[HN Gopher] Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you...
___________________________________________________________________
Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were
going to finish
Author : speckx
Score : 235 points
Date : 2026-04-25 16:11 UTC (12 hours ago)
HTML web link (blog.matthewbrunelle.com)
TEXT w3m dump (blog.matthewbrunelle.com)
| cyanydeez wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| IanCal wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| My hardware won't be nerfed because a cloud business requires
| sacrifices.
| kowbell wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| If you already have a gaming pc, then it's worth exploring as
| the cost of boredom is negligible.
| kowbell wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| AMD 395+ w/128gb is all you need. the idea that mac studio is
| the default is a nerdfest.
| kowbell wrote:
| I admittedly haven't done a ton of research lately on AI
| capable PC hardware because of how nuts prices are right
| now, so I might be missing something...
|
| ...but all the AMD 395+ machines I can find are even more
| expensive than the aforementioned cheapest Mac Studio. Mac
| Studio starts at $2,000 (only 32GB), AMD 395+ 128GB
| machines seem to start at $3,000 from what I can see.
| binary0010 wrote:
| 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.
| nike-17 wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Please see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079
| ogig wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| osener wrote:
| It is common amongst French, Dutch etc speakers where saying
| "it said x" sounds unnatural.
| Anonyneko wrote:
| Russian too. There is a subset of words which are referred
| to as "it", but for most words "he" or "she" are used
| regardless of whether these are living things or not. With
| loanwords we just decide by similarity to other words.
| Claude is definitely a "he" as the word is the same as a
| common male name.
|
| This trips me up occasionally when I'm translating things
| into English. Once, when I referred to an indefinite gender
| player character in a gacha game as a "he" (because the
| word "player" is a "he"), quite a few people got mad! Even
| though in my head I was never trying to imply one way or
| the other.
| Dou8Le wrote:
| For future reference, in this case you could use the
| singular "they" to refer to an ambiguously-gendered
| person or character. "<MC> drew their sword, for they
| would not tolerate such vile deeds."
| mejutoco wrote:
| Reminds me of the main character of the show Mrs Davis. She
| insists on calling the ai it through the entire show.
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14759574/
| torben-friis wrote:
| I wouldn't read too much into it, it's natural for non native
| speakers. In Spanish for example, objects have grammatical
| gender as well, so it's easy to slip.
| isjdkwjdown wrote:
| > No judgment
|
| Yes judgment. Loads of it. Judge away.
|
| This is just bizarre. Do not refer to this product of
| marketing-technology as you refer to a person. EVER.
| hansmayer wrote:
| The article itself is also probably an attempt at marketing
| the LLMs too. They are now quite desperate. Expect to see a
| flood of such "independent" articles over the next 12 mo
| ths.
| dsvf wrote:
| As a native German speaker, I have also referred to a chatbot
| in English as "he", and similar to you, a native English
| speaker, felt jarred by it. It was definitely not out of any
| personification or humanization though. In German, I would
| say it is "der Chatbot" (from "der Roboter"), which in German
| is a male noun so I would refer to it as "er" (the male
| pronoun) - which in my head I autotranslated to "he". Most of
| the time, though, I think of it (and refer to it) as an LLM,
| which is "das Sprachmodell" (neutrum), so I automatically
| translate it to "it".
|
| So that's another, maybe more harmless reason for it.
| golem14 wrote:
| I mean, both in English and in german, that's how you would
| talk to a dog. "Er hat in die Ecke gepinkelt"/"He peed in
| the corner" (or "she", if it's a female dog).
|
| I don't know what is jarring talking about the chatbot like
| that.
|
| It may be creepier if you said "she wrote that program for
| me" as you now assign a specific gender to the chatbot.
| yrds96 wrote:
| It's not weird if it comes from ESL. At least in portuguese
| there's no "it" equivalent for pronouns or any other neutral
| artifact in the language, in other words, everything has a
| gender, even an AI model, the same goes for objects e.g.:
| knife(she), fork(he), spoon(she), plate(he).
|
| People often commit mistakes regarding that, the same way we
| don't have "they" as pronoun to someone we don't know the
| gender, so we address to these people as "dele(dela)"
| (masculine and feminine pronouns).
|
| But if this is coming from someone who has english as a
| primary language it's definetely weird to treat models as
| person
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's funny with someone coming from Mandarin. There's no
| separate he/she/it in spoken Mandarin, so they tend to mix
| up "he" and "she." It sounds very strange and gives me some
| idea of what French speakers must go through when they hear
| me say "le voiture" or whatever.
| saghm wrote:
| I took a few semesters of Dutch in college, and it has
| both gendered and neuter nouns for non-human objects.
| Interestingly though, the professor told us that in the
| northern parts of the Netherlands people don't really
| bother using the feminine ones ever and refer to every
| non-human gendered noun as masculine, which apparently
| also includes animals, meaning that a sizable portion of
| Dutch speakers will refer to cows using masculine
| language.
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| Because the article for masculine and feminine are the
| same ("de") so absolutely nobody knows the gender of
| anything.
|
| Source: am Dutch. Can't wait for us to just ditch
| gendered nouns.
| saghm wrote:
| Dutch is one of the few languages where it's actually
| pretty plausible for something like this to happen! It
| blew my mind that sometimes you'll all (or I guess more
| specifically your government) will make changes to the
| language to clean up issues, but I guess that's one of
| the benefits to having a language that's mostly based in
| one country (and some seemingly political baggage for the
| few others with any significant number of speakers; my
| professor said that Flemish is basically also Dutch, but
| my naive impression is that the half of Belgium who speak
| it might not be happy with that description).
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Weird. Don't you have an equivalent to the Spanish "eso,
| esa"? Gendered object.
| stackghost wrote:
| I believe this is common to all the Romance languages.
|
| In the Canadian French dialect all the swear words are
| incredibly versatile and church-related such as "osti"
| which I believe refers to the Eucharist.
|
| It just so happens that for nouns beginning with a bowel,
| you drop the e or the a from le/la, and use an apostrophe.
|
| So if you don't know if it's "le porte" or "la porte" you
| can use my favorite trick which is to shove _osti_ in there
| and say "l'osti de porte" which roughly translates to "the
| goddamn door". You can do this for any noun in French, and
| Canadian French speakers will get it, though people from
| France will make fun of you.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Quite an imaginative technique you got there.
|
| Signe -Un Quebecois
| hansmayer wrote:
| I mean we have all met that one cretin who will discuss over
| chat by pasting bulletpoints from an LLM. No wonder some of
| them think it is a living person!
| plombe wrote:
| Well Claude was named after Shannon
| moron4hire wrote:
| There's an analyst at my job who calls it "he", who is a
| native English speaker himself, which I guess is because it's
| "Claude" (as in Claude Shannon) Code.
| simondotau wrote:
| I recognise I am revealing a different type of ambient
| misogyny in my thinking, but choosing to gender an LLM as
| feminine gives me "I played tomb raider because I enjoy
| looking at women" vibes. Like somehow "she" is more of a
| conscious choice than "he" and comes with all the baggage of
| all cultural differences between genders, when neither choice
| should do that.
|
| Curiously though I don't get the same sensation when
| technologies are gendered by other people. I honestly don't
| recall thinking about it when Apple released Siri. (Now I'm
| second-guessing myself and wondering if I should've reacted
| negatively towards feminine being the default for someone in
| a personal assistant role.)
| nurettin wrote:
| That's what I felt when I heard that the god of abraham was a
| he.
| sellmesoap wrote:
| Time for claudette to make an apperance!
| arcatek wrote:
| Isn't Godot a little ill-designed to work well with LLMs? for
| example I ended up a couple of times with incorrect tres files,
| and letting the llm generate IDs feel a little fragile.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| I have taken many stabs at it and Claude will produce stuff
| but the output is very far away from useful. E.g. "I've
| created a road and beautiful trees" and what I see is a mess
| of colors and shapes.
| ogig wrote:
| I concur it's bad at directly visual concepts, your prompt
| is akin to the svg pelican. What I do is asking him for
| procedural algos, automatas, quadtrees, layered noises, and
| rig those into the game. Yes, it can't "make the next gta",
| but with a reasonable scope and knowing what it does best,
| it has been very easy for me to produce satisfying results.
| cyclopeanutopia wrote:
| Would you care to show a few pictures?
| ogig wrote:
| Sure! Two are gameplay pics. An enemy sprite sheet
| generation, and the results of the map generators. Of
| course these are basic placeholders for a few hours of
| work, but I will definitely go heavy on this route with
| more layering and details.
|
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A7kfcjHjSmCNidqc9t731uog
| lzL... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Bl_n0ECqc78LGGf7S
| sOx38mRUOP... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JMcgzqcnZ2
| ncboeyAXvscRWagqR... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-lu
| J6y7YslNfwmFnCdIDbJ871i0... https://drive.google.com/file
| /d/14n4TLAVywk_1GMhLLGOuukQwUmb...
| operatingthetan wrote:
| My problem is I don't really have video game engineering
| experience. I was going off a concept that a different AI
| nailed with video creation and was trying to replicate it
| in the game engine.
| ogig wrote:
| I had very few issues, sometimes I had to direct CC to the
| godot docs and we could keep moving. Specifically the tile
| configuration was a "read the docs" moment. All the
| functionality is available through code, so nothing CC can't
| reach afaik. Is there any LLM oriented game engine?
| kowbell wrote:
| Are any LLMs suited at directly modifying game
| scene/asset/prefabs for _any_ engine?
| jaggederest wrote:
| Bevy is a great engine for LLM-based games because it's
| 100% code. I'm toying with a few things in it, one of them
| is an entire-planet economic simulation, and it scales well
| up to a million dead tiles and 10k-50k live tiles on Apple
| Silicon, pretty impressive.
| riddlemethat wrote:
| What's fun for me these days is picking up a project I started
| with an LLM doing agent driven development a few months ago or
| even a year ago and hit a wall and stopped being able to be
| picked up by the latest version of Claude and/or codex and
| bringing it further. Some can now launch some still are too
| complex for the agent to build. But, it's getting easier and
| easier to build personal apps. We are not far off from being
| able to say "Alexa, build me an app on my iPhone that lets me
| take pictures of the food in my fridge to compile the
| nutritional benefits and sync it with my workout app then
| compare it to the ideal ingredients I should eat based on my
| fitness goals in my health app and have it set to send me
| emails where it can find me better ingredients to buy that are
| cost effective, local, and meet my diet restrictions" and in 15
| minutes that app suddenly exists.
| maccard wrote:
| I'd love to see your attempts at this. I think we're close to
| something vaguely resembling this at a first glance but
| nothing that actually works.
| avereveard wrote:
| Same I purposefully have a number of over ambitious project
| out of distribution entirely to test so failure mode, mostly
| games, when one works, well I gained a new game. Can't wait
| for my 10 player battleship game on a 100x100 grid to be
| functional.
| hansmayer wrote:
| > he explicitly pushed into "lets have V0 game play loop
| finished,
|
| > he even helped me build the lore. These have been one of the
| most fun times using a computer in a long time.
|
| Such a warm, touching story about a friendship between a grown
| up man and his neural network. But at least I had a good,
| roaring laugh reading this nonsense, thank you for that!
| ogig wrote:
| How snarky. You are conflating friendship with admiration for
| the effectiveness of newfound tool. If it's the "he" that
| triggers you, feel free to replace with "it". It's just a
| second-language artifact.
| hansmayer wrote:
| I dunno man. He sounded like he found a new friend in 'him'
| to me. And it was genuinely hilarious. It took me a while
| to stop laughing.
| noodletheworld wrote:
| > the effectiveness of newfound tool
|
| ...and yet, _most_ people continue to say that non standard
| tooling ecosystems, where the agent cannot run and validate
| the code it writes, remain difficult and unproductive.
|
| "I just pointed CC at godot and it made a game! This is
| sooo good"
|
| ...is a fairytale.
|
| What tooling are you using to make it run and compile the
| code? How is it iterating on the project without breaking
| existing functionality?
|
| None of these are _insurmountable_ , but they require some
| careful setup.
|
| Posts like this dont make me laugh; they just make me roll
| my eyes.
|
| Either the OP has not done what they claim.
|
| Or they have spent a lot more time and effort on it than
| they claim.
|
| > 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.
|
| Such a sweet story about a boy and his AI.
|
| Unfortunately, I also dont believe in fairytales.
|
| Instead of waving your hands wildly about AI, post some
| videos and code of the results.
|
| This is hackernews, not hypenews.
| ogig wrote:
| But I had already answered, before your comment, with
| screenshots broadly showing the current state and the
| result of the generators.
|
| You imply I'm merely "pointing CC at godot and it made a
| game"; I never said it was simple, required no previous
| knowledge, that it was instant or that the game was done.
| I do have a careful setup involving CI and isolation.
|
| Godot provides a headless mode. CC runs python scripts to
| run tests and check for debugger warnings. For anything
| more complex it can wire debug info anywhere. Godot is
| fully code based so you can make the analogy with any
| other framework you used AI assistants with.
|
| No sure about what you can't believe about my statements.
| CC implementing algo from a paper? That it can brainstorm
| item or lore ideas? I don't seem to be claiming anything
| out of the common usage of LLMs
| kowbell wrote:
| OP never said Claude made a whole game from scratch
| though, nor are they saying Claude is doing everything
| without any human contributing to the project, nor are
| they saying they haven't spent a lot of time and effort
| on it. Just that it's made it fun and more accessible and
| it's gotten them excited about something they abandoned.
|
| Here's a bullet point list of the things Claude's done
| according to OP:
|
| * it picked up the general path immediately
|
| * he explicitly pushed into "lets have V0 game play loop
| finished, then we can compound and have fun = not giving
| up".
|
| * [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[ed] items
|
| * create[d] graphic assets
|
| * he created a set of procedural 2d generators as
| external tools
|
| * he even helped me build the lore.
|
| Every one of these are plausible in isolation.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| But why give Anthropic/openai our money? Nonsense. Use open
| models
| theshrike79 wrote:
| 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 20kEUR
| worth of hardware at home.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Why assume local when you can easily use any of the open
| models via openrouter or any number of similar services.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| binary0010 wrote:
| Disagree. Qwen 3.6 and opencode have built and helped plan
| entire feature sets such as vectorizing and searching,
| setting up UI to manage categorized search data. Some test
| systems around this, etc.
|
| Very usable locally assuming you setup your local tooling
| correctly and you are an actual programmer who can generally
| help drive this stuff correctly and not just a vibe coder.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| How big of a Qwen model are you running that can plan and
| implement entire feature sets?
|
| I've tried multiple that I can run locally and they're all
| very much just glorified autocomplete, but slower - on a M4
| Max MacBook
| AntiUSAbah wrote:
| Quality, simplicity, speed.
|
| I have a ML Setup with 2 4090 and 128gb of ram, its warm when i
| use them for finetuning or batch processes.
|
| I do not run them for coding. Its a lot easier and nicer to
| play around with better models for just 20 $.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| Well they are subsidizing us for starters.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Why give apple/nvidia your money?
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Jokes on you, i'm running my local models on AMD :-P
| dang wrote:
| [stub for offtopicness]
|
| [we've hopefully deprovokified the title now]
| WaxProlix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| blame the hn title rules (although i would just have
| substituted "AI")
|
| i doubt anyone is nouning "agentic" of their own accord (yet)
| operatingthetan wrote:
| Just "leaders" at consulting firms mostly
| sailfast wrote:
| 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.
| hard_times wrote:
| Oh? How very kind of the author to allow me to.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| > 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
| ozim wrote:
| 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.
| bdangubic wrote:
| projects you were never going to finish should stay projects that
| are never finished :)
| throwatdem12311 wrote:
| 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
| jedberg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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)
| msingh_5 wrote:
| It's tedious but likely possible.
|
| If you really want to engage an LLM to help point it
| towards Cherri (https://github.com/electrikmilk/cherri) to
| help with implementation
| ori_b wrote:
| Where's the fun in purchasing an app from Anthropic?
| jedberg wrote:
| Co-working with AI is an important skill to learn these
| days. Similar to paying a bit for AWS for your personal
| projects as a good way to learn all the AWS tools for
| your career.
| ori_b wrote:
| Meh. That's fine if you really don't want to build
| things, and are mainly concerned about increasing your
| market value.
|
| If you like creating, buying software from Anthropic is
| boring as hell.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| What is the skill that needs to be learned? I've been
| forced to vibe code everything at work, there's no skill
| required to ask Claude code to do something.
| tkgally wrote:
| > Claude Code is brilliant for personal apps.
|
| Agreed.
|
| The clipboard manager I had been using on my Macs for many
| years started flaking out after an OS update. The similar apps
| in the App Store didn't seem to have the functionality I was
| looking for. So inspired by a Simon Willison blog post [1]
| about vibe coding SwiftUI apps, I had Claude Code create one
| for me. It took a few iterations to get it working, but it is
| now living in the menu bar of my Mac, doing everything I wanted
| and more.
|
| Particularly enlightening to me was the result of my asking CC
| for suggestions for additional features. It gave me a long list
| of ideas I hadn't considered, I chose the ones I wanted, and it
| implemented them.
|
| Two days ago, I decided I wanted a dedicated markdown editor
| for my own use--something like the new markdown editing
| component in LibreOffice [2] but smaller and lighter. I asked
| the new GPT 5.5 to prepare an outline of such a program, and I
| had CC implement it. After two vibe coding sessions, I now have
| a lightweight native Mac app that does nearly everything I
| want: open and create markdown files, edit them in a word-
| processing-like environment, and save them with canonical
| markdown formatting. It doesn't handle markdown tables yet;
| I'll try to get CC to implement that feature later today.
|
| [1] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/27/vibe-coding-swiftui/
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47298885
| codybloem wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| rjh29 wrote:
| If you're coding for the sake of coding, maybe. If you have
| itches to scratch and ambitions, but can't summon the
| motivation or the time, then how is that "working in your free
| time"? A project that used to take up my entire weekend or
| vacation can now be knocked up in 15 minutes. That's the exact
| opposite of working.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| What is coding for the sake of coding? I don't think anyone
| does that. Its about solving puzzles, using your brain,
| learning by doing, creating things- none of that happens when
| you use llm coding tools. Instead all you're doing is
| creating more cheap mediocre throwaway crap just because you
| can.
| zippergz wrote:
| I have a lot of hobbies. Programming is one of them, but not
| the only one. There are times that some piece of software would
| help me with one of my hobbies, but I don't want to steal time
| from hobby X to build the software. And often these don't
| involve the kind of coding that I want to be doing for fun.
| This has been a sweet spot for LLM-aided coding for me. I've
| built several hobby helper apps where the goal was making one
| of my other hobbies more fun rather than programming. It's
| still hobby time, not work, but the hobby is not coding.
| aifactory5 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This sounds similar to how art patronage used to (still does?)
| work.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Which site did you use?
| tarr1124 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >the market will be flooded with extremely speciality
| projects
|
| All the personal tools described in this thread are duct tape
| and bubble gum 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.
| hansmayer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| D) to solve a problem in your personal life? To make an app
| that you wish existed but didn't?
| xXSLAYERXx wrote:
| > What is the point of using AI for a side project
|
| Why is this so hard for you to understand?
|
| > 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.
|
| You seem frustrated that people have different motivations than
| you. Have you looked into getting an AI girlfriend?
| thegrim33 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| +1 and - The title has that weird corpo media "here is why you
| should not quiet quit" vibe to it, doesn'it?
| aokdi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Your dignity.
| CharlesW wrote:
| 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).
| maplethorpe wrote:
| How do you know you'd learn nothing from it?
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| 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
| jliptzin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| saadn92 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| LastMuel wrote:
| Yes, I built an app to plan an Easter Scavenger Hunt. How niche
| is that?!
| toolrelay wrote:
| This hits home. I have ~10 abandoned side projects.
|
| I just shipped one this week (ToolRelay - toolrelay.online) by
| forcing myself to focus on a single vertical slice end-to-end and
| stop opening new repos.
|
| The pattern that broke for me: stop building, start distributing.
| The build phase gives a dopamine hit; distribution feels painful,
| so we keep building instead.
|
| Curious -- was the AI assistance helping you build new features,
| or helping you re-understand your own old code months later?
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| 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"
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| 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
| potomak wrote:
| 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 after 1 week
| of prompting Opus 4.6 with a max subscription.
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