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Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI

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Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI

#41

>The age of actually finishing side projects is here This is a really good summary of how I've experienced AI put into words. I'm not really sure how this can be monetized though. I'm not going to burn $200-1k per day on agents to do some side projects that have been on the back burner. The only reason I'm doing it now is the heavily subsidized or free available models all over the place.

I'm paying 10 dollars per month on GitHub Copilot. Gives access to good enough models. Not best, but great value for money.

Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI

#42
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the future. NFTs and crypto were also the future. > I don't think we'll ever manually write code again. It's just so much faster. More work for the people who like to fix tech debt.

> NFTs and crypto were also the future. I find this the least convincing argument ever. Its only a gotcha if you assume all/most of the people excited about one were excited about the other. Personally I never met a real person who gave a shit about crypto, much less nfts. But AI interest is everywhere, with it roughly 50/50 in my life of people who are uneasy with it vs use it regularly. I don't disagree about monum…

> crypto, much less nfts

Actually I met one guy who was somehow deep in NFTS when this Boring-Ape-NFT took off and he told me how much money he has now (on paper) - then they were vaporized and he lost everything.

Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI

#43
post #25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the future. NFTs and crypto were also the future. > I don't think we'll ever manually write code again. It's just so much faster. More work for the people who like to fix tech debt.

You need to try it before you knock it. I was a doubter. This will literally work 100x faster than you. It can one-shot 1kLOC across dozens of files in mere minutes and understand the context. You'll need to pay back a lot of those performance gains in reviewing the code, but the overall delta is a 2x speedup at minimum. I'd say it's closer to 4x. You can get a week's worth of work done in a day. A human context swit…

Calm down. That kind of mania is for Twitter.

Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI

#44
post #20

I have more than a few side projects that began as late night discussions with an llm. A couple of those projects reached a level of completion where I use the products daily, and one project reached production (a game you can find referenced on my profile). I have had similar experiences to the author, and I’ve found that just working with a single agent in Antigravity (on the Gemini Pro subscription) is adequate. T…

Anyone who hasn't tried AI for coding absolutely should. This is the future. I don't think we'll ever manually write code again. It's just so much faster.

> I don't think we'll ever manually write code again. It's just so much faster.

If velocity was the most important criteria, well, we could always write tech-debt faster, we just chose not to.

Unless the LLM/agent is carefully curated, it will produce tech-debt faster than it can fix it.

For some products, it seems not a problem - you just want to validate PMF on a product (of course you'll have a new problem now, which is that everyone with $20 to spare can do the same).

For others, a longer-life product is preferable. We shall have to see how things shake out. My best guess would be that we have more useless stuff that is free or close to free, and fewer useful stuff that is free or close to free.

Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI

#45
post #2

in the age of LLM-built side projects... what's the right venue for sharing these things with other people? i feel like the expectations for a "Show HN" project are too high for a passing around a silly little toy that I had the robot throw together. product hunt is for things that are actual products/businesses. so maybe you throw it in a targetted subreddit for a niche interest group? seems like there should be a m…

I marketed my macOS app from here to reddit to LinkedIn, Blusky and only people from Discord bought it.

Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI

#46

This is what I've been doing for a couple years now: having AI help to code/test projects that I've had in my long TODO list but would never realistically started/completed. AI is now pretty capable of producing decent code if your specifications are decent. I still think that non-programmers are going to have a tough time with vibe coding. Nuances and nomenclature in the language you are targeting and programming de…

I've a similar history of AI use as you but every so often I simply describe what I want and try out what it creates. Honestly in these past 2 years the pace of improvement has been stunning. Yesterday I was inside one of the tools that a just build it prompt created and I asked it to use a NewType pattern for some of the internals. It wasn't until I was in bed that I thought why? If I'm never reading that code and t…

I do think about this a lot. On the one hand, you might be right, and it may not matter at all. On the other, we often do that kind of stuff because it makes it harder to slip up by accident and/or makes the code easier to read and understand. These things are surely helpful to AI agents in the same way that they are useful to people?

I guess it depends on whether the extra time you could invest in that kind of thing pays back in terms of context windows, code quality or speed of AI code generation.

Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI

#47
post #2

in the age of LLM-built side projects... what's the right venue for sharing these things with other people? i feel like the expectations for a "Show HN" project are too high for a passing around a silly little toy that I had the robot throw together. product hunt is for things that are actual products/businesses. so maybe you throw it in a targetted subreddit for a niche interest group? seems like there should be a m…

In theory, you write/vlog about the human side of making it, or lessons learned, or something else that people will find value in related to the thing you make. Over time, maybe a few people start to care.

Ironically, if people care about you, you can pretty much serve up hot buttered shit and get traction.

Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI

#48
post #2

in the age of LLM-built side projects... what's the right venue for sharing these things with other people? i feel like the expectations for a "Show HN" project are too high for a passing around a silly little toy that I had the robot throw together. product hunt is for things that are actual products/businesses. so maybe you throw it in a targetted subreddit for a niche interest group? seems like there should be a m…

Once a month HN user david927 does a "What are you working on?" post (among others: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22What%20are%20you%20working%...) that is perfect for you to drop things like this into as a comment. It looks like this month's is still open for comments though unlikely to generate much interest after the first few days.

It should be made an official HN tradition like whoishiring.

Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI

#49

This is what I've been doing for a couple years now: having AI help to code/test projects that I've had in my long TODO list but would never realistically started/completed. AI is now pretty capable of producing decent code if your specifications are decent. I still think that non-programmers are going to have a tough time with vibe coding. Nuances and nomenclature in the language you are targeting and programming de…

I completed three "micro apps" solely for myself (well, one for my wife and I) over the last month, all vibe coded. I sent two of them (sort of micro mindfulness tools) to a therapist friend. "WOW, I didn't know you could do all that!"

What I told her was, I, in fact, could not do all that. I'm a marketer who's been in software companies for 15 years. Zero coding ability. However, through repeated exposure to programmers, PMs, and designers - and because a major part of my role is to develop a nuanced understanding of how our products create value for users - I've learned how to think like a product designer and developer (albeit to a non-professional degree).

That's the part of the "anyone can now build software" sentiments that seems to be skipped over. Anyone can now have their ideas coded for them, but that doesn't automatically create the ability to make all the right decisions during the design and build process. It doesn't create thoughtfulness and consideration and the willingness to say "no" to a feature because, while it seems cool, it will detract from the core purpose of the overall tool.

Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI

#50
post #41

>The age of actually finishing side projects is here This is a really good summary of how I've experienced AI put into words. I'm not really sure how this can be monetized though. I'm not going to burn $200-1k per day on agents to do some side projects that have been on the back burner. The only reason I'm doing it now is the heavily subsidized or free available models all over the place.

I'm paying 10 dollars per month on GitHub Copilot. Gives access to good enough models. Not best, but great value for money.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936105 Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition

> "Even without hacks, Copilot is still a cheap way to use Claude models"

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