12 ms·

Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

376 points by speckx 7mo ago

cyanydeez 7mo ago
There certainly is some relaxing value in working on projects to vibe code them; but not enough to pay some random corporation. Get yourself a Mac Studio or AMD395+ and pi or opencode, and a few plugins and they're pretty capable. Since they're not speed demons but reliable compaions who are always there, you don't ever feel compelled to constantly attend to whatever they're doing. And when you inevitably get bored with it, well, you've not done much anyway. You can always get back up to speed in a month and have the LLM remind you of what it was doing.
- AntiUSAbah 7mo ago
  I find $200/month for the pro/max subscriptions cost prohibivitve, but as a software enginere $20/month is just lunch. And with a Claude or GPT $20 Subscription, i can do other fun things too like using it for real things (emails) or image generation. A Mac Studio or AMD395 is neither of it. And its not just a basic setup either. I need to buy it, configure it, put it somewhere. That alone is a grand and more + a whole weekend.
  - cyanydeez 7mo ago
    You need to factor in the constant value proposition that cloud providers will absolutely drive you to in the next 2 years; even if you're not an AI hater, you should listen to ed zitron's description of the value props these clouds require to make a profit for their VC backers. This means oyu may be opinionated today on something you will not have tomorrow, 6 months, a year. All that work flow you salivate over can be ripped away. If you're fine with that, and you've "escaped the permanent underclass" congrats, this opinion is not for you.
    - AntiUSAbah 7mo ago
      I will be able to setup when necessary but until then, your proposed hardware is still very expensive and cost prohibitive to a lot of people. And at least in germany, running it yourself with free hardware costs me also 20 $. I'm happily playing around and using open source models, i do not mind at all. Btw. Open Router also hosts/provides open source models. That might be the better suggestion to the avg reader/user.
- IanCal 7mo ago
  Buying hardware is paying a "random corporation". Make the massive hardware purchase after finding out if you have enough demand to buy rather than rent,
  - cyanydeez 7mo ago
    My hardware won't be nerfed because a cloud business requires sacrifices.
- kowbell 7mo ago
  > And when you inevitably get bored with it, well, you've not done much anyway. I'm very interested in Local LLMs but the cheapest Mac Studio right now is more expensive than 8 years of a Claude Code Pro subscription, and incomparably slower/less capable. If I get bored with it, I will have a piece of unused hardware and a couple grand less in my bank account.
  - politelemon 7mo ago
    If you already have a gaming pc, then it's worth exploring as the cost of boredom is negligible.
    - kowbell 7mo ago
      I did tinker a lil with mine! RTX3080 with 10GB VRAM, 5600x with 64GB DDR4 - not very good but it was very fun and exciting to tinker with :) My partner on the otherhand has an M3 Max 64GB which I've had way more success with. Setting up opencode and doing a tiny spec-driven Rust project and watching it kiiinda work was extraordinarily exciting!
  - binary0010 7mo ago
    I have opencode with qwen 3.6 on my local machine. Just get the setup right and it's surprisingly fun to work with.
    - kowbell 7mo ago
      I had a ton of fun setting up and trying it out locally (also opencode and one of the qwens.) I still don't have hardware powerful enough to feel like it's meaningfully productive, but all the learning I had to do (and all the bonus things I got curious about as the curtain peeled back) got my nerd brain all worked up, and finally seeing it work was exciting in that cool-new-experience way you don't often get to enjoy :)
      - binary0010 7mo ago
        Yeah this is exactly how I felt! Never really felt excited about llms or agentic workflows before. Getting everything setup 100% local and tweaking it to exactly what I want and having it actually working quite well has been a really cool experience.
- binary0010 7mo ago
  Yeah. I setup opencode + qwen 3.6 last weekend. It's actually really cool to have it work on some internal tooling and stuff while I work on my primary projects. I'm surprised how easy it is to setup and that it can handle modestly complex planning and development flows.
- redsocksfan45 7mo ago
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nike-17 7mo ago
[flagged]
- dang 7mo ago
  Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079
ogig 7mo ago
My most abandoned type of projects are video games. I have a folder with tens of abandoned projects, I re-frame them as experiments at that point. This last week I decided to give Claude a go at one of these, and it's been a blast, it picked up the general path immediately. Since I said to CC they were abandon projects, he explicitly pushed into "lets have V0 game play loop finished, then we can compound and have fun = not giving up". Its been awesome at game dev, I gave him game design ideas, he comes with working code. I gave him papers about procedural algos, and he comes with the implementation, brainstorm items, create graphic assets (he created a set of procedural 2d generators as external tools), he even helped me build the lore. These have been one of the most fun times using a computer in a long time. Claude Code + Godot = fun. Going back to it.
- aleksiy123 7mo ago
  On the topic of procedural, one thing I experiment with is having the llm part of the procedural loop. Sort of writing a narrative on top live. Unfortunately, local models are still a bit slow and weak but was interesting to see what it came up with nonetheless.
- quietbritishjim 7mo ago
  I think this is the first time I've seen someone refer to an LLM as "he" rather than "it". No judgement, but I definitely found it interesting (and disconcerting).
  - folkrav 7mo ago
    I've heard it quite a bit before, but mostly from second-language speakers whose first language don't have impersonal third-person pronouns - e.g. French uses "il" or "elle" for all of "he", "she" or "it". It doesn't help that the marketing leans heavily on anthropomorphizing LLMs either, IMHO.
    - quietbritishjim 7mo ago
      That makes sense, thanks. English is my only language so I hadn't considered that
sdevonoes 7mo ago
But why give Anthropic/openai our money? Nonsense. Use open models
- theshrike79 7mo ago
  The author got $50 free credits. Also Anthropic is by far the best, open (local) models are glorified autocomplete at best unless you casually have 20k€ worth of hardware at home.
  - eikenberry 7mo ago
    Why assume local when you can easily use any of the open models via openrouter or any number of similar services.
    - theshrike79 7mo ago
      The OP said “ But why give Anthropic/openai our money? Nonsense. Use open models” Then I’d be giving money to openrouter and a Chinese model provider, is that better?
      - eikenberry 7mo ago
        Yes, it is better. They are releasing open models, unlike Anthropic. Additionally other (non-chinese) companies run the open models, so if that is the issue you have options.
        signatoremo 7mo ago
        "If you don't pay for a product, you are the product". That's always been emphasized on HN threads related to FB, Google, etc. Are LLMs different?
        eikenberry 7mo ago
        This is more a form of commoditizing your compliment as they don't see the model as a product but more like a programming language or other tool that you build products with.
dang 7mo ago
[stub for offtopicness] [we've hopefully deprovokified the title now]
- sailfast 7mo ago
  It’s ok to use coding assistance tools for anything you’d like! Not that you needed the permission of some random on the internet.
- WaxProlix 7mo ago
  To use agentic what? Off topic as heck but I really dislike this trend of coercing adjectives into true nominals - we're using programmatic! - like some sort of even-more-obnoxious variant on the verb to noun ('the ask') process. Why does it bother me so? I have no idea.
  - tensegrist 7mo ago
    blame the hn title rules (although i would just have substituted "AI") i doubt anyone is nouning "agentic" of their own accord (yet)
    - operatingthetan 7mo ago
      Just "leaders" at consulting firms mostly
- hard_times 7mo ago
  Oh? How very kind of the author to allow me to.
theshrike79 7mo ago
> In my mind there are different buckets for personal projects. One is things I do to learn and grow and the other is things I really wish existed. Pretty much 100% of projects I've done with vibe coding/engineering is in the second category. Stuff I need that either doesn't exist or exists, but is either horribly complex to configure or is a mess of 420 features even though I just need one of them. It's a lot easier for me to implement that one specific feature just for myself than keep vigilant on an existing app's eventual scope creep as it progresses to the eventual ability to read email[0] =). [0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html
ozim 7mo ago
With AI coding I was able to build three applications I always wanted but never had time to code them. Now it is different in a way — I don’t have time to use them.
- simonw 7mo ago
  I've genuinely lost count of the number of little vibe coded things I've built but then failed to use, because it turns out I have limited bandwidth in terms of fully trying out the quirky ideas I'm popping out through coding agents.
  - ozim 7mo ago
    I work on enterprise SaaS applications - people forget about features all the time and make requests for things that are already there. It is more of a bandwidth thing than need of actual new features. When on daily basis you have 10-20 apps you use for work.
bdangubic 7mo ago
projects you were never going to finish should stay projects that are never finished :)
- throwatdem12311 7mo ago
  effort needed used to be a gatekeeper for bad ideas now Claude will gas you up and tell you your bad ideas are actually the most amazing thing it’s ever heard
- wiseowise 7mo ago
  This. It is bizarre to read about +100 or whatever generated tools. Reminds me of those “1000+ games” bundle that are cheap knock off of popular games.
fengge 7mo ago
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CoherenceDaddy 7mo ago
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jedberg 7mo ago
12 years ago I tried to make a simple app for myself. It would display bars that got smaller as the day/week/month got shorter, and would show the weather as a set of bars between max temp and min, cloud cover, etc. I got it working well enough to display what I wanted in text and ascii, but I could never get the interface good enough to want to use it daily, and certainly couldn't get the graphical interface working. I threw it a Claude Code, told it what I wanted the graphical interface to look like, and let it run. It got an app exactly what I wanted, and even found a bug in the date parser that I hadn't noticed. I now have it running in the corner of my screen at all times. The next app I'm going to build is an iPhone app that turns off all my morning alarms when the kids' don't have school. Something I've wanted forever, but never could build because I know nothing about making iPhone apps and don't have time to learn (because of the aforementioned children). Claude Code is brilliant for personal apps. The code quality doesn't really matter, so you can just take what it gives you and use it.
- jkingsman 7mo ago
  Absolutely. I love building things, but sometimes I want something built. LLM assistance is great for when I want a personal tool, code quality be damned, for a specific purpose, without it taking over a weekend.
- msingh_5 7mo ago
  You don’t need to build an app. You can use the built in Shortcuts app. create a shortcut that turns off all alarms. Can have it read your calendar or whatever as signal to determine if alarms should be on/off for a certain day/time and have it run at a regular schedule.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jedberg 7mo ago
    I could, but what's the fun in that!? (But in seriousness, I hadn't considered using shortcuts. It's not clear it's extensible enough to do exactly what I want, but I'll look into it)
codybloem 7mo ago
When it comes to side projects, most of the time, if the spirit isn't willing I find it not worth doing. Process/experience over results, I call leisure. Results over process, I call work. If you have many side projects done mainly for the results, than you are working in your free time, and looking at it like that: is it really free? The modern age already requires of us more results than the spirit is good for. I like to leave side projects for the good of the spirit. An exception could be results for a greater good that one really believes in. This can give purpose and enrich the process and experience of doing.
- w33n1s 7mo ago
  I share this view, I think it's very healthy. I've been programming for 30+ years now, but I've always been fine with command line applications. Only recently I started getting into Qt to add a UI and turn my stuff into a real desktop application. It's been a real steep learning curve but I'm finally over it more or less. Anyway I posted a screenshot of my application on LinkedIn, and mentioned it would be free and open source. I got HUNDREDS of comments from "LinkedIn-type people" all big name engineers that wouldn't HIRE me for anything but either made comments like "looking forward to integrating this into our workflows" or "not the first time someone tried to do this..." Either way, instead of feeling motivated, I got the worst feeling that I'm doing all this work and people are either going to just take advantage of it and get the credit for "finding" it, or criticize it simply because it's not for them. It bummed me out so bad that I stopped work on it entirely for like a month. Anyway I finally came to look at it the way you mentioned. What I LIKED was the process of learning Qt and seeing my old programs come alive. So instead, it's my "project car" now. I build it up and tear it down all the time. Totally redesign the data models just to see what advantages different designs can give me. Try make my own graphical views. Try implementing language translations. It's been "finished" for a while now but I probably have five completely different-under-the-hood versions of it and THAT is what has been fun. I use it constantly all day at work and I never mentioned it on LinkedIn again lol
  - bbkane 7mo ago
    I've been doing the same thing with my CLI framework. Rethinking and rebuilding with no pressure to finish is a lot of fun. I've been using the CHANGELOG [0] as a "blog" explaining WHY I made the changes and that's really been fun to look back and read too 0: https://github.com/bbkane/warg/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md https://github.com/bbkane/warg/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
aifactory5 7mo ago
The tooling landscape has changed so much in the last two years that I find myself re-evaluating automation setups that were solid 18 months ago. The time investment to rebuild is real but the efficiency gains on the other side are worth it for anything you're doing more than a few times a week.
theendisney 7mo ago
I once had a project for novice freelancers. The idea was to take your abandoned fumble and put multiple people on it at 3rd world rates. There are lots of people in cheap coutries who can somewhat code. You can aford hiring someone for [say] 3 euro per day. If they describe where they got stuck in the daily progres report you can look at it and help a bit or not and Just let them figure it out. You can pay more of course, buy them a computer, an internet connecties, books, courses, even an office but it isnt required. Just pay 60 per project every 4 weeks and ignore it. If interesting progress happens its fun to look at.
- natpalmer1776 7mo ago
  This sounds similar to how art patronage used to (still does?) work.
- aetherspawn 7mo ago
  Which site did you use?
tarr1124 7mo ago
Three notetaking app attempts sitting in my private repos, all stalled at the gap between idea and free time. With Claude Code I finally got the one I really wanted out in two months. Building it has been the best hobby I've found. Beats games or scrolling. When you've been carrying an idea for years, the app that finally ships has more of you in it, and I'd bet we'll see a lot more of these from solo builders.
- guessbest 7mo ago
  But who will buy it? No knocks against building old projects, but the market will be flooded with extremely speciality projects. I miss when every app had a spec on the box. I think we need something like that for usage. A new modeling language or something.
  - zormino 7mo ago
    Who cares? Nothing wrong with trying to make a product to sell, but projects dont have to be to sell. I've been having a blast lately working on an old game engine I started during covid and getting sidetracked into some new projects. None of them will ever make me a dime but I'm learning a ton and having fun.
  - roncesvalles 7mo ago
    >the market will be flooded with extremely speciality projects All the personal tools described in this thread are duct tape and bubblegum under the hood and nowhere near productionizable. That's what Claude Code makes for you. The whole point is that for personal tools, code quality never really mattered since it's never going to be exposed to the public or be iterated upon by a revolving door team of devs like real software products. These are all highly overfitted tools that shave off like 15 seconds of time in the day for some particular person. It's almost exactly like having a 3D printer for software, with exactly the kind of quality that a present-day 3D printer gives you.
    - zormino 7mo ago
      I really like the 3d printer analogy. You can still make some pretty cool stuff, you can make some pretty complex things if you carefully design the whole system and put in the effort to print each part individually, and quality depends both on how good of a 3d printer you have and on the proper use of it. "3d print me a new house" is still a pipe-dream: you'll get some miniature facsimile of a house, sure, but a proper house requires proper tools and expertise.
hansmayer 7mo ago
Sounds a lot like that disgusti g corporate press propaganda tbh, of the "eat less avocado toast if you cant afford rent" variant. Is the AI mainstream that desperate in their relentlesss push for adoption of their bullshit text generators?
cedws 7mo ago
In the time I’ve had agents I’ve never abandoned more projects. Vibe coding especially just leads me to feel no attachment. I don’t feel proud to put my name on it. Despite coding from a young age I always thought that I cared more about the outcome than the code. Turns out that’s not entirely the case.
nothinkjustai 7mo ago
What is the point of using AI for a side project? Isn’t the point of a side project to A) have fun writing code or B) challenge yourself or C) learn something new, and usually all 3? Slopping out random stuff you have no attachment to, taught you nothing, and that feels bad to pass off as your own work accomplishes nothing.
- rjh29 7mo ago
  D) to solve a problem in your personal life? To make an app that you wish existed but didn't?
  - wiseowise 7mo ago
    Most of the replies in the thread that do this just scratch their OCD.
- xXSLAYERXx 7mo ago
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thegrim33 7mo ago
Every time I see a story like this I like to play the game "does this person just happen to work for a company that sells AI solutions?". And yes, yes they do. Almost never will see you a story promoting AI solutions from someone that isn't directly involved in selling AI solutions.
- hansmayer 7mo ago
  +1 and - The title has that weird corpo media "here is why you should not quiet quit" vibe to it, doesn'it?
- wiseowise 7mo ago
  “Losing GPT 5.5 feels like amputating a limb”, - unnamed NVidia engineer.
aokdi 7mo ago
Yes, you can revive it into worthless slop. Learning next to nothing for yourself and achieving a hollow sense of satisfaction at best. Maybe even shamelessly post it as a Show HN along with the other 99% of worthless slop submissions there.
- rjh29 7mo ago
  I want app X. I know how to code it but it'll take a whole weekend/vacation days. I would learn nothing. Now I can use AI to make it. What exactly am I losing here?
  - aokdi 7mo ago
    Your dignity.
    - CharlesW 7mo ago
      As you perch comfortably in your Throne of Purity, it's worth remembering that the average software developer sits on top of 10+ layers of abstraction (not counting hardware).
      - wiseowise 7mo ago
        LLMs are not a level of abstraction, can we let the meme die already? For the same reason why literature summaries are not an abstraction over reading.
        rjh29 7mo ago
        The generated code is an abstraction, as you do not need to concern yourself with how it was made, only the surface API. Saying "can we let the meme die already" is not an argument.
        wiseowise 7mo ago
        It might be an abstraction, but definitely not the same level of frameworks, OS, machine code, etc. LLM is not a runtime. It might be something akin to non deterministic compiler where it converts your MD to code.
NetOpWibby 7mo ago
In 2020 I was in the Codemirror forums trying to get help with a project that replaces React in GraphiQL for Svelte. It was too difficult for me to figure out so I shelved it. Yesterday I asked Claude to make this happen and it referenced that very thread I made. Anyhoo, I'm working on making it pretty (it works!!) before integrating it into my opinionated GraphQL server[1]. There really is no excuse for NOT being the change you wish to see in the world anymore. --- [1]: https://code.webb.page/eol/gq.git/about https://code.webb.page/eol/gq.git/about
lawwantsin17 7mo ago
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jliptzin 7mo ago
We have closed-source and open-source software, I think the next phase is going to be self-source or llm-source software (not sure what the term will ultimately end up being), but basically if you have a need for something that is not filled exactly by any app, you will just give the spec to an LLM and in X amount of minutes/hours you will have bespoke software built just for you to use personally, fully tested and to spec. For example, I still haven't found a workout/weight lifting tracking app that does 100% of what I want and at this point I may just build it myself because I could probably do it in half a day with claude and won't have to pay any annoying subscription fees. Maybe it'll still be called AI slop but if it works it works.
arjie 7mo ago
It’s great. I have a stupendous amount of personal software now. Yesterday was a native text editor that was fully integrated into my mediawiki install and would autocomplete links and make syntax easier to use. No one could have built this software but me because it’s worth nothing to others. And I couldn’t build it because it takes too long. But when I’m using an agent to code the limited resource is my attention which actually does fine so long as every free brain cycle is on a task. So these personal things are great to throw into my tab loop to occupy a free slot. These have been wonderful times.
- hypercube33 7mo ago
  I finished a mod for Quake 2 I started in 1998 finally a few weeks ago. AI is really helping me get past the COVID burnout I was running of too many projects I half did. Fixed terminals (an rdp tool) today. Working on OpenRA bugs I opened issues 10 years ago now - engine is 10x faster and pathfinding mostly works properly.
  - Joyrst 7mo ago
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- saadn92 7mo ago
  It's crazy. I have something like 120 personal tools at this point and the pattern you describe is exactly right. The bottleneck moved from implementation to context switching. I started keeping a markdown file at the root of every project that captures state and next steps whenever I stop working on it, purely so I can resume without the 20-minute "wait where was I" tax. There's just no pressure to handle edge cases or write docs for people who'll never use it. Just solve exactly your problem and move on.
  - AnotherGoodName 7mo ago
    I’ve been asking it to make some of my game tools into static websites where possible. I did pay the $10 for the following domains but i’m ok with that so i can share some of the fun things that come out of the agent. grandcheaten.com - a save game editor and guide for jagged alliance 3 thedailycheat.com - a save game editor for newstower
phoebe_builds 7mo ago
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toolrelay 7mo ago
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- VladVladikoff 7mo ago
  I checked your link and fail to see how that is a pre AI project that you are only completing now, it is obviously a recent concept. Also your username matches the project, so this seems mostly like a lame attempt to shill your product by “joining the conversation”
  - lelanthran 7mo ago
    You replied to a bot.
fitsumbelay 7mo ago
it's a top affordance of AI because pause development usually over complexity I can't manage or knowledge gap that I can't close in time to sustain momentum. Not only are those roadblocks a non-issue, my perspective shifts from in-the-weeds hacking to a perch with meta view to take the project to completion or maybe beyond previous goals. win-win to the power of win
EverMemory 7mo ago
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haricomputer 7mo ago
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potomak 7mo ago
I prompted Claude code from my phone to revive Draw!, a pixel art editor I first published 15 years ago as an exploration using Redis as a DB. The new version is live at http://pixel.drawbang.com http://pixel.drawbang.com after 1 week of prompting Opus 4.6 with a max subscription.
- rhubarbtree 7mo ago
  Could you try to revive it by hand? I’m curious as to how long it would have taken.
  - nickthegreek 7mo ago
    Absolutely insane request.
    - rhubarbtree 7mo ago
      Not the whole thing. Just a day looking at it. Did they do that?
flashdesk 7mo ago
I’ve had a similar experience. Having better tools really makes a difference when revisiting old or half-finished projects.
noisy_boy 7mo ago
I have revamped my home networking setup, installed raspberry pi, setup adguard on it for the home network, migrated my jellyfin set-up to it, integrated all these devices on tailscale, dealt with physical LAN point limitations by setting up a switch, repurposed old router to get around ISP imposed limitations, setup a three tier backup solution and so on. In themselves they are not particularly challenging but taken together, these personal projects had been pending for years. Not any more. Few weekends and everything has been implemented and I have learned a ton in the process. It has been great fun doing this turbo charged tinkering. I think personal projects are where LLMs shine the brightest.
- henryopen 7mo ago
  Same arc here — Proxmox host with 5 Linux VMs, 2 Windows boxes, a Pi, all of it the "I'll get to it next weekend" pile that sat for two years. The thing that broke the dam wasn't the coding speed, it was no longer having to write the boring middle layer myself: apt upgrades across 6 hosts, auditing which containers had restart=unless-stopped, certificate rotation. I describe the goal, it does the SSH dance. Whether that's net good for my skills long-term I genuinely don't know yet.
  - noisy_boy 7mo ago
    I made it document it all too. So now that is effectively a skill which means next time I don't need to give it background on my home networking setup. If I want to check something myself, I can read that same document which is part of my Obsidian vault that gets synced to my phone via Syncthing. So I can basically connect to the pi via termux on my android and check stuff from anywhere. Plus, time flies on train rides when you are watching a movie of your choice from jellyfin running on the pi. Very satisfying.
butz 7mo ago
So, what are you planning to do when you finish all your unfinished hobby projects?
3vo-ai 7mo ago
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0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
> I still have fears around deskilling from relying on these tools too much I'm a millennial who builds furniture with hand tools and wood joinery from a century ago. Nobody taught me, although I did find resources online to learn from. I should not be able to do these things. Everyone should have forgotten this esoteric, obsolete, uncommon knowledge by now. Yet here I am, doing it anyway. It turns out you can just learn what you want, when you want to. I don't fear losing this skill in the future, because I can just remind myself how it works. The tools, books, videos, and wood aren't going anywhere. You aren't going to "be deskilled" from not writing code by hand regularly. Just because you use AI doesn't mean your brain grows a black hole from which information can never return. It's not giving you Alzheimer's. There might be a small amount of time it takes for you to refresh yourself, but then you're back to work again. Just ask anyone who went from coding to managing. They're a little rusty when they go back after years of absence, but they pick it back up. Also, especially if it's a personal project, keep in mind you do not need to burn Opus tokens. Buy any of the dirt cheap subscriptions which give you access to MiniMax. Put it in a container on yolo mode. Give it some context, a prompt, web search, and a ticket system like beads. Then let it churn. You aren't in a rush, it's a personal project. As long as you follow the brainstorm -> plan -> implementation -> testing process, and have added methods to do real testing (not mocks or unit tests), it will get done with time and money to spare.
- bowsamic 7mo ago
  > Just because you use AI doesn't mean your brain grows a black hole from which information can never return. How do you know this? I’m not taking that risk
  - deaux 7mo ago
    Every single second of our existence is taking risks about things we don't know. Of course he doesn't know this, he just assigns odds, as we do. Clearly you've assigned much higher odds.
teo_zero 7mo ago
> things I really wish existed. Just last week I was looking for a way to move all the windows from one screen to another in a go. After evaluating many clumsy or over-complicated existing solutions, I asked copilot to write a C program to do it. It had to be minimal and not depend on any runtime framework. A few loops later I had what I wanted without installing third-party tools!
- rasz 7mo ago
  > move all the windows from one screen to another in a go Sounds like a job for 10 line AutoHotkey script.
  - teo_zero 7mo ago
    In fact it was one of the suggested tools. But installing a whole new application, and having it running in the background all the time listening for evey keypress, just to do its unique job once in a while... well, that's what I was referring to when I mentioned "over-complicated solutions". Of course if you already have AutoHotKey running for other reasons, it fits perfectly.
solraph 7mo ago
I know how to write code, I just don't have time. AI has been an absolute game changer in let me get OS projects out into the world that I just didn't have time to build before. I'm having an absolute blast spinning up local GUI applications for Linux that I wanted to exist, but didn't have enough motivation to build before. (Shameless plug) * Sambervise: https://github.com/edward-murrell/sambervise https://github.com/edward-murrell/sambervise - A Linux GUI application for remotely administering Samba 4 Active Directory Domain Controllers. * Krbtray: A GTK3 system tray application for Kerberos ticket management on Linux Mint / Cinnamon (and other GTK environments using GtkStatusIcon, such as XFCE and MATE). https://github.com/edward-murrell/krbtray https://github.com/edward-murrell/krbtray
- XorNot 7mo ago
  Okay this may actually have sold me on AI coding now because these are both the sorts of applications I've been looking for to solve real problems.
- locknitpicker 7mo ago
  > I know how to write code, I just don't have time. AI has been an absolute game changer in let me get OS projects out into the world that I just didn't have time to build before. Another important development is that coding assistants greatly reduced the cost of refactoring whole software projects. With coding assistants we can explore the solution space with deeper changes at a fraction of the time it would take us just to write the code alone, let alone draft how modules were designed. This isn't without tradeoffs, though. Some models can and often do generate code that misses the bar on maintainability. Just because we save time writing it that doesn't mean we don't have to spend time reiterating, cleaning up,and updating system prompts/instruction files to ground the prompts.
- meken 7mo ago
  Just some feedback - I would love to see some screenshots in your GitHub READMEs!* *I saw the second project has a partial screenshot, but not a full one.
  - 7mo ago
maxbeech 7mo ago
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yukino99 7mo ago
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jillesvangurp 7mo ago
I've always had more ideas than I can take on. Some of them are good ideas even. With AI tools, I'm now able to generate fairly decent working things for more of them. Ironically the value of implementing these ideas is dropping fast. A few weeks ago, I built a little search library that runs in the browser and doesn't need a server. It's styled after Elasticsearch and has most of it's term and matching query support, aggregation support, and I added ANN vector search as well (uses web GPU). Most of that was just me going "let's add feature X" and boom done. I used it in some websites (also built using AI) at this point. It doesn't scale but it's great for blogs, documentation sites (https://querylight.tryformation.com/ https://querylight.tryformation.com/, this site documents the library), etc. It all works exactly like I imagined it would. I probably could add most of the long tail of features Elasticsearch has to this library with very little effort. But the flip side is that the library got a rather lukewarm reception on Github. It seems people are too busy coding things themselves with AI to appreciate other people's efforts much. And fair enough, if you need a search library, you could probably generate your own. Or just let the AI pick one for you. It's not like this was hard for me or a lot of work. The economic value of these projects is dropping rapidly. I still like doing them because I like building stuff. And I think there is as a learning curve with these tools that is important to master. Because there is a lot of work that is going to need doing still and people will pay less for it and still expect decent results that you can only get if you master the tools. The ambition level will just go up to match what is now possible. People thinking that they are going to lean back while the AI works for them are in for a surprise. I work very long days the last months.
RuoqiJin 7mo ago
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pando85 7mo ago
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DeathArrow 7mo ago
>I initially drafted this before my last post on how Claude Code is getting worse. I'm putting it out now so I can reference it in a future post on OpenCode. IMO, what is getting worse is not Claude Code, the CLI tool, but Anthropic API. That's what most people experience. I used Claude Code with GLM 5.1, MiniMax M2.7, Kimi K2.6 and had pretty good results. I prefer Claude Code over OpenCode because most plugins and skills have best compatibility with Claude Code. Even Terminal Bench showed a bit better results for Claude Code than for OpenCode.
ianhxu 7mo ago
I've had several product ideas a week for years, all of them just sitting in Apple Notes. In the last month, I built three of them into a usable beta and I use all of them every day.
mbtrilla 7mo ago
My experience matched this almost too closely. Had a comparison-aggregator side project sitting at maybe 20% done for over a year. I'd open it once a month, scroll through the still-need-to-do list, get tired, close the tab. Pairing with Claude for a couple of weekends got me past the half-built wall. The thing that surprised me wasn't raw speed. It was that I stopped having to spend an hour reloading my own old code into my head before I could do anything. That re-entry tax is what always killed it for me. The hype is annoying but the people dunking on these tools mostly aren't using them for the boring stuff they're actually decent at.
Fabulu 7mo ago
I was and remain skeptical. But I can't help but see how much productive I am and how much fun I'm having using Claude. The landscape is changing.
randyrand 7mo ago
tangent: Can someone implement a way to run iOS apps on linux?
- tonymet 7mo ago
  I wouldn’t say it’s impossible but you have private APIs, binary incompatibility to overcome. but the AI will eventually conquer both.
pylonpeng 7mo ago
[flagged]
tonymet 7mo ago
I built a DNS MX health check , including the charting, scheduler, alerts, notifier in just a few minutes . And it’s way more fun to own all of the components. No third party deps, either. I have about 20 random utilities like this that each would have required a subscription . It’s fun to try to optimize the tool to the extreme. Can I get this to run in a few kb ? A docker image < 100kb ? What’s the smallest possible browser tab ? (sadly it’s still 25mb) . How many ns can I get this operation? I enjoy building tools my way . Instead of depending on mySQL or a bloated web framework just to get the functionality I need, I can design all of the requirements according to my preferences. I hope AI actually rekindles the ingenuity of 90s coding. No more “best practices” , “laws of software engineering” or other suffocating constraints. It became way too conformist over the past 15 years ( around the time Clean Code / Design Patterns became a religion)
giancarlostoro 7mo ago
Not just never going to finish in some cases you never even got to start on them. You have been architecting this thing for 15 years you know the entire stack inside out at this point, so much so that when you finally say let me see what the AI can do, and you braindump into a markdown file and have Claude build from that spec you are astounded.
endofreach 7mo ago
I'm using them just to start even more of those projects. I guess i'll always be, most literally, a beginner.
vdalhambra 7mo ago
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Zopieux 7mo ago
I'm at peace with unfinished projects. My dev/ is a graveyard, only a few of those eventually make their way to a public forge. That's okay. Not every project needs to be finished; not every project needs to be published. I had fun and learned something building those prototypes. I suppose the end result wasn't really the point. Throwing LLMs at doing the thing deprives me of that joy, kills most of the learning opportunities, and leaves you with a (usually half) baked product that you don't really own or understand. Sometimes I just want a quick bespoke tool and using an LLM is fine. But I do not enjoy using something I don't understand.
pelasaco 7mo ago
I love to use LLM to kill/archive old projects. I had some gems that i wrote back in the days, checked this week if its still relevant, if rails picked it up already, etc.. then i could just update README.md and archive them without any fear.
giannicmptr1000 7mo ago
This is one of the best uses of ai and a lot of fun.
apple4ever 7mo ago
For me, the journey is more important than the destination. Using coding assistance takes all the fun out of it, as well as the learning. (Not to mention adding aggravation of dealing with prompts and figuring out whether the response is correct or not).
lihanghanger 7mo ago
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saidinesh5 7mo ago
Honestly, LLMs have been quite good at helping me procrastinate less on my pet projects. It took me a weekend to build a little esp8266 gadget that automatically turns off my parents' water heater after a fixed time. They saw a dip in our power bill thanks to that. I did not want the complexity of a full blown home assistant setup there. And the Philips Wiz socket did not support setting timers/simple automations.I wanted to test out micropython too for this instead of the usual C++/Arduino/etc.. I started on a saturday and went from 0 to 90 that single day. The product I had after that day was mostly complete but it was crashing at odd times. I spent another day to get to the root cause of the issue - caused by the LLM mixing up async and sync functions. One prompt to the LLM and the problem is gone. The product has been running flawlessly since then - for months. Every weekend I spent with Antigravity - I was able to push out something totally usable. Water Heater monitor, configurations for the custom Tuya devices I installed in my home, a chrome extension I wanted to use at work. I am honestly impressed at the pace at which this whole thing improved too. Just 2 years ago - it was a totally useless tool that couldn't even match the speed or accuracy of my text editor snippets.
kk_mors 6mo ago
[flagged]

376 points by speckx 7mo ago

There certainly is some relaxing value in working on projects to vibe code them; but not enough to pay some random corporation. Get yourself a Mac Studio or AMD395+ and pi or opencode, and a few plugins and they're pretty capable. Since they're not speed demons but reliable compaions who are always there, you don't ever feel compelled to constantly attend to whatever they're doing. And when you inevitably get bored with it, well, you've not done much anyway. You can always get back up to speed in a month and have the LLM remind you of what it was doing.

AntiUSAbah 7mo ago
I find $200/month for the pro/max subscriptions cost prohibivitve, but as a software enginere $20/month is just lunch. And with a Claude or GPT $20 Subscription, i can do other fun things too like using it for real things (emails) or image generation. A Mac Studio or AMD395 is neither of it. And its not just a basic setup either. I need to buy it, configure it, put it somewhere. That alone is a grand and more + a whole weekend.
- cyanydeez 7mo ago
  You need to factor in the constant value proposition that cloud providers will absolutely drive you to in the next 2 years; even if you're not an AI hater, you should listen to ed zitron's description of the value props these clouds require to make a profit for their VC backers. This means oyu may be opinionated today on something you will not have tomorrow, 6 months, a year. All that work flow you salivate over can be ripped away. If you're fine with that, and you've "escaped the permanent underclass" congrats, this opinion is not for you.
  - AntiUSAbah 7mo ago
    I will be able to setup when necessary but until then, your proposed hardware is still very expensive and cost prohibitive to a lot of people. And at least in germany, running it yourself with free hardware costs me also 20 $. I'm happily playing around and using open source models, i do not mind at all. Btw. Open Router also hosts/provides open source models. That might be the better suggestion to the avg reader/user.
IanCal 7mo ago
Buying hardware is paying a "random corporation". Make the massive hardware purchase after finding out if you have enough demand to buy rather than rent,
- cyanydeez 7mo ago
  My hardware won't be nerfed because a cloud business requires sacrifices.
kowbell 7mo ago
> And when you inevitably get bored with it, well, you've not done much anyway. I'm very interested in Local LLMs but the cheapest Mac Studio right now is more expensive than 8 years of a Claude Code Pro subscription, and incomparably slower/less capable. If I get bored with it, I will have a piece of unused hardware and a couple grand less in my bank account.
- politelemon 7mo ago
  If you already have a gaming pc, then it's worth exploring as the cost of boredom is negligible.
  - kowbell 7mo ago
    I did tinker a lil with mine! RTX3080 with 10GB VRAM, 5600x with 64GB DDR4 - not very good but it was very fun and exciting to tinker with :) My partner on the otherhand has an M3 Max 64GB which I've had way more success with. Setting up opencode and doing a tiny spec-driven Rust project and watching it kiiinda work was extraordinarily exciting!
- binary0010 7mo ago
  I have opencode with qwen 3.6 on my local machine. Just get the setup right and it's surprisingly fun to work with.
  - kowbell 7mo ago
    I had a ton of fun setting up and trying it out locally (also opencode and one of the qwens.) I still don't have hardware powerful enough to feel like it's meaningfully productive, but all the learning I had to do (and all the bonus things I got curious about as the curtain peeled back) got my nerd brain all worked up, and finally seeing it work was exciting in that cool-new-experience way you don't often get to enjoy :)
    - binary0010 7mo ago
      Yeah this is exactly how I felt! Never really felt excited about llms or agentic workflows before. Getting everything setup 100% local and tweaking it to exactly what I want and having it actually working quite well has been a really cool experience.
binary0010 7mo ago
Yeah. I setup opencode + qwen 3.6 last weekend. It's actually really cool to have it work on some internal tooling and stuff while I work on my primary projects. I'm surprised how easy it is to setup and that it can handle modestly complex planning and development flows.
redsocksfan45 7mo ago
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nike-17 7mo ago

[flagged]

dang 7mo ago
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079

ogig 7mo ago

My most abandoned type of projects are video games. I have a folder with tens of abandoned projects, I re-frame them as experiments at that point. This last week I decided to give Claude a go at one of these, and it's been a blast, it picked up the general path immediately. Since I said to CC they were abandon projects, he explicitly pushed into "lets have V0 game play loop finished, then we can compound and have fun = not giving up". Its been awesome at game dev, I gave him game design ideas, he comes with working code. I gave him papers about procedural algos, and he comes with the implementation, brainstorm items, create graphic assets (he created a set of procedural 2d generators as external tools), he even helped me build the lore. These have been one of the most fun times using a computer in a long time. Claude Code + Godot = fun. Going back to it.

aleksiy123 7mo ago
On the topic of procedural, one thing I experiment with is having the llm part of the procedural loop. Sort of writing a narrative on top live. Unfortunately, local models are still a bit slow and weak but was interesting to see what it came up with nonetheless.
quietbritishjim 7mo ago
I think this is the first time I've seen someone refer to an LLM as "he" rather than "it". No judgement, but I definitely found it interesting (and disconcerting).
- folkrav 7mo ago
  I've heard it quite a bit before, but mostly from second-language speakers whose first language don't have impersonal third-person pronouns - e.g. French uses "il" or "elle" for all of "he", "she" or "it". It doesn't help that the marketing leans heavily on anthropomorphizing LLMs either, IMHO.
  - quietbritishjim 7mo ago
    That makes sense, thanks. English is my only language so I hadn't considered that

sdevonoes 7mo ago

But why give Anthropic/openai our money? Nonsense. Use open models

theshrike79 7mo ago
The author got $50 free credits. Also Anthropic is by far the best, open (local) models are glorified autocomplete at best unless you casually have 20k€ worth of hardware at home.
- eikenberry 7mo ago
  Why assume local when you can easily use any of the open models via openrouter or any number of similar services.
  - theshrike79 7mo ago
    The OP said “ But why give Anthropic/openai our money? Nonsense. Use open models” Then I’d be giving money to openrouter and a Chinese model provider, is that better?
    - eikenberry 7mo ago
      Yes, it is better. They are releasing open models, unlike Anthropic. Additionally other (non-chinese) companies run the open models, so if that is the issue you have options.
      - signatoremo 7mo ago
        "If you don't pay for a product, you are the product". That's always been emphasized on HN threads related to FB, Google, etc. Are LLMs different?
        eikenberry 7mo ago
        This is more a form of commoditizing your compliment as they don't see the model as a product but more like a programming language or other tool that you build products with.

dang 7mo ago

[stub for offtopicness] [we've hopefully deprovokified the title now]

sailfast 7mo ago
It’s ok to use coding assistance tools for anything you’d like! Not that you needed the permission of some random on the internet.
WaxProlix 7mo ago
To use agentic what? Off topic as heck but I really dislike this trend of coercing adjectives into true nominals - we're using programmatic! - like some sort of even-more-obnoxious variant on the verb to noun ('the ask') process. Why does it bother me so? I have no idea.
- tensegrist 7mo ago
  blame the hn title rules (although i would just have substituted "AI") i doubt anyone is nouning "agentic" of their own accord (yet)
  - operatingthetan 7mo ago
    Just "leaders" at consulting firms mostly
hard_times 7mo ago
Oh? How very kind of the author to allow me to.

theshrike79 7mo ago

> In my mind there are different buckets for personal projects. One is things I do to learn and grow and the other is things I really wish existed. Pretty much 100% of projects I've done with vibe coding/engineering is in the second category. Stuff I need that either doesn't exist or exists, but is either horribly complex to configure or is a mess of 420 features even though I just need one of them. It's a lot easier for me to implement that one specific feature just for myself than keep vigilant on an existing app's eventual scope creep as it progresses to the eventual ability to read email[0] =). [0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

ozim 7mo ago

With AI coding I was able to build three applications I always wanted but never had time to code them. Now it is different in a way — I don’t have time to use them.

simonw 7mo ago
I've genuinely lost count of the number of little vibe coded things I've built but then failed to use, because it turns out I have limited bandwidth in terms of fully trying out the quirky ideas I'm popping out through coding agents.
- ozim 7mo ago
  I work on enterprise SaaS applications - people forget about features all the time and make requests for things that are already there. It is more of a bandwidth thing than need of actual new features. When on daily basis you have 10-20 apps you use for work.

bdangubic 7mo ago

projects you were never going to finish should stay projects that are never finished :)

throwatdem12311 7mo ago
effort needed used to be a gatekeeper for bad ideas now Claude will gas you up and tell you your bad ideas are actually the most amazing thing it’s ever heard
wiseowise 7mo ago
This. It is bizarre to read about +100 or whatever generated tools. Reminds me of those “1000+ games” bundle that are cheap knock off of popular games.

fengge 7mo ago

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CoherenceDaddy 7mo ago

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jedberg 7mo ago

12 years ago I tried to make a simple app for myself. It would display bars that got smaller as the day/week/month got shorter, and would show the weather as a set of bars between max temp and min, cloud cover, etc. I got it working well enough to display what I wanted in text and ascii, but I could never get the interface good enough to want to use it daily, and certainly couldn't get the graphical interface working. I threw it a Claude Code, told it what I wanted the graphical interface to look like, and let it run. It got an app exactly what I wanted, and even found a bug in the date parser that I hadn't noticed. I now have it running in the corner of my screen at all times. The next app I'm going to build is an iPhone app that turns off all my morning alarms when the kids' don't have school. Something I've wanted forever, but never could build because I know nothing about making iPhone apps and don't have time to learn (because of the aforementioned children). Claude Code is brilliant for personal apps. The code quality doesn't really matter, so you can just take what it gives you and use it.

jkingsman 7mo ago
Absolutely. I love building things, but sometimes I want something built. LLM assistance is great for when I want a personal tool, code quality be damned, for a specific purpose, without it taking over a weekend.
msingh_5 7mo ago
You don’t need to build an app. You can use the built in Shortcuts app. create a shortcut that turns off all alarms. Can have it read your calendar or whatever as signal to determine if alarms should be on/off for a certain day/time and have it run at a regular schedule.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- jedberg 7mo ago
  I could, but what's the fun in that!? (But in seriousness, I hadn't considered using shortcuts. It's not clear it's extensible enough to do exactly what I want, but I'll look into it)

codybloem 7mo ago

When it comes to side projects, most of the time, if the spirit isn't willing I find it not worth doing. Process/experience over results, I call leisure. Results over process, I call work. If you have many side projects done mainly for the results, than you are working in your free time, and looking at it like that: is it really free? The modern age already requires of us more results than the spirit is good for. I like to leave side projects for the good of the spirit. An exception could be results for a greater good that one really believes in. This can give purpose and enrich the process and experience of doing.

w33n1s 7mo ago
I share this view, I think it's very healthy. I've been programming for 30+ years now, but I've always been fine with command line applications. Only recently I started getting into Qt to add a UI and turn my stuff into a real desktop application. It's been a real steep learning curve but I'm finally over it more or less. Anyway I posted a screenshot of my application on LinkedIn, and mentioned it would be free and open source. I got HUNDREDS of comments from "LinkedIn-type people" all big name engineers that wouldn't HIRE me for anything but either made comments like "looking forward to integrating this into our workflows" or "not the first time someone tried to do this..." Either way, instead of feeling motivated, I got the worst feeling that I'm doing all this work and people are either going to just take advantage of it and get the credit for "finding" it, or criticize it simply because it's not for them. It bummed me out so bad that I stopped work on it entirely for like a month. Anyway I finally came to look at it the way you mentioned. What I LIKED was the process of learning Qt and seeing my old programs come alive. So instead, it's my "project car" now. I build it up and tear it down all the time. Totally redesign the data models just to see what advantages different designs can give me. Try make my own graphical views. Try implementing language translations. It's been "finished" for a while now but I probably have five completely different-under-the-hood versions of it and THAT is what has been fun. I use it constantly all day at work and I never mentioned it on LinkedIn again lol
- bbkane 7mo ago
  I've been doing the same thing with my CLI framework. Rethinking and rebuilding with no pressure to finish is a lot of fun. I've been using the CHANGELOG [0] as a "blog" explaining WHY I made the changes and that's really been fun to look back and read too 0: https://github.com/bbkane/warg/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md https://github.com/bbkane/warg/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

aifactory5 7mo ago

The tooling landscape has changed so much in the last two years that I find myself re-evaluating automation setups that were solid 18 months ago. The time investment to rebuild is real but the efficiency gains on the other side are worth it for anything you're doing more than a few times a week.

theendisney 7mo ago

I once had a project for novice freelancers. The idea was to take your abandoned fumble and put multiple people on it at 3rd world rates. There are lots of people in cheap coutries who can somewhat code. You can aford hiring someone for [say] 3 euro per day. If they describe where they got stuck in the daily progres report you can look at it and help a bit or not and Just let them figure it out. You can pay more of course, buy them a computer, an internet connecties, books, courses, even an office but it isnt required. Just pay 60 per project every 4 weeks and ignore it. If interesting progress happens its fun to look at.

natpalmer1776 7mo ago
This sounds similar to how art patronage used to (still does?) work.
aetherspawn 7mo ago
Which site did you use?

tarr1124 7mo ago

Three notetaking app attempts sitting in my private repos, all stalled at the gap between idea and free time. With Claude Code I finally got the one I really wanted out in two months. Building it has been the best hobby I've found. Beats games or scrolling. When you've been carrying an idea for years, the app that finally ships has more of you in it, and I'd bet we'll see a lot more of these from solo builders.

guessbest 7mo ago
But who will buy it? No knocks against building old projects, but the market will be flooded with extremely speciality projects. I miss when every app had a spec on the box. I think we need something like that for usage. A new modeling language or something.
- zormino 7mo ago
  Who cares? Nothing wrong with trying to make a product to sell, but projects dont have to be to sell. I've been having a blast lately working on an old game engine I started during covid and getting sidetracked into some new projects. None of them will ever make me a dime but I'm learning a ton and having fun.
- roncesvalles 7mo ago
  >the market will be flooded with extremely speciality projects All the personal tools described in this thread are duct tape and bubblegum under the hood and nowhere near productionizable. That's what Claude Code makes for you. The whole point is that for personal tools, code quality never really mattered since it's never going to be exposed to the public or be iterated upon by a revolving door team of devs like real software products. These are all highly overfitted tools that shave off like 15 seconds of time in the day for some particular person. It's almost exactly like having a 3D printer for software, with exactly the kind of quality that a present-day 3D printer gives you.
  - zormino 7mo ago
    I really like the 3d printer analogy. You can still make some pretty cool stuff, you can make some pretty complex things if you carefully design the whole system and put in the effort to print each part individually, and quality depends both on how good of a 3d printer you have and on the proper use of it. "3d print me a new house" is still a pipe-dream: you'll get some miniature facsimile of a house, sure, but a proper house requires proper tools and expertise.

hansmayer 7mo ago

Sounds a lot like that disgusti g corporate press propaganda tbh, of the "eat less avocado toast if you cant afford rent" variant. Is the AI mainstream that desperate in their relentlesss push for adoption of their bullshit text generators?

cedws 7mo ago

In the time I’ve had agents I’ve never abandoned more projects. Vibe coding especially just leads me to feel no attachment. I don’t feel proud to put my name on it. Despite coding from a young age I always thought that I cared more about the outcome than the code. Turns out that’s not entirely the case.

nothinkjustai 7mo ago

What is the point of using AI for a side project? Isn’t the point of a side project to A) have fun writing code or B) challenge yourself or C) learn something new, and usually all 3? Slopping out random stuff you have no attachment to, taught you nothing, and that feels bad to pass off as your own work accomplishes nothing.

rjh29 7mo ago
D) to solve a problem in your personal life? To make an app that you wish existed but didn't?
- wiseowise 7mo ago
  Most of the replies in the thread that do this just scratch their OCD.
xXSLAYERXx 7mo ago
[flagged]

thegrim33 7mo ago

Every time I see a story like this I like to play the game "does this person just happen to work for a company that sells AI solutions?". And yes, yes they do. Almost never will see you a story promoting AI solutions from someone that isn't directly involved in selling AI solutions.

hansmayer 7mo ago
+1 and - The title has that weird corpo media "here is why you should not quiet quit" vibe to it, doesn'it?
wiseowise 7mo ago
“Losing GPT 5.5 feels like amputating a limb”, - unnamed NVidia engineer.

aokdi 7mo ago

Yes, you can revive it into worthless slop. Learning next to nothing for yourself and achieving a hollow sense of satisfaction at best. Maybe even shamelessly post it as a Show HN along with the other 99% of worthless slop submissions there.

rjh29 7mo ago
I want app X. I know how to code it but it'll take a whole weekend/vacation days. I would learn nothing. Now I can use AI to make it. What exactly am I losing here?
- aokdi 7mo ago
  Your dignity.
  - CharlesW 7mo ago
    As you perch comfortably in your Throne of Purity, it's worth remembering that the average software developer sits on top of 10+ layers of abstraction (not counting hardware).
    - wiseowise 7mo ago
      LLMs are not a level of abstraction, can we let the meme die already? For the same reason why literature summaries are not an abstraction over reading.
      - rjh29 7mo ago
        The generated code is an abstraction, as you do not need to concern yourself with how it was made, only the surface API. Saying "can we let the meme die already" is not an argument.
        wiseowise 7mo ago
        It might be an abstraction, but definitely not the same level of frameworks, OS, machine code, etc. LLM is not a runtime. It might be something akin to non deterministic compiler where it converts your MD to code.

NetOpWibby 7mo ago

In 2020 I was in the Codemirror forums trying to get help with a project that replaces React in GraphiQL for Svelte. It was too difficult for me to figure out so I shelved it. Yesterday I asked Claude to make this happen and it referenced that very thread I made. Anyhoo, I'm working on making it pretty (it works!!) before integrating it into my opinionated GraphQL server[1]. There really is no excuse for NOT being the change you wish to see in the world anymore. --- [1]: https://code.webb.page/eol/gq.git/about https://code.webb.page/eol/gq.git/about

lawwantsin17 7mo ago

[dead]

jliptzin 7mo ago

We have closed-source and open-source software, I think the next phase is going to be self-source or llm-source software (not sure what the term will ultimately end up being), but basically if you have a need for something that is not filled exactly by any app, you will just give the spec to an LLM and in X amount of minutes/hours you will have bespoke software built just for you to use personally, fully tested and to spec. For example, I still haven't found a workout/weight lifting tracking app that does 100% of what I want and at this point I may just build it myself because I could probably do it in half a day with claude and won't have to pay any annoying subscription fees. Maybe it'll still be called AI slop but if it works it works.

arjie 7mo ago

It’s great. I have a stupendous amount of personal software now. Yesterday was a native text editor that was fully integrated into my mediawiki install and would autocomplete links and make syntax easier to use. No one could have built this software but me because it’s worth nothing to others. And I couldn’t build it because it takes too long. But when I’m using an agent to code the limited resource is my attention which actually does fine so long as every free brain cycle is on a task. So these personal things are great to throw into my tab loop to occupy a free slot. These have been wonderful times.

hypercube33 7mo ago
I finished a mod for Quake 2 I started in 1998 finally a few weeks ago. AI is really helping me get past the COVID burnout I was running of too many projects I half did. Fixed terminals (an rdp tool) today. Working on OpenRA bugs I opened issues 10 years ago now - engine is 10x faster and pathfinding mostly works properly.
- Joyrst 7mo ago
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saadn92 7mo ago
It's crazy. I have something like 120 personal tools at this point and the pattern you describe is exactly right. The bottleneck moved from implementation to context switching. I started keeping a markdown file at the root of every project that captures state and next steps whenever I stop working on it, purely so I can resume without the 20-minute "wait where was I" tax. There's just no pressure to handle edge cases or write docs for people who'll never use it. Just solve exactly your problem and move on.
- AnotherGoodName 7mo ago
  I’ve been asking it to make some of my game tools into static websites where possible. I did pay the $10 for the following domains but i’m ok with that so i can share some of the fun things that come out of the agent. grandcheaten.com - a save game editor and guide for jagged alliance 3 thedailycheat.com - a save game editor for newstower

phoebe_builds 7mo ago

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toolrelay 7mo ago

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VladVladikoff 7mo ago
I checked your link and fail to see how that is a pre AI project that you are only completing now, it is obviously a recent concept. Also your username matches the project, so this seems mostly like a lame attempt to shill your product by “joining the conversation”
- lelanthran 7mo ago
  You replied to a bot.

fitsumbelay 7mo ago

it's a top affordance of AI because pause development usually over complexity I can't manage or knowledge gap that I can't close in time to sustain momentum. Not only are those roadblocks a non-issue, my perspective shifts from in-the-weeds hacking to a perch with meta view to take the project to completion or maybe beyond previous goals. win-win to the power of win

EverMemory 7mo ago

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haricomputer 7mo ago

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potomak 7mo ago

I prompted Claude code from my phone to revive Draw!, a pixel art editor I first published 15 years ago as an exploration using Redis as a DB. The new version is live at http://pixel.drawbang.com http://pixel.drawbang.com after 1 week of prompting Opus 4.6 with a max subscription.

rhubarbtree 7mo ago
Could you try to revive it by hand? I’m curious as to how long it would have taken.
- nickthegreek 7mo ago
  Absolutely insane request.
  - rhubarbtree 7mo ago
    Not the whole thing. Just a day looking at it. Did they do that?

flashdesk 7mo ago

I’ve had a similar experience. Having better tools really makes a difference when revisiting old or half-finished projects.

noisy_boy 7mo ago

I have revamped my home networking setup, installed raspberry pi, setup adguard on it for the home network, migrated my jellyfin set-up to it, integrated all these devices on tailscale, dealt with physical LAN point limitations by setting up a switch, repurposed old router to get around ISP imposed limitations, setup a three tier backup solution and so on. In themselves they are not particularly challenging but taken together, these personal projects had been pending for years. Not any more. Few weekends and everything has been implemented and I have learned a ton in the process. It has been great fun doing this turbo charged tinkering. I think personal projects are where LLMs shine the brightest.

henryopen 7mo ago
Same arc here — Proxmox host with 5 Linux VMs, 2 Windows boxes, a Pi, all of it the "I'll get to it next weekend" pile that sat for two years. The thing that broke the dam wasn't the coding speed, it was no longer having to write the boring middle layer myself: apt upgrades across 6 hosts, auditing which containers had restart=unless-stopped, certificate rotation. I describe the goal, it does the SSH dance. Whether that's net good for my skills long-term I genuinely don't know yet.
- noisy_boy 7mo ago
  I made it document it all too. So now that is effectively a skill which means next time I don't need to give it background on my home networking setup. If I want to check something myself, I can read that same document which is part of my Obsidian vault that gets synced to my phone via Syncthing. So I can basically connect to the pi via termux on my android and check stuff from anywhere. Plus, time flies on train rides when you are watching a movie of your choice from jellyfin running on the pi. Very satisfying.

butz 7mo ago

So, what are you planning to do when you finish all your unfinished hobby projects?

3vo-ai 7mo ago

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0xbadcafebee 7mo ago

> I still have fears around deskilling from relying on these tools too much I'm a millennial who builds furniture with hand tools and wood joinery from a century ago. Nobody taught me, although I did find resources online to learn from. I should not be able to do these things. Everyone should have forgotten this esoteric, obsolete, uncommon knowledge by now. Yet here I am, doing it anyway. It turns out you can just learn what you want, when you want to. I don't fear losing this skill in the future, because I can just remind myself how it works. The tools, books, videos, and wood aren't going anywhere. You aren't going to "be deskilled" from not writing code by hand regularly. Just because you use AI doesn't mean your brain grows a black hole from which information can never return. It's not giving you Alzheimer's. There might be a small amount of time it takes for you to refresh yourself, but then you're back to work again. Just ask anyone who went from coding to managing. They're a little rusty when they go back after years of absence, but they pick it back up. Also, especially if it's a personal project, keep in mind you do not need to burn Opus tokens. Buy any of the dirt cheap subscriptions which give you access to MiniMax. Put it in a container on yolo mode. Give it some context, a prompt, web search, and a ticket system like beads. Then let it churn. You aren't in a rush, it's a personal project. As long as you follow the brainstorm -> plan -> implementation -> testing process, and have added methods to do real testing (not mocks or unit tests), it will get done with time and money to spare.

bowsamic 7mo ago
> Just because you use AI doesn't mean your brain grows a black hole from which information can never return. How do you know this? I’m not taking that risk
- deaux 7mo ago
  Every single second of our existence is taking risks about things we don't know. Of course he doesn't know this, he just assigns odds, as we do. Clearly you've assigned much higher odds.

teo_zero 7mo ago

> things I really wish existed. Just last week I was looking for a way to move all the windows from one screen to another in a go. After evaluating many clumsy or over-complicated existing solutions, I asked copilot to write a C program to do it. It had to be minimal and not depend on any runtime framework. A few loops later I had what I wanted without installing third-party tools!

rasz 7mo ago
> move all the windows from one screen to another in a go Sounds like a job for 10 line AutoHotkey script.
- teo_zero 7mo ago
  In fact it was one of the suggested tools. But installing a whole new application, and having it running in the background all the time listening for evey keypress, just to do its unique job once in a while... well, that's what I was referring to when I mentioned "over-complicated solutions". Of course if you already have AutoHotKey running for other reasons, it fits perfectly.

solraph 7mo ago

I know how to write code, I just don't have time. AI has been an absolute game changer in let me get OS projects out into the world that I just didn't have time to build before. I'm having an absolute blast spinning up local GUI applications for Linux that I wanted to exist, but didn't have enough motivation to build before. (Shameless plug) * Sambervise: https://github.com/edward-murrell/sambervise https://github.com/edward-murrell/sambervise - A Linux GUI application for remotely administering Samba 4 Active Directory Domain Controllers. * Krbtray: A GTK3 system tray application for Kerberos ticket management on Linux Mint / Cinnamon (and other GTK environments using GtkStatusIcon, such as XFCE and MATE). https://github.com/edward-murrell/krbtray https://github.com/edward-murrell/krbtray

XorNot 7mo ago
Okay this may actually have sold me on AI coding now because these are both the sorts of applications I've been looking for to solve real problems.
locknitpicker 7mo ago
> I know how to write code, I just don't have time. AI has been an absolute game changer in let me get OS projects out into the world that I just didn't have time to build before. Another important development is that coding assistants greatly reduced the cost of refactoring whole software projects. With coding assistants we can explore the solution space with deeper changes at a fraction of the time it would take us just to write the code alone, let alone draft how modules were designed. This isn't without tradeoffs, though. Some models can and often do generate code that misses the bar on maintainability. Just because we save time writing it that doesn't mean we don't have to spend time reiterating, cleaning up,and updating system prompts/instruction files to ground the prompts.
meken 7mo ago
Just some feedback - I would love to see some screenshots in your GitHub READMEs!* *I saw the second project has a partial screenshot, but not a full one.
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maxbeech 7mo ago

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yukino99 7mo ago

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jillesvangurp 7mo ago

I've always had more ideas than I can take on. Some of them are good ideas even. With AI tools, I'm now able to generate fairly decent working things for more of them. Ironically the value of implementing these ideas is dropping fast. A few weeks ago, I built a little search library that runs in the browser and doesn't need a server. It's styled after Elasticsearch and has most of it's term and matching query support, aggregation support, and I added ANN vector search as well (uses web GPU). Most of that was just me going "let's add feature X" and boom done. I used it in some websites (also built using AI) at this point. It doesn't scale but it's great for blogs, documentation sites (https://querylight.tryformation.com/ https://querylight.tryformation.com/, this site documents the library), etc. It all works exactly like I imagined it would. I probably could add most of the long tail of features Elasticsearch has to this library with very little effort. But the flip side is that the library got a rather lukewarm reception on Github. It seems people are too busy coding things themselves with AI to appreciate other people's efforts much. And fair enough, if you need a search library, you could probably generate your own. Or just let the AI pick one for you. It's not like this was hard for me or a lot of work. The economic value of these projects is dropping rapidly. I still like doing them because I like building stuff. And I think there is as a learning curve with these tools that is important to master. Because there is a lot of work that is going to need doing still and people will pay less for it and still expect decent results that you can only get if you master the tools. The ambition level will just go up to match what is now possible. People thinking that they are going to lean back while the AI works for them are in for a surprise. I work very long days the last months.

RuoqiJin 7mo ago

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pando85 7mo ago

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DeathArrow 7mo ago

>I initially drafted this before my last post on how Claude Code is getting worse. I'm putting it out now so I can reference it in a future post on OpenCode. IMO, what is getting worse is not Claude Code, the CLI tool, but Anthropic API. That's what most people experience. I used Claude Code with GLM 5.1, MiniMax M2.7, Kimi K2.6 and had pretty good results. I prefer Claude Code over OpenCode because most plugins and skills have best compatibility with Claude Code. Even Terminal Bench showed a bit better results for Claude Code than for OpenCode.

ianhxu 7mo ago

I've had several product ideas a week for years, all of them just sitting in Apple Notes. In the last month, I built three of them into a usable beta and I use all of them every day.

mbtrilla 7mo ago

My experience matched this almost too closely. Had a comparison-aggregator side project sitting at maybe 20% done for over a year. I'd open it once a month, scroll through the still-need-to-do list, get tired, close the tab. Pairing with Claude for a couple of weekends got me past the half-built wall. The thing that surprised me wasn't raw speed. It was that I stopped having to spend an hour reloading my own old code into my head before I could do anything. That re-entry tax is what always killed it for me. The hype is annoying but the people dunking on these tools mostly aren't using them for the boring stuff they're actually decent at.

Fabulu 7mo ago

I was and remain skeptical. But I can't help but see how much productive I am and how much fun I'm having using Claude. The landscape is changing.

randyrand 7mo ago

tangent: Can someone implement a way to run iOS apps on linux?

tonymet 7mo ago
I wouldn’t say it’s impossible but you have private APIs, binary incompatibility to overcome. but the AI will eventually conquer both.

pylonpeng 7mo ago

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tonymet 7mo ago

I built a DNS MX health check , including the charting, scheduler, alerts, notifier in just a few minutes . And it’s way more fun to own all of the components. No third party deps, either. I have about 20 random utilities like this that each would have required a subscription . It’s fun to try to optimize the tool to the extreme. Can I get this to run in a few kb ? A docker image < 100kb ? What’s the smallest possible browser tab ? (sadly it’s still 25mb) . How many ns can I get this operation? I enjoy building tools my way . Instead of depending on mySQL or a bloated web framework just to get the functionality I need, I can design all of the requirements according to my preferences. I hope AI actually rekindles the ingenuity of 90s coding. No more “best practices” , “laws of software engineering” or other suffocating constraints. It became way too conformist over the past 15 years ( around the time Clean Code / Design Patterns became a religion)

giancarlostoro 7mo ago

Not just never going to finish in some cases you never even got to start on them. You have been architecting this thing for 15 years you know the entire stack inside out at this point, so much so that when you finally say let me see what the AI can do, and you braindump into a markdown file and have Claude build from that spec you are astounded.

endofreach 7mo ago

I'm using them just to start even more of those projects. I guess i'll always be, most literally, a beginner.

vdalhambra 7mo ago

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Zopieux 7mo ago

I'm at peace with unfinished projects. My dev/ is a graveyard, only a few of those eventually make their way to a public forge. That's okay. Not every project needs to be finished; not every project needs to be published. I had fun and learned something building those prototypes. I suppose the end result wasn't really the point. Throwing LLMs at doing the thing deprives me of that joy, kills most of the learning opportunities, and leaves you with a (usually half) baked product that you don't really own or understand. Sometimes I just want a quick bespoke tool and using an LLM is fine. But I do not enjoy using something I don't understand.

pelasaco 7mo ago

I love to use LLM to kill/archive old projects. I had some gems that i wrote back in the days, checked this week if its still relevant, if rails picked it up already, etc.. then i could just update README.md and archive them without any fear.

giannicmptr1000 7mo ago

This is one of the best uses of ai and a lot of fun.

apple4ever 7mo ago

For me, the journey is more important than the destination. Using coding assistance takes all the fun out of it, as well as the learning. (Not to mention adding aggravation of dealing with prompts and figuring out whether the response is correct or not).

lihanghanger 7mo ago

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saidinesh5 7mo ago

Honestly, LLMs have been quite good at helping me procrastinate less on my pet projects. It took me a weekend to build a little esp8266 gadget that automatically turns off my parents' water heater after a fixed time. They saw a dip in our power bill thanks to that. I did not want the complexity of a full blown home assistant setup there. And the Philips Wiz socket did not support setting timers/simple automations.I wanted to test out micropython too for this instead of the usual C++/Arduino/etc.. I started on a saturday and went from 0 to 90 that single day. The product I had after that day was mostly complete but it was crashing at odd times. I spent another day to get to the root cause of the issue - caused by the LLM mixing up async and sync functions. One prompt to the LLM and the problem is gone. The product has been running flawlessly since then - for months. Every weekend I spent with Antigravity - I was able to push out something totally usable. Water Heater monitor, configurations for the custom Tuya devices I installed in my home, a chrome extension I wanted to use at work. I am honestly impressed at the pace at which this whole thing improved too. Just 2 years ago - it was a totally useless tool that couldn't even match the speed or accuracy of my text editor snippets.

kk_mors 6mo ago

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