After 25 years of relying on off‑the‑shelf software, the author now runs a desktop built entirely from his own code. The low‑level foundation, CHasm, is pure x86_64 assembly without libc, handling pixel output, keyboard input and window management. On top sits Fe₂O₃, a Rust application layer that uses a tiny TUI library called crust. Together they power a custom i3‑style tiler, status bar, terminal, file viewer and login shell, leaving only Firefox as the sole external GUI.

Vim, the editor the author used since 2001, vanished after a 72‑hour sprint. He wrote scribe, a modal Rust editor that trims unused Vim features while adding soft‑wrap, a Limelight‑style reading mode, AI‑augmented prompts and shared registers across sessions. The first commit landed at 00:09 on May 1, and by May 3 the author was typing exclusively in scribe.

Those two weeks proved that the barrier to crafting a personal desktop has collapsed. Claude Code's build system, Rust’s safety and mature TUI tutorials let the author replace years‑long projects with weekend‑long experiments. The result is a lean environment that obeys his exact workflow, showing that building bespoke tools for a single user is now a realistic option.