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Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

blog.matthewbrunelle.com

101–110 of 263 posts

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#102

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.

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Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#103
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> the effectiveness of newfound tool

…and yet, most people continue to say that non standard tooling ecosystems, where the agent cannot run and validate the code it writes, remain difficult and unproductive.

“I just pointed CC at godot and it made a game! This is sooo good”

…is a fairytale.

What tooling are you using to make it run and compile the code? How is it iterating on the project without breaking existing functionality?

None of these are insurmountable, but they require some careful setup.

Posts like this dont make me laugh; they just make me roll my eyes.

Either the OP has not done what they claim.

Or they have spent a lot more time and effort on it than they claim.

> 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.

Such a sweet story about a boy and his AI.

Unfortunately, I also dont believe in fairytales.

Instead of waving your hands wildly about AI, post some videos and code of the results.

This is hackernews, not hypenews.

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#104
post #53

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…

> Claude Code is brilliant for personal apps.

Agreed.

The clipboard manager I had been using on my Macs for many years started flaking out after an OS update. The similar apps in the App Store didn’t seem to have the functionality I was looking for. So inspired by a Simon Willison blog post [1] about vibe coding SwiftUI apps, I had Claude Code create one for me. It took a few iterations to get it working, but it is now living in the menu bar of my Mac, doing everything I wanted and more.

Particularly enlightening to me was the result of my asking CC for suggestions for additional features. It gave me a long list of ideas I hadn’t considered, I chose the ones I wanted, and it implemented them.

Two days ago, I decided I wanted a dedicated markdown editor for my own use—something like the new markdown editing component in LibreOffice [2] but smaller and lighter. I asked the new GPT 5.5 to prepare an outline of such a program, and I had CC implement it. After two vibe coding sessions, I now have a lightweight native Mac app that does nearly everything I want: open and create markdown files, edit them in a word-processing-like environment, and save them with canonical markdown formatting. It doesn’t handle markdown tables yet; I’ll try to get CC to implement that feature later today.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/27/vibe-coding-swiftui/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47298885

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#105
post #36
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are any LLMs suited at directly modifying game scene/asset/prefabs for any engine?

Bevy is a great engine for LLM-based games because it's 100% code. I'm toying with a few things in it, one of them is an entire-planet economic simulation, and it scales well up to a million dead tiles and 10k-50k live tiles on Apple Silicon, pretty impressive.

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#106
It’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.

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#107
post #90
post #83

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?

How do you know you'd learn nothing from it?

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#108
post #7

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…

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).

There's an analyst at my job who calls it "he", who is a native English speaker himself, which I guess is because it's "Claude" (as in Claude Shannon) Code.

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#109

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 l…

I have a lot of hobbies. Programming is one of them, but not the only one. There are times that some piece of software would help me with one of my hobbies, but I don't want to steal time from hobby X to build the software. And often these don't involve the kind of coding that I want to be doing for fun. This has been a sweet spot for LLM-aided coding for me. I've built several hobby helper apps where the goal was making one of my other hobbies more fun rather than programming. It's still hobby time, not work, but the hobby is not coding.

Re: Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

#110
post #7

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…

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).

I recognise I am revealing a different type of ambient misogyny in my thinking, but choosing to gender an LLM as feminine gives me “I played tomb raider because I enjoy looking at women” vibes. Like somehow “she” is more of a conscious choice than “he” and comes with all the baggage of all cultural differences between genders, when neither choice should do that.

Curiously though I don’t get the same sensation when technologies are gendered by other people. I honestly don’t recall thinking about it when Apple released Siri. (Now I’m second-guessing myself and wondering if I should’ve reacted negatively towards feminine being the default for someone in a personal assistant role.)

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