commented:
Similar to many developers in the pre-LLM era, I had a decent amount
of unfinished projects and ideas that I thought it would be cool to
bring to live. Most of them I gave up midway because, once I started
to work on it, I didn't have the time, energy, or it was just not such
a great idea after all.
Nowadays I have access to the yes machine that can produce these
projects for me and I still don't do it. Why? Honestly, I feel the
human bandwidth is a good proxy to tell if something is important
enough for you to build, care and ultimately use it. I know people
vibecoding their super tailored apps that replaces their SaaS
subscriptions makes a good headline, but this is just
survivorship-bias. I believe the majority of people that finally
concluded their software dream project because of AI, have already
found out that finishing was not the problem.

  commented:
I hear people say this and am baffled. My side projects I have always
either built knowing that I was not going to use them or because they
filled a need (or want, or very minor desire) I actually had. This has
not changed with LLMs.
To pick an example at random, I ported facebook's Demucs stem splitter
to run in wasm, because I wanted something I could use on my phone,
and I've used it several times now to give demos to kids about
listening to various parts of music. Could I have done that on my own?
Absolutely. Would I have? Empirically, no.
My wife has way more of these than I do - e.g. a metronome app for
running that works exactly how she wanted it to, or a pattern designer
for weaving. She also uses hers all the time. Prior to Claude Code she
had mostly stopped programming (she did it professionally but not as a
hobby).
I cannot imagine looking out at the world with a programmer's brain
and not seeing a bunch of things which could be at least minorly
improved by application of some code.

  commented:
I've realized that most of my pleasure in side projects came from the
act of building, not the thing to use afterwards. That's probably also
why I abandoned so many of them when the pleasure of building declined
below the burden of maintaining.

  commented:

I cannot imagine looking out at the world with a programmer's brain
and not seeing a bunch of things which could be at least minorly
improved by application of some code.

Let me be the first to congratulate you on learning that people do not
share the same priorities as you.

  commented:
To be clear, I'm absolutely not saying that any of this is or should
be a priority! There are also lots of things that could be improved by
application of money, or time, or whatever, and in almost all cases it
wouldn't be worth doing.

  commented:
Very similar experience here. I always have a lot of ideas I want to
try doing, little things I want to automate, or just to see if
something works or not. Before LLMs, the barrier to figuring out all
the boilerplate, library APIs, tooling, and so on was just too high to
bother unless you really wanted to make something work. Now, it's
really easy to just get the LLM to build a small tool that scratches
an itch, and if it doesn't work out then it's not a big deal either.
I've resurrected a whole bunch of half finished projects I've had, and
got to explore a lot of things I just never had the energy to do
before. And a lot of the time you do learn something new. Perhaps not
at the same level of detail as you would have if you did it
artisanally by hand, but you still learn something in the process.
For example, my latest adventure was to try and reverse engineer NEF
files my Nikon camera uses which don't have an open source decoder. I
use Topaz Photo to clean up noise and sharpen photos, and I wanted to
see if I could use an open source model to do that instead. In the
process I learned how wavelet based codecs work, and that gave me an
idea to apply wavelets to code analysis. It turns out nobody tried
doing this before, and it resulted in a really neat tool I now
regularly use to find gnarly parts in codebases
https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-06-02-wavescope.html
So, I got two useful tools out of this experiment, and I learned about
a technique I didn't know about in the process. This would've never
happened without LLMs because I wouldn't even have bothered trying to
reverse engineer a proprietary image encoding format on my own.

  commented:

for a more playful example, the one-shot editor for poems in Pilish
was posted as an aid to a Facebook group

Clearly off topic, but thank you for making me discover Pilish. Made
my day honestly. Now a colleague has challenged me to write the next
PR description in it.

  commented:
Sorry for the off topic comment, but your blog is absolutely
beautiful.  Everything about the styling / font formatting is spot on.
Feels like reading a book.  Did you use any style guidelines or
rubrics to set this up?

  commented:
Thank you! No, I didn’t use anything like that, other than my sense of
aesthetics.
.