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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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] =).
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.
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'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
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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 :)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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,
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well Claude was named after Shannon
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/
It is common amongst French, Dutch etc speakers where saying "it said x" sounds unnatural.
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.
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."
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would you care to show a few pictures?
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/1A7kfcjHjSmCNidqc9t731uoglzL... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Bl_n0ECqc78LGGf7SsOx38mRUOP... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JMcgzqcnZ2ncboeyAXvscRWagqR... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-luJ6y7YslNfwmFnCdIDbJ871i0... https://drive.google.com/file/d/14n4TLAVywk_1GMhLLGOuukQwUmb...
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?
Are any LLMs suited at directly modifying game scene/asset/prefabs for any engine?
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
Where's the fun in purchasing an app from Anthropic?
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.
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.
This sounds similar to how art patronage used to (still does?) work.
Which site did you use?
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
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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 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
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.
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?
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.
+1 and - The title has that weird corpo media "here is why you should not quiet quit" vibe to it, doesn'it?
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.
> 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.
I have opencode with qwen 3.6 on my local machine. Just get the setup right and it's surprisingly fun to work with.
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 :)
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.
If you already have a gaming pc, then it's worth exploring as the cost of boredom is negligible.
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!
AMD 395+ w/128gb is all you need. the idea that mac studio is the default is a nerdfest.
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.
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.
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,
My hardware won't be nerfed because a cloud business requires sacrifices.
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.
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.
D) to solve a problem in your personal life? To make an app that you wish existed but didn't?
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.
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?
Your dignity.
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).
But why give Anthropic/openai our money? Nonsense. Use open models
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 $.
Why give apple/nvidia your money?
Well they are subsidizing us for starters.
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.
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.
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
Why assume local when you can easily use any of the open models via openrouter or any number of similar services.
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?
projects you were never going to finish should stay projects that are never finished :)
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
[stub for offtopicness]
[we've hopefully deprovokified the title now]
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.
blame the hn title rules (although i would just have substituted "AI")
i doubt anyone is nouning "agentic" of their own accord (yet)
Just "leaders" at consulting firms mostly
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.
Oh? How very kind of the author to allow me to.
[flagged]
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079