alt Hacker NewsIt’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.
Replies
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.
Just curious, how long did you operate without AI? The burst in productivity I feel implies a time to accumulate these many small needs.
Yes, I built an app to plan an Easter Scavenger Hunt. How niche is that?!
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.