a single brain. It did not try to please everyone. It did not exist to justify a burn rate. It had no grand vision for market dominance. It existed because one person cared enough to make it exist.
You Feel It in the Edges
Software written by one person feels different. The seams are tighter. The decisions make sense in a way that you can follow like tracks in fresh snow. When you click something and it behaves exactly the way you expect, you are seeing the hand of someone who thought about it in the shower, on the bus, maybe in the middle of the night. Every detail feels considered. Not necessarily polished in the corporate design-system way, but deliberate.
It is not that the interface is perfect. In fact, sometimes the interface is strange, even idiosyncratic. But the strangeness is consistent. It follows its own internal logic, and once you learn it, you are inside the developer’s mind. This is something that gets ironed out of big-team products. Committees do not allow eccentricity. Managers do not let the design go “weird.” But the weirdness is often what makes it powerful.
The Weight of the Hand
The difference is like cooking. When you eat soup made in a restaurant that serves two hundred people a night, you taste something competent, safe, and standardized. When you eat soup made by a person who has been obsessively perfecting their recipe for twenty years, you taste something else. The hand is in the work.
When I use one-person software, I can feel the hand. I know someone decided that feature X mattered and feature Y did not. I know someone threw away an entire weekend’s code because it did not sit right with them. I know that if I wrote an email to ask about a bug, the same person who wrote the code would read it and decide whether to fix it. That immediacy is rare in a world of Jira tickets and quarterly goals.
The First Time It Hit Me
The first time I felt this was with a little-known text editor I found buried on a forgotten forum. I had been bouncing between bloated editors that promised the world but locked basic features behind subscriptions. This one was raw. No installer. Just an executable in a zip file. You unzipped it and ran it. It opened in under a second. No splash screen. No analytics ping. No nagging you to sign in.
The man who made it had been working on it for fifteen years. Not full-time. Just steadily. Adding a feature when he wanted it. Removing one when it annoyed him. The codebase was his garden. It ran on machines that were considered junkyard relics. It had a scripting language built in that was clearly not designed for anyone else, just for him. But it was fast, lean, and never crashed on me once.
I sent him a message to say thanks. He replied in a paragraph that sounded like a friend from an IRC channel. No marketing voice. No copy-pasted customer service boilerplate. Just a guy saying he was glad I found it useful. I still use that editor.
Why This Feels Like a Dying Breed
Modern software culture does not like one-person projects. Investors see them as “unscalable.” Employers see them as risky because there is no support team to lean on. Users get conditioned to expect “ecosystems” and “integrations” instead of focused tools.
When the lone developer dies, burns out, or loses interest, the software often disappears. Sometimes the repo gets archived. Sometimes the website goes down and the download link is lost to time. In a decade, we have lost hundreds of small tools that were better than anything you can get now, simply because there was no company to keep them alive.
This is the paradox: the things that make one-person software good also make it fragile.
The Illusion of Team Superiority
The myth is that teams make better software because they can split the work. One person writes the backend, another handles the UI, someone else manages testing. In theory, this creates efficiency. In practice, it creates dilution. Each handoff between team members is a leak in the bucket. The original intention behind a feature becomes watered down by conflicting priorities, compromises, and misunderstandings.
I have seen it firsthand. I have been in rooms where a developer writes something elegant and fast, and by the time the design team and the product team get done “refining” it, the result is slower, harder to maintain, and less useful to the actual user.
One-person software does not suffer from this. The person writing it holds the entire vision in their head. There are no meetings to explain the why. There is no committee to convince. The decision-making is a closed loop between creator and tool.
Case Study: The Note-Taker That Saved Me
A few years ago, I was drowning in ideas. I had tried every note-taking app on the market. Notion, Evernote, OneNote, all of them. Each one had its strengths, but each also carried bloat that slowed me down. Then I found a little note-taking program written by a single developer in Eastern Europe. No marketing page. Just a GitHub repo and a screenshot.
It ran locally, stored everything in plain text, and had a graph view before “graph view” was a buzzword. It let me build connections between ideas without forcing me into someone else’s vision of “productivity.” The export was just Markdown files. No lock-in. It was not pretty. The fonts were ugly. But it became my second brain because it got out of my way.
The dev had a PayPal donate button on his site. I sent him money. He wrote back saying he had no plans to make it a company because that would ruin it. I believed him. Three years later, it still works flawlessly. I have no anxiety about losing my notes because they live in my folder, not on someone else’s server.
Why One Person Makes the Harder Choices
When a single developer builds something, they have to say no. Constantly. They cannot add every feature request because there is no one to dump the work on. They have to prioritize ruthlessly. That discipline is why their software feels so coherent. Every piece fits. Every function earns its keep.
Teams rarely have this discipline. They add features to please sales, to close deals, to keep up with competitors. The result is software that does a lot on paper but feels like a mess to use. One-person software often does less, but it does it perfectly.