I love this, although I tend to use the “Home-cooked meal” analogy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877423
An ode to houseplant programming (2025)
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: An ode to houseplant programming (2025)
#22Not sure we need another term for this, as "utilities" has been the accepted term for various one-off programs that do miscellaneous things, and of which power-users will tend to have a rather large collection of. However, the term reminded me of a memorable interaction I had many decades ago with an old woman who wanted to write a program in x86 Asm to manage various aspects of the plants in her garden. (She did suc…
Sometimes utilities can be production-grade, tho, so I don't think that captures the nonchalance the author was looking for. "Home-cooked apps" is still my preferred phrase. Personal software and subsistence development are also good terms.
Home-cooked doesn't sound right. The term Handmade has a fair bit of usage for this already and has a lot less semantic friction in my head. Homemade isn't bad either, if you really like the cooking analogy.
Re: An ode to houseplant programming (2025)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes utilities can be production-grade, tho, so I don't think that captures the nonchalance the author was looking for. "Home-cooked apps" is still my preferred phrase. Personal software and subsistence development are also good terms.
Home-cooked doesn't sound right. The term Handmade has a fair bit of usage for this already and has a lot less semantic friction in my head. Homemade isn't bad either, if you really like the cooking analogy.
I think Maggie uses home-cooked here and it works for me because of the extended analogy
Re: An ode to houseplant programming (2025)
#24I love it. I do plant tissue culture as hobby and really see plants as the living systems that they are.
Cool, can you provide some more info on how you got in to this, recommended dabbling strategy and what sort of ROI you're getting from time invested? I have been getting in to botany pretty heavily already.
Re: An ode to houseplant programming (2025)
#25Not sure we need another term for this, as "utilities" has been the accepted term for various one-off programs that do miscellaneous things, and of which power-users will tend to have a rather large collection of. However, the term reminded me of a memorable interaction I had many decades ago with an old woman who wanted to write a program in x86 Asm to manage various aspects of the plants in her garden. (She did suc…
Sometimes utilities can be production-grade, tho, so I don't think that captures the nonchalance the author was looking for. "Home-cooked apps" is still my preferred phrase. Personal software and subsistence development are also good terms.
"subsistence development", to me, sounds like "doing menial dev tasks in order to earn enough $ to survive"
Re: An ode to houseplant programming (2025)
#26I prefer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening
While interesting, that seems unrelated. A software equivalent might be turning an agent loose on a codebase unrestricted and seeing what it comes up with (which is followed by cleaning up the mess, analogous to the rounds of outcrossing that follow irradiation and selection).
Re: An ode to houseplant programming (2025)
#27> A happy home: I love having both plants and homemade projects in my living space.
This reminds me of various programs I've made to improve the quality of my digital life. Humble little things that I didn't want to build, addressing minor problems that could be mostly solved by other means, but nevertheless appeared on my mental wish list often enough that I eventually dedicated some time to creating them.
These tools do exactly what I need, all day, every day, quietly making things more pleasant than they would be otherwise. With them, I feel at home.
Re: An ode to houseplant programming (2025)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the denigration of any and all intellectual pursuits that gets me. It's the myopic lead the blind, in a race to empty their brain fastest before the singularity can rupture them into the mainframe heaven. Their irl counterparts at the university make me think it must be envy, the same as with AI art: they were never good programmers but have always envied the their prestige; and using this new wonderful machine,…
Or it’s just a useful tool that lets me build more stuff and focus on what I’m more interested in, and can use it to learn.
It can be a useful tool to do all that, that's what I use it for. Unfortunately a lot of AI boosters have the sfba move fast and break things mentality and that leads to all sorts of slop being pushed.
I think broadly speaking, we need less software that's higher quality. Commercially at least, LLM's seem to be creating more lower quality software. Less software but much higher quality, and then let the gaps be filled in by houseplant programming. Instead we get half-baked vibe coded Cloudflare-isk slop being promoted, or CEO's of saas-slop providers salivating at the chance to fire half of their workforce.
I want to see more houseplants being posted here, LLM generated or not. At least they would tend to have more care and love put into them.
Re: An ode to houseplant programming (2025)
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah this place has been depressing lately. The hope is that AI could be used to automate the parts of our lives that bring us no joy or growth and help us become fully actualised human beings, but instead it seems like it's just used as a tool to boost profits while making the world a worse place.
As someone said, "Machines were supposed to rid us of tedious work. Instead they write poetry and create art, and we fill captchas to prove to them that we are human"
Yeah, something like "I want AI to do my laundry and clean my house so I have more time to write and create art. Instead the AI writes and generates art so I have more time to clean my house and do laundry."
Re: An ode to houseplant programming (2025)
#30I love it. I do plant tissue culture as hobby and really see plants as the living systems that they are.
Cool, can you provide some more info on how you got in to this, recommended dabbling strategy and what sort of ROI you're getting from time invested? I have been getting in to botany pretty heavily already.
I've always had a passion for carnivorous plants and it was inevitable that I would end up doing tissue culture by keeping on digging deeper in the obsession.
The biggest ROI is fulfilling my childhood dream of having a ton of my favourites rare plants. Then I sell my extra ones on my webshop, but it doesn't make that much money as I am not focusing on expensive varieties, just the ones I like.
You can check out plants in jars on YouTube, or use a LLM to get into it. Some LLMs might not want to answer you because they think you're trying to do something dangerous... Claude has been flagging a lot of my questions.