Every morning at 6 a.m. my Mac mini prints out my day.

A small piece of software I wrote (with Claude) reaches into my Google Calendar and my to-do list, pulls everything I’m supposed to do or be at, lays it out on half a sheet of letter paper, and saves it as a PDF. The PDF goes to the printer. The printout goes into my notebook. By the time I sit down at the desk it’s waiting for me — paper, no screen, things to cross off in pen.

At the end of the day I plan tomorrow. I cross things off in the digital tools, schedule whatever moved, and the next morning the cycle starts again.

I love this setup. I love the tactile satisfaction of crossing things off. I love being able to work without a glowing rectangle in front of me. And I love that I don’t have to give up the things digital is genuinely better at — recurring tasks, “first Monday of every month,” meetings other humans can see and join.

But the real reason I’m writing about it isn’t the productivity hack. It’s that this little piece of software shouldn’t exist.

A piece of automation this specific to one person’s quirks — print-and-paste, half-letter, my tools, my calendar, my layout — would never have been worth a software engineer’s time. Nobody hires someone to build them this. I wouldn’t have built this two years ago, or even six months ago, and I can (sort of) write code. There were too many other things to do.

But something changed. The cost of making a small, weird, personal piece of software collapsed. With Claude, “I want a thing that does X for me” went from a few days (maybe) to a few minutes.

This is going to keep happening. And I think we’re about to live in a world full of small, custom, slightly weird software that exists only for the person who wanted it. Single-player software.

Of course, none of this is entirely new. People have been writing little automations for themselves for decades. If you read what I just described and thought “okay, you wrote a cron job,” you’re not wrong. So the idea isn’t new. What’s new is who gets to do it. Until very recently, “I want a thing that prints my day on half-letter paper at 6 a.m.” was either a weekend project for someone fluent in a stack of tools, or it wasn’t going to exist. Now it’s 10 minutes for anyone with a Claude Code or Codex subscription. The set of people who can build something like this just got much bigger. The skill that matters isn’t syntax — it’s taste, knowing what’s worth automating in the first place.

Tomorrow at 6 a.m. my printout will be waiting for me — small and weird and exactly mine. What will you build?