Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.matthewbrunelle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 263 posts

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

#221

Post by fwip »

folkrav wrote: post #21
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).

I've heard it quite a bit before, but mostly from second-language speakers whose first language don't have impersonal third-person pronouns - e.g. French uses "il" or "elle" for all of "he", "she" or "it". It doesn't help that the marketing leans heavily on anthropomorphizing LLMs either, IMHO.

It also seems to me, that people who call Claude 'he' seem to tend to have a very positive opinion of the LLM. My sample size isn't big enough to be sure if there's actually any correlation here, let alone if there's a causation or which way it flows.

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

#222

Post by linsomniac »

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…

In the beforetimes, I had to be very selective about the tools I spent my attention on, because they could take me 1-4 hours, easy.

Now I can throw ideas for tools at Claude with Last week I shaved off more rough edges of our stack than I've had time to do in the previous quarter, probably closer to a year.

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

#223

Post by AntiUSAbah »

cyanydeez wrote: post #73
AntiUSAbah wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find $200/month for the pro/max subscriptions cost prohibivitve, but as a software enginere $20/month is just lunch. And with a Claude or GPT $20 Subscription, i can do other fun things too like using it for real things (emails) or image generation. A Mac Studio or AMD395 is neither of it. And its not just a basic setup either. I need to buy it, configure it, put it somewhere. That alone is a grand and more + a who…

You need to factor in the constant value proposition that cloud providers will absolutely drive you to in the next 2 years; even if you're not an AI hater, you should listen to ed zitron's description of the value props these clouds require to make a profit for their VC backers. This means oyu may be opinionated today on something you will not have tomorrow, 6 months, a year. All that work flow you salivate over can…

I will be able to setup when necessary but until then, your proposed hardware is still very expensive and cost prohibitive to a lot of people.

And at least in germany, running it yourself with free hardware costs me also 20 $.

I'm happily playing around and using open source models, i do not mind at all.

Btw. Open Router also hosts/provides open source models. That might be the better suggestion to the avg reader/user.

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

#224

Post by Anonyneko »

bavell wrote: post #219
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!

How well does it work with Godot? Engines like Unity and Godot are very focused on using the editor UI, so I've always wondered if there's any better workflow than generating code snippets. Unless you're going full .NET/GDExtension...

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

#225

Post by xeromal »

ogig wrote: post #47
cyclopeanutopia wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you care to show a few pictures?

Sure! Two are gameplay pics. An enemy sprite sheet generation, and the results of the map generators. Of course these are basic placeholders for a few hours of work, but I will definitely go heavy on this route with more layering and details. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A7kfcjHjSmCNidqc9t731uoglzL... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Bl_n0ECqc78LGGf7SsOx38mRUOP... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JMcgzqcnZ2ncboey…

Thanks for sharing!

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

#226

Post by xeromal »

skyberrys wrote: post #146
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…

Just curious, how long did you operate without AI? The burst in productivity I feel implies a time to accumulate these many small needs.

My github is littered with projects dating back to when I started as a dev in 2012. I'd just got burned out before completing them

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

#227

Post by giancarlostoro »

Not just never going to finish in some cases you never even got to start on them.

You have been architecting this thing for 15 years you know the entire stack inside out at this point, so much so that when you finally say let me see what the AI can do, and you braindump into a markdown file and have Claude build from that spec you are astounded.

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

#228

Post by guessbest »

tarr1124 wrote: post #170
guessbest wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who will buy it? No knocks against building old projects, but the market will be flooded with extremely speciality projects. I miss when every app had a spec on the box. I think we need something like that for usage. A new modeling language or something.

Selling would be nice, but a lot of solo builders are mainly in it for the building. The note app I wanted didn't exist anywhere. I was close to hiring a contractor to build it, so it's already worth tens of thousands of dollars to me. I want to make a bit off it but not run a real business. No VC, no employees. If it earns enough to pay my own salary, I get to keep building it as my job, which beats most startup exi…

Do you have a link to the note app? Just curious what could make it unique, not criticizing anyone.
Post reply on HN