alt Hacker NewsReally? I'm more motivated than ever to make stuff at the moment. I have a long list of projects I've always wanted to make, but I never had time. The barrier is so low now.
For example, I want to make:
- A mini OS on top of SeL4
- A UI framework based on SolidJS, for native apps, in rust.
- My own photo manager (which can do backups & sync across all my devices). And a gallery to share photos with friends
- A local first data store, built on top of CRDTs
- My own programming language
And lots more.
Each of these projects on their own would take months of time. If LLMs can speed up development, that's great! I don't care if nobody else uses what I make. I want a personal computer full of my own software.
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Leisure projects for me at least are about the personal challenge and achievement. If the LLM does it, you achieved nothing.
The issue is maintenance. If you want to use these projects for important things, you need to maintain them. If you don't want to maintain them, I can't see myself using them for anything important.
I actually want less software for myself. Less things to maintain. I've become a "digital minimalist" in that I use very few software, only ones maintained by others who can afford and are willing to keep them working.
And you're actually excited by the prospect of buying them from Anthropic instead of making them?
I support this take especially since you added the "I don't care if nobody else uses what I make", but you should at least acknowledge what you're talking about is pretty unrelated to the article, as the author's entire context seems to be making something for other people to use and building it together with other people.
Since you said you want to make those things that you list, I assume none of these things have been built yet. If so, I would encourage you to consider how excited you will be to constantly maintain those things you build. But even if the maintainence cycle won't be as exciting, since you are the sole user you have the advantage of being able to proceed at a leisurely pace even while doing maintainence work.
In a professional setting, the dopamine hit of being able to build something quickly that works in an area that you have little to no knowledge in makes you more dependent on the AI in the maintaince cycle as you want to chase that dopamine high by maintaining the same development speed. This in turn leads to a bigger burnout crash after that peak dopamine hit. Maintainence is a phase of diminishing returns even without AI, but when your coding agents are introducing new bugs at record pace with their bugfixes with no new features to write home about you are in a special place in Hell.
I'm all for using AI to build ambitious projects. I have yet to see a person/company/organization continuously release huge software endeavours in a stable professional manner day in and day out with a coding agent harem in tow.
If something like the Ladybird browser, or any browser that is "built by scratch", achieved Chrome parity in six months and consistently maintained the same level of stability with continuous releases then I would see that as proof that this approach has become professionaly sustainable.
The reason people are getting away with so much using AI is because of the open secret in most enterprise engineering practices: the customer cares more about the response time for fixes they report than they do about overall or longterm product quality.
I feel the same way as you. But was unfortunately not surprised to see the replies you are getting here.
There are a ton of opportunities available right now to make new things. And make them better, more customizable, and more sovereign.
To the replies: be the change you want to see in the world, guys. That may be trite but focusing only on the negative will just make your own life shitty.