I spend a lot of time configuring Ghostty, Neovim, and Sway. Tweaking keybindings, rearranging layouts, writing little scripts that glue things together. At some point I realized I enjoy shaping the tool more than using it stock. What these three have in common: everything is a config file. The entire interface is a text file you own.

That matters more than it sounds. These tools trust you with everything they can do. Compare that to most commercial software, where customization means a settings panel with a handful of toggles and maybe a theme picker. The developer decided what you need and sealed the rest shut. Config-driven software works the other way around — here’s the core, here are the knobs, do what you want. The developer builds a foundation and gets out of the way.

LLMs are making this gap matter a lot more. The old barrier to customization was knowledge — understanding the config format, knowing what options exist, predicting side effects. Most people never bothered. Now you describe what you want in plain English and get working config back. No memorizing Lua syntax, no digging through man pages. The bottleneck shifts from “can you figure out how to configure it” to “can it be configured at all.” Software that exposes its internals just became useful to a much larger group of people.

Where I think this goes is the game-mods model, applied to everyday software. Vendors build the engine. Communities reshape everything else. Not plugins or extensions bolted onto a fixed UI, but total transformations of the experience. Someone’s email client could look and behave nothing like yours, same base underneath. A notes app could become a project tracker or a publishing tool depending on which community mod you pull in. Software stops being a product you use as-is and starts looking more like a starting point.

The gap between moddable and locked-down software keeps widening. Tools that expose config files and scriptable interfaces get more capable every time the models improve. Tools that hide everything behind a fixed GUI stay exactly where they are.