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I feel pretty productive myself with AI but this list isn’t beating the rap that AI boosters mostly use AI to do useless stuff focused on pretending to improve

I feel pretty productive myself with AI but this list isn’t beating the rap that AI boosters mostly use AI to do useless stuff focused on pretending to improve productivity or projects that make it easier to use AI.

stavros 8mo ago
Here's what I made: * https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/ - A voice note recorder. * https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot - My secure AI personal assistant that's made my life admin massively easier. * https://github.com/skorokithakis/macropad https://github.com/skorokithakis/macropad - A macropad. * https://github.com/skorokithakis/sleight-of-hand https://github.com/skorokithakis/sleight-of-hand - A clock that ticks seconds irregularly but is accurate for minutes. * https://pine.town https://pine.town - A whimsical little massively multiplayer drawing town. * https://encyclopedai.stavros.io https://encyclopedai.stavros.io - A fictional encyclopedia. * https://justone.stavros.io https://justone.stavros.io - A web implementation of the board game Just One. * https://www.themakery.cc https://www.themakery.cc - The website and newsletter for my maker community. * https://theboard.stavros.io https://theboard.stavros.io - A feature board that implements itself. * https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula - A blood test viewer. * https://github.com/skorokithakis/support-email-bot https://github.com/skorokithakis/support-email-bot - An email bot to answer common support queries for my users. Maybe some of these will beat the rap.
- profsummergig 8mo ago
  > "A clock that ticks seconds irregularly but is accurate for minutes." Sounds like something that could be tried as a fix for a kind of OCD (obsessive seconds counting).
  - stavros 8mo ago
    Maybe, although it's actually giving me OCD, I think. It's really hard to tune out because of the irregular ticking. I implemented a regular mode to combat this, defeating the purpose somewhat.
    - pinkmuffinere 8mo ago
      what was the motivation for originally making it with irregular ticking?
      - stavros 8mo ago
        It sounded fun (and it is)! My favorite mode is one that ticks each second imperceptibly fast, and then stalls for a second in one of the ticks (so that it lasts two). It's just the right amount of "did that clock just skip a beat? Nah must just be my imagination".
        pinkmuffinere 8mo ago
        Ha, cool! I love the whimsicality of this
        stavros 8mo ago
        Thanks, I love it too!
    - observationist 8mo ago
      Unpredictable things catch our attention - it's the exceptions that are important to survival, and our brains evolved to cope with the stimuli that this experiment messes with. Something like this would be anxiety inducing for most people, I bet. That'd be an excellent experiment, track heart rate, EEG, and performance on a range of cognitive tasks with 2 minute long breaks between each tasks, one group exposed to the irregular ticking, another exposed to regular ticking, another with silence, and one last one with pleasant white noise.
    - bencyoung 8mo ago
- saulpw 8mo ago
  Some of them definitely do not. Like a fictional encyclopedia? What is the point of that? That's like "an alphabetical novel". And even for the ones that might "beat the rap", I don't understand from your descriptions why they are interesting or unique. A voice note recorder? Cool. There are already hundreds if not thousands of those, why did you need to make your own in the first place? I'm not saying that yours isn't special, I'm just saying that it doesn't help to post the blandest description possible if you're trying to impress people with the utility of your utility.
  - stavros 8mo ago
    Sounds like the goalposts are moving from "not useless stuff focused on pretending to improve productivity or projects that make it easier to use AI" to "extremely useful stuff".
    - jjee 8mo ago
      Fair. But finally we are seeing what LLM proponents are putting forward. And it’s exactly what I expected - lines of code. Cute. But… so what? This is not good for the AI hype and nor any continued support for future investment. On the other hand all this stuff is going to drive continual innovation. The more tokens generated the more model producers invest. And we might eventually get to a place of local models.
      - stavros 8mo ago
        I swear, I'm going to stop commenting on this site, the amount of shitting on people who use LLMs (ie everyone) is just impossible to deal with.
        slopinthebag 8mo ago
        I have the opposite experience, the amount of AI boosters deriding the less enthusiastic, gleefully exclaiming how someone will be "left behind" if they don't immediately adopt the latest hype cycle, or sharing AI slop and either embellishing or outright lying about it's capabilities is making me want to log off forever. "Handwritten code? Don't you only care about providing maximum shareholder value?" No.
- risyachka 8mo ago
  It does not matter how much stuff is built. What matters is what comes out of it. And with AI the result of 99.9% is abandonware. Just piles of code no one will ever touch again. Which proves the point of no productivity gains. Its just cheap dopamine hits.
  - tempaccount5050 8mo ago
    Missing the point. I no longer need to buy or rely on someone else for software I want to use. A lot of things I want to do ARE one offs. I can write software and throw it away when I'm done.
    - sarchertech 8mo ago
      You still need to spend plenty of time verifying they work though unless it’s something where that truly doesn’t matter.
    - incr_me 8mo ago
      I know this sounds sarcastic but I really mean it: For years everyone has been monastically extolling some variation of "the best code is deleted code". Now, we have a machine that spits out infinite code that we can infinitely delete. It's a blessing that we can have shitty code generated that exposes at light speed how shitty our ideas are and have always been.
      - dsf2 8mo ago
        A nicer framing is original ideas and original thinking in general is very hard and doesn't come around very often. Steve Jobs once said a thing about the belief that an idea is 90% of the work is a disease. He is and was absolutely right.
  - grim_io 8mo ago
    Abandonware is what the customer wants. Constant enshittification and UI redesigns are driven by the provider to justify monthly extortion.
  - 8mo ago
SunshineTheCat 8mo ago
I've actually felt the same way about some (not all) but some "productivity" hacks I've seen people post online with their OpenClaw setups. I chuckle when I see some of them because you could achieve the same (or often faster) result by jotting a note onto a notecard and sticking it in your pocket. Most of the other automations running don't really seem to serve any real purpose at all. But hey, if it's fun, have at it.
shepherdjerred 8mo ago
That's a fair criticism of my personal projects. Maybe 3-4 of those could potentially see usefulness outside of myself. At work, I would say I've done plenty of "useful" things with AI, but that's hard to show off given that I work on an internal application.
- peteforde 8mo ago
  I don't think you should feel like your personal projects need to be vetted by an armchair peanut gallery. It's actually kind of offensive how so many people show up in a thread like this and demand that what sparked joy for you be formally subjected to a gauntlet of moving goalpost validation markers. Quite simply, I don't think that they are asking or arguing in good faith.
gopher_space 8mo ago
I mean I’m using it to deconstruct and reinvent my development process from the ground up, but it’s so easy to do this now and so customized for my specific needs that the idea of posting about it never crossed my mind.
lukan 8mo ago
"Or projects that make it easier to use AI" I get the sentiment, but this is natural with a groundbraking new technology. We are still in the process of figuring out how to best apply generative LLM's in a productive way. Lots of people tinker and share their results. Most is surely hype and will get thrown away and forgotten soon, but some is solid. And I am glad for it as I did not take part in that but now enjoy the results as the agents have become really good now.
- harry8 8mo ago
  > "Or projects that make it easier to use AI" This is exactly the same reason why the appropriate question to ask about Haskell is "where are the open source projects that are useful for something that is not programming?" The answer for Haskell after 3 decades is very, very little. Pandoc, Git Annexe, Xmonad. Might be something else since I last did the exercise but for Haskell the answer is not much. Then we examine why the kids (us kids of all ages) can't or don't write Haskell programs. The answer for LLM coding may be very different. But the question "where is the software that does something that solves a problem outside its own orbit" is crucial. (You have a problem. You want to use foo to solve it, now you have two problems but you can use foo to solve a part of the second one!!) The price of getting code written just went down. Where are the site/business launches? Apps? New ideas being built? Specifically. With links. Not general, hand-wavy "these are the sorts of things that ..." because even if it's superb analysis, without some data that can be checked it's indistinguishable from hype. Whatever data we get will be very informative.
  - lukan 8mo ago
    For instance, there is a abandoned open source project, I would have liked to see revived, https://www.wickeditor.com/ https://www.wickeditor.com/ (a attempt at recreating flash with web technology). Current official state in the repo: outdated dependencies, build process, etc. I looked into doing it manually, but gave up. Way too much dirty work and me no energy for that. Then I discovered that claude CLI got good - and told it to do it (with some handholding). And it did it. Build process modernized. No more outdated dependencies. Then I added some features I missed in the original wick editor. Again, it did it and it works. A working editor that was abandoned and missed features - now working again with the missing features. With minimal work done from my side (but I did put in work before to understand the source). I call this a very useful result. There are lots of abandoned half working projects out there. Lots of value to be recovered. Unlike Haskell, Agents are not just busy with building agents, but real tools. Currently I have the agents refactor a old codebase of mine. Lot's of tech dept. Lot's of hacks. Bad documentation. There are features I wanted to implement for ages but never did as I did not wanted to touch that ugly code again. But claude did it. It is almost scary of what they are already capable of.

stavros 8mo ago

Here's what I made: * https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/ - A voice note recorder. * https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot - My secure AI personal assistant that's made my life admin massively easier. * https://github.com/skorokithakis/macropad https://github.com/skorokithakis/macropad - A macropad. * https://github.com/skorokithakis/sleight-of-hand https://github.com/skorokithakis/sleight-of-hand - A clock that ticks seconds irregularly but is accurate for minutes. * https://pine.town https://pine.town - A whimsical little massively multiplayer drawing town. * https://encyclopedai.stavros.io https://encyclopedai.stavros.io - A fictional encyclopedia. * https://justone.stavros.io https://justone.stavros.io - A web implementation of the board game Just One. * https://www.themakery.cc https://www.themakery.cc - The website and newsletter for my maker community. * https://theboard.stavros.io https://theboard.stavros.io - A feature board that implements itself. * https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula - A blood test viewer. * https://github.com/skorokithakis/support-email-bot https://github.com/skorokithakis/support-email-bot - An email bot to answer common support queries for my users. Maybe some of these will beat the rap.

profsummergig 8mo ago
> "A clock that ticks seconds irregularly but is accurate for minutes." Sounds like something that could be tried as a fix for a kind of OCD (obsessive seconds counting).
- stavros 8mo ago
  Maybe, although it's actually giving me OCD, I think. It's really hard to tune out because of the irregular ticking. I implemented a regular mode to combat this, defeating the purpose somewhat.
  - pinkmuffinere 8mo ago
    what was the motivation for originally making it with irregular ticking?
    - stavros 8mo ago
      It sounded fun (and it is)! My favorite mode is one that ticks each second imperceptibly fast, and then stalls for a second in one of the ticks (so that it lasts two). It's just the right amount of "did that clock just skip a beat? Nah must just be my imagination".
      - pinkmuffinere 8mo ago
        Ha, cool! I love the whimsicality of this
        stavros 8mo ago
        Thanks, I love it too!
  - observationist 8mo ago
    Unpredictable things catch our attention - it's the exceptions that are important to survival, and our brains evolved to cope with the stimuli that this experiment messes with. Something like this would be anxiety inducing for most people, I bet. That'd be an excellent experiment, track heart rate, EEG, and performance on a range of cognitive tasks with 2 minute long breaks between each tasks, one group exposed to the irregular ticking, another exposed to regular ticking, another with silence, and one last one with pleasant white noise.
  - bencyoung 8mo ago
saulpw 8mo ago
Some of them definitely do not. Like a fictional encyclopedia? What is the point of that? That's like "an alphabetical novel". And even for the ones that might "beat the rap", I don't understand from your descriptions why they are interesting or unique. A voice note recorder? Cool. There are already hundreds if not thousands of those, why did you need to make your own in the first place? I'm not saying that yours isn't special, I'm just saying that it doesn't help to post the blandest description possible if you're trying to impress people with the utility of your utility.
- stavros 8mo ago
  Sounds like the goalposts are moving from "not useless stuff focused on pretending to improve productivity or projects that make it easier to use AI" to "extremely useful stuff".
  - jjee 8mo ago
    Fair. But finally we are seeing what LLM proponents are putting forward. And it’s exactly what I expected - lines of code. Cute. But… so what? This is not good for the AI hype and nor any continued support for future investment. On the other hand all this stuff is going to drive continual innovation. The more tokens generated the more model producers invest. And we might eventually get to a place of local models.
    - stavros 8mo ago
      I swear, I'm going to stop commenting on this site, the amount of shitting on people who use LLMs (ie everyone) is just impossible to deal with.
      - slopinthebag 8mo ago
        I have the opposite experience, the amount of AI boosters deriding the less enthusiastic, gleefully exclaiming how someone will be "left behind" if they don't immediately adopt the latest hype cycle, or sharing AI slop and either embellishing or outright lying about it's capabilities is making me want to log off forever. "Handwritten code? Don't you only care about providing maximum shareholder value?" No.
risyachka 8mo ago
It does not matter how much stuff is built. What matters is what comes out of it. And with AI the result of 99.9% is abandonware. Just piles of code no one will ever touch again. Which proves the point of no productivity gains. Its just cheap dopamine hits.
- tempaccount5050 8mo ago
  Missing the point. I no longer need to buy or rely on someone else for software I want to use. A lot of things I want to do ARE one offs. I can write software and throw it away when I'm done.
  - sarchertech 8mo ago
    You still need to spend plenty of time verifying they work though unless it’s something where that truly doesn’t matter.
  - incr_me 8mo ago
    I know this sounds sarcastic but I really mean it: For years everyone has been monastically extolling some variation of "the best code is deleted code". Now, we have a machine that spits out infinite code that we can infinitely delete. It's a blessing that we can have shitty code generated that exposes at light speed how shitty our ideas are and have always been.
    - dsf2 8mo ago
      A nicer framing is original ideas and original thinking in general is very hard and doesn't come around very often. Steve Jobs once said a thing about the belief that an idea is 90% of the work is a disease. He is and was absolutely right.
- grim_io 8mo ago
  Abandonware is what the customer wants. Constant enshittification and UI redesigns are driven by the provider to justify monthly extortion.
- 8mo ago

SunshineTheCat 8mo ago

I've actually felt the same way about some (not all) but some "productivity" hacks I've seen people post online with their OpenClaw setups. I chuckle when I see some of them because you could achieve the same (or often faster) result by jotting a note onto a notecard and sticking it in your pocket. Most of the other automations running don't really seem to serve any real purpose at all. But hey, if it's fun, have at it.

shepherdjerred 8mo ago

That's a fair criticism of my personal projects. Maybe 3-4 of those could potentially see usefulness outside of myself. At work, I would say I've done plenty of "useful" things with AI, but that's hard to show off given that I work on an internal application.

peteforde 8mo ago
I don't think you should feel like your personal projects need to be vetted by an armchair peanut gallery. It's actually kind of offensive how so many people show up in a thread like this and demand that what sparked joy for you be formally subjected to a gauntlet of moving goalpost validation markers. Quite simply, I don't think that they are asking or arguing in good faith.

gopher_space 8mo ago

I mean I’m using it to deconstruct and reinvent my development process from the ground up, but it’s so easy to do this now and so customized for my specific needs that the idea of posting about it never crossed my mind.

lukan 8mo ago

"Or projects that make it easier to use AI" I get the sentiment, but this is natural with a groundbraking new technology. We are still in the process of figuring out how to best apply generative LLM's in a productive way. Lots of people tinker and share their results. Most is surely hype and will get thrown away and forgotten soon, but some is solid. And I am glad for it as I did not take part in that but now enjoy the results as the agents have become really good now.

harry8 8mo ago
> "Or projects that make it easier to use AI" This is exactly the same reason why the appropriate question to ask about Haskell is "where are the open source projects that are useful for something that is not programming?" The answer for Haskell after 3 decades is very, very little. Pandoc, Git Annexe, Xmonad. Might be something else since I last did the exercise but for Haskell the answer is not much. Then we examine why the kids (us kids of all ages) can't or don't write Haskell programs. The answer for LLM coding may be very different. But the question "where is the software that does something that solves a problem outside its own orbit" is crucial. (You have a problem. You want to use foo to solve it, now you have two problems but you can use foo to solve a part of the second one!!) The price of getting code written just went down. Where are the site/business launches? Apps? New ideas being built? Specifically. With links. Not general, hand-wavy "these are the sorts of things that ..." because even if it's superb analysis, without some data that can be checked it's indistinguishable from hype. Whatever data we get will be very informative.
- lukan 8mo ago
  For instance, there is a abandoned open source project, I would have liked to see revived, https://www.wickeditor.com/ https://www.wickeditor.com/ (a attempt at recreating flash with web technology). Current official state in the repo: outdated dependencies, build process, etc. I looked into doing it manually, but gave up. Way too much dirty work and me no energy for that. Then I discovered that claude CLI got good - and told it to do it (with some handholding). And it did it. Build process modernized. No more outdated dependencies. Then I added some features I missed in the original wick editor. Again, it did it and it works. A working editor that was abandoned and missed features - now working again with the missing features. With minimal work done from my side (but I did put in work before to understand the source). I call this a very useful result. There are lots of abandoned half working projects out there. Lots of value to be recovered. Unlike Haskell, Agents are not just busy with building agents, but real tools. Currently I have the agents refactor a old codebase of mine. Lot's of tech dept. Lot's of hacks. Bad documentation. There are features I wanted to implement for ages but never did as I did not wanted to touch that ugly code again. But claude did it. It is almost scary of what they are already capable of.