Why I Build Useless Software and You Should Too

There’s something deliciously rebellious about opening your editor with zero productive intentions. No Jira tickets breathing down your neck. No product managers asking about user stories. No venture capitalists wondering about your monetization strategy. Just you, a caffeinated beverage, and the beautiful chaos of making something completely unnecessary.

Welcome to the wonderfully pointless world of “toy” software - programs that exist purely because they can.

What Makes Software Beautifully Useless?

Toy software isn’t necessarily simple or small (though it can be). It’s software that follows the sacred laws of digital anarchy:

• No money worship - Revenue is someone else’s problem
• No deadlines from hell - It’s done when your dopamine runs out
• No focus groups - You build what makes your brain tingle
• No technical debt anxiety - If it sparks joy and compiles, ship that beautiful mess
• No external demands - The only user that matters is the weirdo in the mirror

The Freedom Hits Different

When I fire up a completely pointless project, my brain does this weird little happy dance. Instead of the usual corporate hamster wheel of “What do users want?” or “Will this scale to infinity?” or “What’s our minimum viable whatever?”, my thoughts become delightfully unhinged:

• “What if I made a dashboard that only tracks things I actually give a damn about?”
• “What if I built a game that only my three weird friends would understand?”
• “What if I created a photo organizer based on the emotional temperature of each picture?”

This mental gear shift is like switching from driving a sensible Honda to piloting a rocket-powered shopping cart. You go from being a problem-solver to being a digital alchemist mixing code with pure whimsy.

My Gallery of Digital Nonsense

Over the years, I’ve birthed dozens of these beautiful digital weirdos. Here are the ones that still make me giggle:

The Screenshot Rebellion

Apple, in their infinite wisdom, decided that copying a screenshot to clipboard should require finger gymnastics worthy of a piano virtuoso: Cmd+Ctrl+Shift+4. Meanwhile, the normal screenshot is just Cmd+Shift+4. This keyboard choreography offended my lazy soul, so I built a tiny Python menu bar revolutionary that takes screenshots, saves them to disk, AND copies them to clipboard like a civilized human being. It’s magnificently over-engineered for such a petty grievance, and I’ve been using it for years like the stubborn digital hermit I am.

The Great VSCode Brain Transplant

After years of living in the JetBrains universe, I immigrated to VSCode and discovered something hilariously frustrating: all the features I needed existed, they just spoke a completely different dialect of UX. Take search - VSCode spawns this intimidating sidebar contraption that looks like a space shuttle control panel. My caveman brain couldn’t decode it, so I built my own extension that makes search behave like the command palette (you know, like a normal human would expect). It was my faithful digital companion for months until VSCode decided to add Sublime Text-style search that opens results in a new editor. Boom - my extension became instantly obsolete, and I abandoned it without a shred of guilt.

I’ve birthed 5 or 6 of these brain-compatibility extensions, all transforming VSCode’s perfectly functional features into something my neurons can actually parse. They’re all gloriously buggy, the code looks like it was written by caffeinated raccoons, and I’m way too lazy to make them presentable for public consumption. I also crafted a custom Dracula theme variant that remains forever unpublished because writing proper documentation feels suspiciously like actual work.

The Literary Memory Prosthetic

I dabble in short story writing when the mood strikes, and my brain has this charming quirk: it cannot, for the life of it, remember whether I spelled my character’s name “Katherine,” “Catherine,” or “Katharine” three paragraphs ago. Normal humans would keep a simple list. But no, my solution was to architect an entire VSCode extension that gives me intellisense for character names, like I’m coding but for imaginary people. Because apparently building complex autocomplete functionality is less effort than exercising basic human memory. I’ve achieved peak laziness and I’m not even sorry.

Why Building Useless Crap Is Actually Genius

Here’s the plot twist nobody tells you: these ridiculous little digital creatures are actually life support for your programming soul. Commercial coding can feel like being slowly drained by corporate vampires - requirements shape-shift like quantum particles, bugs multiply like rabbits on espresso, and deadlines hover over you like storm clouds. But when you’re crafting something purely for your own twisted amusement, you remember why you first fell down the coding rabbit hole. It’s that intoxicating feeling of digital god-mode: making something exist just because you willed it into being.

These projects become your experimental playground where normal rules don’t apply. Want to try that framework that everyone’s either raving about or cursing? Perfect guinea pig material. Curious about functional programming but afraid you’ll break production? This is your consequence-free laboratory. The beautiful thing about zero stakes is that spectacular failure becomes a feature, not a bug.

What’s mind-bending is how toy software flexes completely different brain muscles. In the corporate world, you optimize for metrics, scalability, and the approval of people in meetings. But in your personal digital sandbox? You can optimize for pure aesthetic pleasure, delightful weirdness, or the zen-like satisfaction of solving a problem that didn’t really need solving. There’s something almost spiritual about coding without anyone breathing down your neck - no impatient Slack messages, no one judging your commit messages, no one caring if you rebuild the entire thing from scratch because you discovered a more elegant approach while showering.

Your Journey Into Digital Rebellion

The hardest part about useless software is giving yourself permission to be magnificently unproductive. Start by examining the micro-irritations that pepper your daily existence, or just embrace your inner chaos goblin and build something gloriously absurd.

You could craft a calculator that delivers mathematical truths through interpretive haiku, a password generator that exclusively produces names suitable for fantasy tavern proprietors, or a music player that adjusts genres based on how aggressively you’re typing (anger = death metal, contemplation = ambient soundscapes). Or tackle non-problems with the fervor of a philosopher - build a tool that transforms your grocery list into an epic quest narrative complete with boss battles against the Dairy Dragon, create a browser extension that replaces every instance of “urgent” with “eventually” (instant stress relief), or design a desktop widget displaying real-time Martian weather conditions because Earth weather is so mainstream.

Sometimes the most delightful projects resurrect childhood wonder through digital wizardry. Engineer a terminal pet that judges your coding habits, craft a text adventure game chronicling the epic saga of your morning coffee ritual, or design a drawing app that only accepts mathematical equations as artistic expression. The sacred rule is simple: follow whatever makes your brain release those sweet, sweet happy chemicals, regardless of how utterly bonkers it appears to the outside world.

There are really only a few sacred commandments in this beautiful anarchy: if it stops sparking joy, abandon ship immediately - the moment it feels like actual work, you’ve betrayed the entire mission. Perfection is the arch-nemesis of fun; ship that glorious mess the instant it makes you cackle with delight, not when it passes someone else’s arbitrary quality standards. Your weirdness doesn’t require external validation; if it tickles your brain’s pleasure centers, that’s literally all that matters. Embrace the bizarre with religious fervor because the more unhinged your idea sounds, the more dopamine it’s likely to generate. And when you’re finished, chronicle the emotional journey, not the technical implementation - nobody cares about your code architecture when you’re documenting pure digital joy.

Here’s the beautiful conspiracy I’ve uncovered after years of digital mischief-making: my boring commercial code mysteriously became more imaginative - turns out creative rebellion is contagious and bleeds into everything you touch. I evolved into a superior problem-solving mutant because wrestling with utterly ridiculous challenges builds mental gymnastics skills that transfer to real problems. I rediscovered my authentic programming voice; when you strip away all external expectations, you finally hear your own creative frequency. And I accidentally curated a museum of pure happiness - revisiting these digital oddities is like mainlining concentrated nostalgia.

A Manifesto for Digital Weirdness

Inevitably, some efficiency-obsessed productivity zombie will interrogate you about that thing you built that generates procedural elevator music or simulates the complex social dynamics of a digital ant civilization. Their question reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the universe.

Why do humans splatter paint on canvases? Why do they arrange words into emotional configurations called poetry? Why do they manipulate air vibrations to create music?

Because creation is the closest thing we have to actual magic. Because the act of birthing something from pure imagination releases chemicals that make existence bearable. Because in a world obsessively optimized for profit margins and conversion rates, sometimes your soul requires you to build something purely because your consciousness is capable of conceiving it.

Your magnificently useless software doesn’t need to disrupt industries or solve global problems. It just needs to transform your Tuesday afternoon, elevate your mood from “meh” to “hell yeah,” or expand your perception of what’s possible when you channel pure creative energy through a keyboard.

Confession Time: I’m a Shameless Digital Copycat

Speaking of unashamed behavior, let me drop a truth bomb that might scandalize the originality police: when I see software that makes me think “damn, that’s genius,” I immediately fire up a new project to build my own version of the same core concept. Zero shame. None whatsoever.

Case in point: I saw Joshua Barretto’s brilliant post “Writing Toy Software Is A Joy” on HackerNews today, and before I could even finish reading it, I had abandoned everything in my backlog to write this very post you’re reading right now. Go read his post - it’s the genuinely thoughtful, eloquent version of what I’m attempting to ramble about here. I’m not even trying to hide that this is basically a lame LLM-assisted remix of his much better original. Imitation is the sincerest form of digital flattery, and inspiration strikes like lightning when it strikes.

Oh, yes: I’m writing this entire manifesto with an LLM, then performing surgical edits to inject my personality into it. Because apparently even my writing process embraces the beautiful chaos of modern tool-assisted creativity.

My friends have labeled me “temperamental” because I birth a couple of new toy projects every week, abandoning most of them when the next shiny idea captures my attention span. But here’s the thing: I’m genuinely happy living in this state of perpetual digital ADHD. Every abandoned project taught me something, every copied concept became uniquely mine through the alchemy of personal implementation, and every week brings new possibilities for beautiful, useless creation.

Begin Your Digital Rebellion Today

Right now, this very moment, conjure the most absurdly unnecessary software concept your brain can manufacture. Something that would make you snort-laugh. Something that serves absolutely zero market demand and violates every principle of lean startup methodology.

Now go forth and code that beautiful disaster into existence.

Not because some product manager demanded it. Not because it’ll generate revenue streams or impress potential employers. Not because it’ll look impressive in your GitHub portfolio.

Build it because in a universe drowning in serious software solving serious problems for serious people, sometimes the most revolutionary act is remembering that programming is fundamentally an act of digital playfulness.

And play, my magnificently weird friend, is the most useful thing you can do.

What’s the most delightfully pointless software you’ve ever birthed into this world? Share your digital weirdness with me - these stories fuel my next beautiful waste of time.