I’m a big fan of the ethos behind Simon Willison’s tiny tools. The idea is that we’re now empowered to solve our own hyper-niche problems and when we do it’s helpful to share the solutions with others.

I also like these stances from Thomas Ptacek:

• “I’m not packaging this application up. If you want it, just screenshot this section of the post and give it to Claude. It’ll build something useful.”
• “The truth is, I barely think about these things as ‘apps’ (I have no intention to distribute them). They’re artifacts of me making my computer do stuff for me, the way I want it to.”

Finally, the concept of arbitrariness in the hard sciences is relevant: sometimes a decision or choice is made out of pure, unadulterated convenience because what really matters is the fulfilling of intent via an outcome.

These three taken together form what I’m now thinking of as “arbs”: a sequence of incantations given to a machine once to make something happen reliably many times.

Arbs are cousins of tiny tools. Both exist for a narrow purpose. The difference is that a tiny tool’s form is part of what’s shared, while an arb’s form is arbitrary in the physicist’s sense. The most convenient choices are made to get to the outcome quickly. So there’s no repository to expose. What gets shared is the intent.