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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

#61

Post by msingh_5 »

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.

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

#62

Post by theendisney »

I once had a project for novice freelancers. The idea was to take your abandoned fumble and put multiple people on it at 3rd world rates. There are lots of people in cheap coutries who can somewhat code. You can aford hiring someone for [say] 3 euro per day. If they describe where they got stuck in the daily progres report you can look at it and help a bit or not and Just let them figure it out.

You can pay more of course, buy them a computer, an internet connecties, books, courses, even an office but it isnt required.

Just pay 60 per project every 4 weeks and ignore it. If interesting progress happens its fun to look at.

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

#63

Post by w33n1s »

codybloem wrote: post #56

When it comes to side projects, most of the time, if the spirit isn't willing I find it not worth doing. Process/experience over results, I call leisure. Results over process, I call work. If you have many side projects done mainly for the results, than you are working in your free time, and looking at it like that: is it really free? The modern age already requires of us more results than the spirit is good for. I l…

I share this view, I think it's very healthy.

I've been programming for 30+ years now, but I've always been fine with command line applications. Only recently I started getting into Qt to add a UI and turn my stuff into a real desktop application. It's been a real steep learning curve but I'm finally over it more or less.

Anyway I posted a screenshot of my application on LinkedIn, and mentioned it would be free and open source. I got HUNDREDS of comments from "LinkedIn-type people" all big name engineers that wouldn't HIRE me for anything but either made comments like "looking forward to integrating this into our workflows" or "not the first time someone tried to do this..."

Either way, instead of feeling motivated, I got the worst feeling that I'm doing all this work and people are either going to just take advantage of it and get the credit for "finding" it, or criticize it simply because it's not for them.

It bummed me out so bad that I stopped work on it entirely for like a month.

Anyway I finally came to look at it the way you mentioned. What I LIKED was the process of learning Qt and seeing my old programs come alive.

So instead, it's my "project car" now. I build it up and tear it down all the time. Totally redesign the data models just to see what advantages different designs can give me. Try make my own graphical views. Try implementing language translations.

It's been "finished" for a while now but I probably have five completely different-under-the-hood versions of it and THAT is what has been fun.

I use it constantly all day at work and I never mentioned it on LinkedIn again lol

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

#64

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#65

Post by tarr1124 »

Three notetaking app attempts sitting in my private repos, all stalled at the gap between idea and free time. With Claude Code I finally got the one I really wanted out in two months. Building it has been the best hobby I've found. Beats games or scrolling. When you've been carrying an idea for years, the app that finally ships has more of you in it, and I'd bet we'll see a lot more of these from solo builders.

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

#66

Post by natpalmer1776 »

theendisney wrote: post #62

I once had a project for novice freelancers. The idea was to take your abandoned fumble and put multiple people on it at 3rd world rates. There are lots of people in cheap coutries who can somewhat code. You can aford hiring someone for [say] 3 euro per day. If they describe where they got stuck in the daily progres report you can look at it and help a bit or not and Just let them figure it out. You can pay more of c…

This sounds similar to how art patronage used to (still does?) work.

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

#67

Post by hansmayer »

Sounds a lot like that disgusti g corporate press propaganda tbh, of the "eat less avocado toast if you cant afford rent" variant. Is the AI mainstream that desperate in their relentlesss push for adoption of their bullshit text generators?

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

#68

Post by avereveard »

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…

Same I purposefully have a number of over ambitious project out of distribution entirely to test so failure mode, mostly games, when one works, well I gained a new game. Can't wait for my 10 player battleship game on a 100x100 grid to be functional.

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

#69

Post by yrds96 »

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).

It's not weird if it comes from ESL. At least in portuguese there's no "it" equivalent for pronouns or any other neutral artifact in the language, in other words, everything has a gender, even an AI model, the same goes for objects e.g.: knife(she), fork(he), spoon(she), plate(he).

People often commit mistakes regarding that, the same way we don't have "they" as pronoun to someone we don't know the gender, so we address to these people as "dele(dela)" (masculine and feminine pronouns).

But if this is coming from someone who has english as a primary language it's definetely weird to treat models as person

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

#70

Post by jedberg »

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.

I could, but what's the fun in that!?

(But in seriousness, I hadn't considered using shortcuts. It's not clear it's extensible enough to do exactly what I want, but I'll look into it)

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