I love the article but disagree with the final point. It wasn't until LLMs came out that my toy projects have all been greatly upgraded with features and functionality. I simply didn't have time to do so before.
Writing toy software is a joy
41–50 of 318 posts
Re: Writing toy software is a joy
#42I've written a ton of throwaway toy applications for personal use. The tip I can share is: publish them on GitHub. You'll find out some of them are useful to a lot of people. I have multiple toy repos with 20+ stars and one with 200+ stars. Just put one screenshot and simple instructions to run on README.md, no need to write a manual. As simple as `npm install && npm run start` is enough instruction for most. The scr…
I've been using vhs ( https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs ) to script gif creation- really showcases CLI workflows if you're demoing multiple commands.
Examples: https://github.com/bbkane
Re: Writing toy software is a joy
#43Big time! Almost all of my interesting knowledge came from toy projects I made to solve my own problems (or zero problem solved but it was fun so I did it anyway). For example, I wanted to know if I can make 1 Kubernetes cluster span multi region, multi cloud. So I slapped TailScale for networking, replaced etcd with multi-region PostgreSQL Aurora, and span the Kubelets between my Raspberry Pi, Digital Ocean VMs, and…
>I wanted to know if I can make 1 Kubernetes cluster span multi region, multi cloud
Can I ask what you had running on that cluster?
Re: Writing toy software is a joy
#44> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate Am I the only one using LLMs as if they were a search engine? So before LLMs I was searching on Google things like "pros cons mysql mongodb". I would read the official document…
> Now with LLMs, I simply prompt the same with a little bit more of context "pros and cons of using mysql vs mongodb when storing photos. Link references".
In near future, companies will probably be able to pay lots of money to have their products come up better in the comparison. LLMs are smart enough to make the result seem "organic" -- all verifiable information will be true and supported by references, it will only be about proper framing and emphasis, etc.
Re: Writing toy software is a joy
#45> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate. I get where this is coming from, and I even agree with it today, but I also want to tag it as "don't cache this opinion too hard". It's interesting to notice when and how our…
> "by the way if you have friends who are expert programmers, I don't recommend asking them for help." AI is not an expert programmer [today]. and it doesnt take an expert programmer to arrive at that conclusion.
I also bet your expert programmer friend is give you pointers and not writing the whole thing for you
Re: Writing toy software is a joy
#46> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate Am I the only one using LLMs as if they were a search engine? So before LLMs I was searching on Google things like "pros cons mysql mongodb". I would read the official document…
This work great for me too, when learning something new the LLM brings in all sorts of perspectives and contexts I don’t know about yet.
It pulls in info from the docs, forums, code samples, shows me how things are connected, and may even suggest why something is good or bad.
Plenty of opportunity to look up docs I didn’t even know about yet.
Re: Writing toy software is a joy
#47> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate Am I the only one using LLMs as if they were a search engine? So before LLMs I was searching on Google things like "pros cons mysql mongodb". I would read the official document…
My main use for LLMs is to ask it to give me some boilerplate configuration for some library/tool I am not very familiar with and then look up the docs for the options it spits out. Like:
"give me the terraform configuration for an AWS ECS cluster with 2 services that can talk to each other, with one of them available publicly and the other one private"
Occasionally to give some small self-contained algorithms, for example:
Give me a way to format the difference between dates as human-readable text. For example: 1 day, 16 hours.
Re: Writing toy software is a joy
#48> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate Am I the only one using LLMs as if they were a search engine? So before LLMs I was searching on Google things like "pros cons mysql mongodb". I would read the official document…
I tell to myself to use them as "teachers", not "interns", i.e. ask them questions to guide my process or look for the sources of knowledge needed to understand or do something, instead of asking them to get things done (except tedious, simple tasks).
Re: Writing toy software is a joy
#49> Perhaps you’re a user of LLMs. I get it, they’re neat tools. They’re useful for certain kinds of learning. But I might suggest resisting the temptation to use them for projects like this. Knowledge is not supposed to be fed to you on a plate. I get where this is coming from, and I even agree with it today, but I also want to tag it as "don't cache this opinion too hard". It's interesting to notice when and how our…
I try to do exactly that. I phrase it as using LLM as teachers instead of interns.
Re: Writing toy software is a joy
#50I've written a ton of throwaway toy applications for personal use. The tip I can share is: publish them on GitHub. You'll find out some of them are useful to a lot of people. I have multiple toy repos with 20+ stars and one with 200+ stars. Just put one screenshot and simple instructions to run on README.md, no need to write a manual. As simple as `npm install && npm run start` is enough instruction for most. The scr…
Thanks, I'll try it. I have a few things knocking around.