Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish
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ogig
quietbritishjim
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
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.
wiether
As a French native, I agree with you explanation; still, reading "he" for Claude Code was quite disturbing!
What doesn't help also is that translation tools/AI models will naturally translate "il" after "Claude Code" to "he" since Claude is an actual person name.
Using "AI model" instead is translated to "it" by all tools/AI models I tried.
quietbritishjim
That makes sense, thanks. English is my only language so I hadn't considered that
fwip
It also seems to me, that people who call Claude 'he' seem to tend to have a very positive opinion of the LLM. My sample size isn't big enough to be sure if there's actually any correlation here, let alone if there's a causation or which way it flows.
dsvf
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.
pclmulqdq
"Der Computer" is also masculine, so you have probably been calling your computer "he" for decades. Languages with gendered nouns don't quite have the same he/she/it distinction.
bharat1010
how does that matter if its he, 'she' till its doing the work. Its artificial, shouldnt try to find means of attachment to it
golem14
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
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
loloquwowndueo
Weird. Don’t you have an equivalent to the Spanish “eso, esa”? Gendered object.
wat10000
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.
stackghost
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.
undefined
jvanderbot
Perhaps this has been asked, but why is the speakers choice of pronoun for its LLM disconcerting?
simondotau
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.)
slickytail
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torben-friis
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.
osener
It is common amongst French, Dutch etc speakers where saying "it said x" sounds unnatural.
Anonyneko
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.
bavell
Funny, I've been doing the same thing lately! CC + godot + some game ideas I've had banging around in my head for years but daunting to dive into.
The results so far are... okay, but getting something working to validate the gameplay loop and experiment with different systems is a lot of fun!
Anonyneko
How well does it work with Godot? Engines like Unity and Godot are very focused on using the editor UI, so I've always wondered if there's any better workflow than generating code snippets. Unless you're going full .NET/GDExtension...
riddlemethat
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.
raincole
> take pictures of the food in my fridge to compile the nutritional benefits
AI nowadays can't even do this very first step reliably. But since we have accepted AI hallucination collectively as a species, I agree that this future is just around the corner.
maccard
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
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.
blks
No, I don’t think we anywhere near that future.
arcatek
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.
KronisLV
I don’t think Godot is any worse than other engines inherently, other than it moving forwards pretty quickly and the latest versions not being in the training data.
I wanted to evaluate which engines would be the best for working with LLMs in and it seems like Flax and Stride kind of come out on top - the former has a lot of stuff out of the box (including terrain) and the latter is all C# basically which is great for debugging. But either way, the source code for both of those makes the functionality a bit easier to track down compared to Godot (which is a lot more complex internally).
So what I do now is have both the engine source code locally alongside the docs and when I want to implement something with AI I just tell it - look at the docs, then at the source if needed, write tests for our code, if something doesn’t work then edit the engine source code in our branch and use the provided convenience script to rebuild the engine (both of those are also pretty fast, I ended up settling on Flax, plus the component model is closer to Unity which I like).
I don’t ask the AI to create scene files though, or any sort of visual assets, but rather stuff like RTS/simulation code. I don’t think any AI is that well optimized for the 3D work outside of simple proof of concept setups.
ogig
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?
operatingthetan
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
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.
kowbell
Are any LLMs suited at directly modifying game scene/asset/prefabs for any engine?
jaggederest
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.
samiv
I have a simple script system in my editor that is designed to let the chatbot (Claude) to work on the content. The script interface lets it to import assets into the project, open them for editing, take a screenshot, export content (and few other things). All data is in JSON so it typically figures out the data format quite fast and easily.
Here screenshots of some UI styles that it generated.
pelasaco
do you think so? For me Godot works well with LLM. Unity in another hand, is ill-designed to work with LLM..
tasuki
> I have a folder with tens of abandoned projects, I re-frame them as experiments at that point.
Interesting, I have just the opposite situation: I have a folder with tens of experiments, many of which have become actual projects at this point.
aleksiy123
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.
hansmayer
> 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
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
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
> 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.
arjie
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.
linsomniac
In the beforetimes, I had to be very selective about the tools I spent my attention on, because they could take me 1-4 hours, easy.
Now I can throw ideas for tools at Claude with <15 minutes of my attention. They're so cheap that right now my coworker and I have "competing" versions of CLI Icinga2 tools, and we've been riffing back and forth about features (she added a "select from the above list of services" feature, I added a TUI to do the same).
Last week I shaved off more rough edges of our stack than I've had time to do in the previous quarter, probably closer to a year.
hypercube33
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
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saadn92
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.
2001zhaozhao
> 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.
I wonder whether there could be an AI autocomplete specifically for the task of helping you with the markdown file (and collecting your thoughts and writing prompts in general). Not an agent since that wouldn't really save time, but actually an autocomplete.
Maybe a small specially-trained local model running at hyper fast speeds and which already has your project context baked in with prefix caching (with some other larger model having summarized the context beforehand to feed to the small model), so as you type this file it automatically uses the same prompt prefix over and over to suggest autocomplete which actually makes sense.
wiseowise
> 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.
I sure hope companies double down on leetcode nonsense, because I really don’t have any capacity to compete with this level of ADHD.
AnotherGoodName
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
cxr
Itch.io allows for browser-based app distribution and is probably a better path to a large audience—especially those interested in the two examples you listed—than a custom domain is.
It's not well-known, but Itch's offline Steam equivalent (<https://itch.io/app>) is also open source.
ntcho
I’m also having a blast with generating userscripts/css to make web SaaS work better for my workflows. Went from waiting for months for a new feature to writing QoL improvesments myself
LastMuel
Yes, I built an app to plan an Easter Scavenger Hunt. How niche is that?!
skyberrys
Just curious, how long did you operate without AI? The burst in productivity I feel implies a time to accumulate these many small needs.
arjie
All my life, I suppose haha. But realistically, this will be my 25th year of any sort of programming.
sigseg1v
Not the person you are replying to but I have, in version control, around 80 projects dating back to about 2008 that are in various states of completion and Claude has been able to resurrect a lot of them and get them from their "half finished but will never complete" state up to "pull in modern dependencies and implement (me giving a list of what remains to be done)" to the point that they are now usable. I'm more focused on the things that are 7 or less years old because anything older than that I'm not sure I have a need for anymore.
xeromal
My github is littered with projects dating back to when I started as a dev in 2012. I'd just got burned out before completing them
apple4ever
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).
solraph
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 - 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
meken
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.
locknitpicker
> 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.
XorNot
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.
0xbadcafebee
> 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
> 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
jedberg
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.
tkgally
> 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/
bbkane
Could you share the source to your Markdown editor? I'm always looking for new ones
jkingsman
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
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
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)
wiseowise
They’re way more powerful than you except. I’ve recently rediscovered them and I really couldn’t find a use case for a custom iOS app that wasn’t covered by them.
msingh_5
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
Where's the fun in purchasing an app from Anthropic?
undefined
raincole
Or, you know, you can just build an app. It's far easier and faster to make such an app with claude today than learning a so-called no-code tool.
codybloem
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.
zippergz
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.
rjh29
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
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.
least
> 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.
Why do you think that? I do regular ol' coding at my day job and have been vibe coding some side projects. They both require using my brain and both require my input for something to be created. They are different, though.
> Instead all you're doing is creating more cheap mediocre throwaway crap just because you can.
It probably is these things but since I'm just building stuff for myself, it hardly matters.
I've written a lot of code and a lot of that has been doing roughly the same thing. It's not a mental challenge; it's a chore. Sometimes it is really gratifying to code and try to figure stuff out. Often times it is not. So when it comes to building something in my free time, I'd prefer to avoid that sort of mental friction and banal tasks just to start working on the actual problem. More so than that, I'm building tools for myself to make my life easier so I can spend it more on something else.
I ride an electric bike with pedal assist. Does that mean I'm not really bicycling? Some might say yes and that it defeats the point. To me it ensures that I pick the bicycle more because it reduces friction to do so. I know that if I encounter a hill that the pedal assist will help me up it and thus I use it more and the net benefit outweighs the downsides. I think it's the same thing here.
I don't take pride in the work that an LLM does for me but I will happily benefit from it. It's a tool.
w33n1s
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
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
tarr1124
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
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.
roncesvalles
>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
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.
tarr1124
Selling would be nice, but a lot of solo builders are mainly in it for the building. The note app I wanted didn't exist anywhere. I was close to hiring a contractor to build it, so it's already worth tens of thousands of dollars to me. I want to make a bit off it but not run a real business. No VC, no employees. If it earns enough to pay my own salary, I get to keep building it as my job, which beats most startup exit math. Reaching maybe 100 people with the same problem is the target.
guessbest
Do you have a link to the note app? Just curious what could make it unique, not criticizing anyone.
Zopieux
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.
jillesvangurp
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/, 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.
giancarlostoro
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.
mbtrilla
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.
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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.