{"slug": "opinionated-by-default-hacked-by-design", "title": "Opinionated by default, hacked by design.", "summary": "A developer praised Basecamp's Omarchy Linux distribution and the Pi agentic development tool for their hackable, opinionated design, which he says restores the 'wow factor of computing.' He also highlighted how modern AI tools shrink the distance between wanting a feature and building it, a principle he applies to his own database project, Tabularis.", "body_md": "The more time passes, the more I feel the need, as someone who has always been passionate about computers, to take back control of the software I use.\n\nI’m tired of increasingly bloated software, telemetry embedded everywhere, features I never asked for, and tools that decide what my workflow should look like.\n\nI’m not necessarily looking for minimal software, but I’m looking for software that lets **me choose**.\n\nIn agentic development, for example, I want to start with a minimal harness and decide for myself how to extend it, which tools to add, and how to orchestrate my workflow.\n\nI don’t want to adapt the way I work to decisions made by someone else.\n\nThat’s one of the reasons I find [Pi](https://github.com/earendil-works/pi-mono) such an exceptional tool.\n\nPi starts from an extremely simple foundation and leaves the responsibility, and the freedom, of building on top of it to me. It provides the building blocks, but it doesn’t try to decide what the final system should look like.\n\nAnd it’s also why [Omarchy](https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy) has completely won me over lately.\n\nOmarchy is definitely opinionated. It has very specific ideas about how a Linux desktop should work.\n\nBut paradoxically, those opinions make it a great starting point for building something deeply personal.\n\n[Hyprland](https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland), the tools the system provides, and especially the ability to easily create new functionality, including through dedicated LLM skills, constantly turn this:\n\n“I wish my desktop could do this.”\n\ninto:\n\n“Okay, now it does.”\n\nAnd that has brought back some of the **wow factor of computing** that I feel I had lost over the years.\n\nThat feeling from when a computer wasn’t simply a device for consuming products built by someone else, but something to explore, modify, break apart, rebuild, and adapt to the way you think.\n\nOver the last few days, for example, I found myself wanting a few things that simply didn’t exist in my desktop the way I wanted them.\n\nSo I built them:\n\nAnd this is probably the part I find most interesting.\n\nWith today's AI tools, the distance between **“I wish this existed”** and **“I built it”** is becoming incredibly small.\n\nThat changes the relationship we can have with software.\n\nI realized that, in the end, this is the same principle I’m trying to bring to [Tabularis](https://github.com/TabularisDB/tabularis).\n\nAn opinionated solution, because good defaults matter, but not a cage. Software that can be extended, modified, and adapted.\n\nThat’s also why Tabularis has a plugin system: I don’t think I should be the one deciding every database, integration, or workflow the application will ever support. The core should provide good defaults and strong primitives, while leaving room for people to take it somewhere I never anticipated.\n\nAnd maybe that’s the direction in software that excites me the most today:\n\n**Opinionated by default, hackable by design.**\n\nI don’t want AI to simply do more things for me. I want it to help me shape software around the way I think and work.\n\nThe future I’m interested in is one where software doesn’t decide for me, but gives me the tools to make it do exactly what I want.\n\nAnd Omarchy reminded me how much fun that can be.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/opinionated-by-default-hacked-by-design", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/debba/opinionated-by-default-hacked-by-design-cm9", "published_at": "2026-08-27 07:02:39+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-27 07:18:08.574213+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "ai-tools", "ai-agents"], "entities": ["Omarchy", "Basecamp", "Pi", "Hyprland", "Tabularis"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/opinionated-by-default-hacked-by-design", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/opinionated-by-default-hacked-by-design.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/opinionated-by-default-hacked-by-design.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/opinionated-by-default-hacked-by-design.jsonld"}}