For most of the history of software, an application existed because enough people wanted it to pay for the time it took to build. A tool that only one person needed usually didn’t get written, unless that person happened to be a programmer with a lot of spare evenings. Everyone else adapted to whatever the market offered.

That has changed. With modern LLM coding tools, a person with a clear picture of the application they want can build it, even if they will be its only user. I think of it as custom software on demand: not a product with a market, but a tool made for one person’s way of working. I’ve been building software this way for most of this year, and I think it is one of the more important things these tools make possible.

I own two 3D printers, an Elegoo Centauri Carbon and a Voron, and for a long time I needed three slicers to drive them. PrusaSlicer doesn’t ship settings for my Elegoo. OrcaSlicer does, but it crashes often and generally doesn’t like my PC. Every so often Cura got pulled in too.

The bigger problem was the settings themselves. Both PrusaSlicer and Orca have hundreds of options, and their UIs show you all of them. Most stay at their defaults, so when I want to change one specific thing I end up hunting through tabs, guessing where it lives, and often guessing wrong. Orca also supports a huge number of printers, but it’s somewhat focused on Bambu Lab’s.