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

blog.matthewbrunelle.com

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

#151

Post by bharat1010 »

dsvf wrote: post #55
quietbritishjim wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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 t…

how does that matter if its he, 'she' till its doing the work. Its artificial, shouldnt try to find means of attachment to it

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

#152

Post by blks »

riddlemethat wrote: post #20
ogig wrote: 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…

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…

No, I don’t think we anywhere near that future.

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

#153

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

> I still have fears around deskilling from relying on these tools too much

I'm a millennial who builds furniture with hand tools and wood joinery from a century ago. Nobody taught me, although I did find resources online to learn from. I should not be able to do these things. Everyone should have forgotten this esoteric, obsolete, uncommon knowledge by now. Yet here I am, doing it anyway. It turns out you can just learn what you want, when you want to. I don't fear losing this skill in the future, because I can just remind myself how it works. The tools, books, videos, and wood aren't going anywhere.

You aren't going to "be deskilled" from not writing code by hand regularly. Just because you use AI doesn't mean your brain grows a black hole from which information can never return. It's not giving you Alzheimer's. There might be a small amount of time it takes for you to refresh yourself, but then you're back to work again. Just ask anyone who went from coding to managing. They're a little rusty when they go back after years of absence, but they pick it back up.

Also, especially if it's a personal project, keep in mind you do not need to burn Opus tokens. Buy any of the dirt cheap subscriptions which give you access to MiniMax. Put it in a container on yolo mode. Give it some context, a prompt, web search, and a ticket system like beads. Then let it churn. You aren't in a rush, it's a personal project. As long as you follow the brainstorm -> plan -> implementation -> testing process, and have added methods to do real testing (not mocks or unit tests), it will get done with time and money to spare.

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

#154

Post by wiseowise »

saadn92 wrote: post #130
arjie wrote: post #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 w…

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…

> 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.

I sure hope companies double down on leetcode nonsense, because I really don’t have any capacity to compete with this level of ADHD.

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

#155

Post by wiseowise »

jedberg wrote: post #70
msingh_5 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

They’re way more powerful than you except. I’ve recently rediscovered them and I really couldn’t find a use case for a custom iOS app that wasn’t covered by them.

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

#156

Post by wiseowise »

jedberg wrote: post #97
ori_b wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the fun in purchasing an app from Anthropic?

Co-working with AI is an important skill to learn these days. Similar to paying a bit for AWS for your personal projects as a good way to learn all the AWS tools for your career.

But I thought LLMs democratize development?! Now AI is a “skill” that you have to pay for? Shocking!

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

#157

Post by 2001zhaozhao »

saadn92 wrote: post #130
arjie wrote: post #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 w…

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…

> 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.

I wonder whether there could be an AI autocomplete specifically for the task of helping you with the markdown file (and collecting your thoughts and writing prompts in general). Not an agent since that wouldn't really save time, but actually an autocomplete.

Maybe a small specially-trained local model running at hyper fast speeds and which already has your project context baked in with prefix caching (with some other larger model having summarized the context beforehand to feed to the small model), so as you type this file it automatically uses the same prompt prefix over and over to suggest autocomplete which actually makes sense.

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

#158

Post by teo_zero »

> things I really wish existed.

Just last week I was looking for a way to move all the windows from one screen to another in a go. After evaluating many clumsy or over-complicated existing solutions, I asked copilot to write a C program to do it. It had to be minimal and not depend on any runtime framework. A few loops later I had what I wanted without installing third-party tools!

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

#159

Post by solraph »

I know how to write code, I just don't have time. AI has been an absolute game changer in let me get OS projects out into the world that I just didn't have time to build before. I'm having an absolute blast spinning up local GUI applications for Linux that I wanted to exist, but didn't have enough motivation to build before.

(Shameless plug)

* Sambervise: https://github.com/edward-murrell/sambervise - A Linux GUI application for remotely administering Samba 4 Active Directory Domain Controllers.

* Krbtray: A GTK3 system tray application for Kerberos ticket management on Linux Mint / Cinnamon (and other GTK environments using GtkStatusIcon, such as XFCE and MATE). https://github.com/edward-murrell/krbtray

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

#160

Post by wiseowise »

thegrim33 wrote: post #80

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.

“Losing GPT 5.5 feels like amputating a limb”, - unnamed NVidia engineer.
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