91–100 of 613 posts
I was broken long before AI. I learned that no one was interested in my doodads even before generative AI. People were interested in all this other stuff, like ROI, how much money things make, how practical something is, etc. "No one cares about the code" was beat into me 10-20 years ago. Big ups to Joel for making it this far.
With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a custom solution, but I had been putting it off because there’s a lot of moving parts.
Doing our own in-house e-signing, email marketing, invoicing too. With just me as the dev. Other options from vendors were too expensive and complicated. Built an invoicing product too, it even writes a pretty good note based on all previous notes for that client.
Almost every business integration - outside a few like payments, hosting, email - become code problems.
If you’re doing it right you should be building more than you ever have before.
And btw random non-devs like car rental hosts and barbers are doing the basic site lead form type stuff for their businesses so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore. Any random can use that vercel product and it even deploys to a URL. That’s the small biz prosumer case.
The real devs should be doing massive projects a rando can’t do. Or one that displaces an expensive or complicated integration.
Tons of opportunity at every corner.
I've only found one answer to the "creative work" struggle now, after code writing as an art seems to have died. Start to write. Or continue to write. Or consider writing as the place to explore and develop your ideas. They're just words. There is even more freedom there to create. Not restricted by a compiler. Not restricted by the shape of the final product. Words can be written anywhere. Sometimes on a paper, even…
What people like about code is that you can run it and then it does exactly the things you wrote! And there is a precise, predictable relationship between the code and what it does, which you can fully understand and reason about! Neither natural-language-writing nor LLM-prompting does give you that.
1. It is great to see an effect of your thoughts, like something happening in the real world. 2. Coding offers a feeling of perfect control due to the deterministic nature of code.
I would argue that 1 is still the case with LLMs, and 2 was always just 95% true, never 100%, because of oversights, bugs in libraries, and what have you.
So what actually decays is maybe not so much the feeling of self-efficacy, but the feeling of control, and even this is a gradual change. Perhaps it would be less unsettling if it didn't happen at the same time as a potential loss of control in other areas: career, salary, mode of working etc.
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I'm not going to share exact details about my paid app, but you could think media management, with a lot of extra features, an in-app browser with custom controls, and multiple AI powered features with on device processing.
You're selling an app, but don't want to share any details, or even name it? Call me suspicious.
Should I post my market and keyword research too, here on this site for software developers and entrepreneurs?
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Someone once told me "Some people like writing books. Other people wish they had written a book." People who don't enjoy the craft are not bothered by AI and will replace manual labour with AI. There's nothing with that, but what I don't enjoy about this recent discussion is the assumption that anyone doing things by hand is wasting their time. "You're gonna be obsolete". But that was the reality before, with the str…
This is interesting because it mixes the process with the reward in an inverse way to what I see from AI pro/con. Those who like writing code have seemed to me to lose out in status from the introduction of AI, while those such as myself who care little for status have used AI more and gained from it. Conversely, those who like writing aren't always about the reward (being an author, having a book published) but thos…
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>My app has 200k LOC + 100k in tests, and there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it. May I ask what does this app do ? 200k is like GTA vice city level, is like sqlite level, If its a financial tracker or a to-do list or an agent coordinator I am going to kill myself
Vice City was released nearly 25 years ago! Also it's a game, so it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison. If you count the unique 'features' (or systems) of Vice City, you might find it's a comparable count to the number of features of a medium-sized mobile app.
Off topic but is there anything like Hacker News but without AI posts?
My friends and I have been asking this exact question lately. I’m sure people are still working on interesting things that AREN’T AI. I too would love a HN-minus-AI.
It’s fine to keep apprised of, but I really do miss the actually-genuinely-interesting topics and projects which used to pop up here, pre ai days.
Problem is without LLMs I’m making a contact lead form with some basic stuff and calling it good. With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a…