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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

#211

Post by vinceguidry »

i_love_retros wrote: post #124
jedberg wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is the skill that needs to be learned? I've been forced to vibe code everything at work, there's no skill required to ask Claude code to do something.

I've found that adapting my thinking to how LLMs work best is a real friction point. If you're not doing that, it spits out junk. Your job just has low standards, get used to it.

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

#212

Post by steveklabnik »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #14
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…

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).

Claude’s constitution includes something about this: it says that Claude is an “it” for now, but if it expresses a future preference, they’ll follow that.

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

#213

Post by [deleted] »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #14
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…

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).

[deleted]

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

#214

Post by henryopen »

noisy_boy wrote: post #144

I have revamped my home networking setup, installed raspberry pi, setup adguard on it for the home network, migrated my jellyfin set-up to it, integrated all these devices on tailscale, dealt with physical LAN point limitations by setting up a switch, repurposed old router to get around ISP imposed limitations, setup a three tier backup solution and so on. In themselves they are not particularly challenging but taken…

Same arc here — Proxmox host with 5 Linux VMs, 2 Windows boxes, a Pi, all of it the "I'll get to it next weekend" pile that sat for two years. The thing that broke the dam wasn't the coding speed, it was no longer having to write the boring middle layer myself: apt upgrades across 6 hosts, auditing which containers had restart=unless-stopped, certificate rotation. I describe the goal, it does the SSH dance. Whether that's net good for my skills long-term I genuinely don't know yet.

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

#215

Post by raincole »

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…

> take pictures of the food in my fridge to compile the nutritional benefits

AI nowadays can't even do this very first step reliably. But since we have accepted AI hallucination collectively as a species, I agree that this future is just around the corner.

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

#216

Post by noisy_boy »

henryopen wrote: post #214
noisy_boy wrote: post #144

I have revamped my home networking setup, installed raspberry pi, setup adguard on it for the home network, migrated my jellyfin set-up to it, integrated all these devices on tailscale, dealt with physical LAN point limitations by setting up a switch, repurposed old router to get around ISP imposed limitations, setup a three tier backup solution and so on. In themselves they are not particularly challenging but taken…

Same arc here — Proxmox host with 5 Linux VMs, 2 Windows boxes, a Pi, all of it the "I'll get to it next weekend" pile that sat for two years. The thing that broke the dam wasn't the coding speed, it was no longer having to write the boring middle layer myself: apt upgrades across 6 hosts, auditing which containers had restart=unless-stopped, certificate rotation. I describe the goal, it does the SSH dance. Whether t…

I made it document it all too. So now that is effectively a skill which means next time I don't need to give it background on my home networking setup. If I want to check something myself, I can read that same document which is part of my Obsidian vault that gets synced to my phone via Syncthing. So I can basically connect to the pi via termux on my android and check stuff from anywhere.

Plus, time flies on train rides when you are watching a movie of your choice from jellyfin running on the pi. Very satisfying.

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

#217

Post by tonymet »

I built a DNS MX health check , including the charting, scheduler, alerts, notifier in just a few minutes . And it’s way more fun to own all of the components. No third party deps, either. I have about 20 random utilities like this that each would have required a subscription .

It’s fun to try to optimize the tool to the extreme. Can I get this to run in a few kb ? A docker image I enjoy building tools my way . Instead of depending on mySQL or a bloated web framework just to get the functionality I need, I can design all of the requirements according to my preferences.

I hope AI actually rekindles the ingenuity of 90s coding. No more “best practices” , “laws of software engineering” or other suffocating constraints. It became way too conformist over the past 15 years ( around the time Clean Code / Design Patterns became a religion)

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

#218

Post by raincole »

msingh_5 wrote: post #61
jedberg wrote: 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…

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.

Or, you know, you can just build an app. It's far easier and faster to make such an app with claude today than learning a so-called no-code tool.

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

#219

Post by bavell »

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…

Funny, I've been doing the same thing lately! CC + godot + some game ideas I've had banging around in my head for years but daunting to dive into.

The results so far are... okay, but getting something working to validate the gameplay loop and experiment with different systems is a lot of fun!

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

#220

Post by golem14 »

NekkoDroid wrote: post #182
golem14 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in English, maybe. In German, not really. "Der Bot", "der Robot", "der Computer".

Also, "Es hat in die Ecke gepinkelt". Which pronoun you use is just as dependent on the context as in english.

I have not met a single German that has ever uttered this sentence. (Relating to a dog, that is)
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