If you're anti (AI) side projects, you're pro corporate feudalism.
I love to resist corporate feudalism by making my entire development process fully dependent on SaaS offerings by corporations like Anthropic and “Open”AI.
I hate AI side projects
91–100 of 129 posts
Re: I hate AI side projects
#92Edit: for me the most practical insight to come out of these threads, so far, is that Show HNs for generated repos/sites/projects would be more interesting if submitters were required to share the prompts, and not just the generated output. For such projects, the prompts are the real source, while the GH repo or generated artifact is actually the object code, and if that's all that's shared, it's less interesting and…
i can show you my prompt. it's a mess and only listing the major prompts. but it's interesting to look at (for me at least).
archive:
https://github.com/ludos1978/ludos-vscode-markdown-kanban/bl...
in progress or undone:
https://github.com/ludos1978/ludos-vscode-markdown-kanban/bl...
and there is much improvement, because if often watch videos next to vibe coding the project and do it in minutes i have time. so history is a huge mess. but i started 6 months ago, with most work done in the last 4 months. i spent about 1000$ of ai budget on it.
Re: I hate AI side projects
#93AI exacerbates the slop it but it's an old trend. It boils down to "form over substance" which has been an issue in this industry since as far as I can remember; it just got worse and worse; especially over the past decade. Solid solutions are being overshadowed by AI slop alternatives which were assembled in a few months with no long term vision; the results look great superficially, but under the bonnet, it's ineff…
Makes me think of how fancy framework and library websites have gotten. Surely, if the website has sumptuous animations, the code must be good.
Haha yeah, sometimes the contrast between appearance and code quality is shocking.
Most extreme case I experienced was in blockchain sector; all the software was beautiful, nice UI, smooth transitions, pixel-perfect graphics... But under the bonnet, nobody could even fully explain how anything worked and it was a real tangled mess worth billions in market cap at the time.
Re: I hate AI side projects
#94Edit: for me the most practical insight to come out of these threads, so far, is that Show HNs for generated repos/sites/projects would be more interesting if submitters were required to share the prompts, and not just the generated output. For such projects, the prompts are the real source, while the GH repo or generated artifact is actually the object code, and if that's all that's shared, it's less interesting and…
> Prompts are the real source
LLMs are non deterministic…
Re: I hate AI side projects
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
- learning: easier - searching: better - photo edit/enhance/filter: easier and acessible - text summarization: better - quick scripts/tools: faster - brainstorming/iterating ideas: faster - generating list of names: faster - rephrasing text: better - researching topics: faster - stackoverflow: i'm finally free. won't be missed by me - coding: debatable but for me LLMs made possible projects that weren't before due to…
Doing things "faster" and "easier" is an interesting way to put it. It places all of the value on one's personal experience of using the AI, and completely ignores the quality of the thing produced. Which explains why most stuff produced by LLMs is throwaway garbage! It only reinforces the parent comment - there is virtually no emphasis on making things "better".
Doing things faster/easier means I now do most of these things whereas I didn't before.
Because I have limited time and energy. Take learning as an example:
I couldn't afford to spend a weekend learning the tradeoffs made by the top 5 WebGL JavaScript game engines AND generate the same demos for all of them to compare DX, and performance on my phone. And as I had more questions about their implementation I would have to scavenge their code again, for each question.
A sample of the questions I had (and as I asked it would suggest new question for things I didn't know I should ask):
- Do they perform sorting or are their drawing immediate? sort on z? z and y? z/y and layers? immediate'ish + layers? Frustum culling supported? What's their implementation for it if any?
- What are their GPU atlas strategies? fixed size? multiple with grouping by drawing frequency to reduce atlas switching? 2048? 4096? How many atlases? Does it build the atlas at boot or does it support progressive atlas sprite loading? How does it deal with fragmentation? What does it use for packing algo? Skyline ir something more advanced? How is their batch splitting behaviour and performance characteristics?
- Does it help with ECS? How is their hierarchical entity DX, if any? Does it math with matrices for transformations or simpler math? Shaders support? Do they use an Uber shader for most things? And what about polygons? Also, how do they help with texture bleeding? What's their camera implementation? Do they support spatial audio?
...and so on. Multiply the number of questions by at least 10.
And I asked LLM to show me the code for each answer, on all 5 engines.
This kind of learning just wasn't feasible for me before with my busy life.
So when I say "easier" it often means "made possible".
Finally let's not forget most of us in HN are incredibly privileged and can afford to learn futile things on the weekend. But for a great part of the less privileged population, having access to easier learning is LIFE CHANGING.
Re: I hate AI side projects
#96Blog posts by authors claiming AI has transformed them into godlike engines of productivity: 103728369129 Interviews by celebrities predicting AI will revolutionize the economy: 2837191001747 Software and online things I've used that seem to be better than they were before ChatGPT was introduced: 0
Google Search has gotten better unless you think AI mode is a downgrade, the alternative of having a wikipedia article, reddit post or random website as the first result is not better technically maybe morally for you but not matter of factually. The average user does less manual filtering.
I’d infinitely prefer a relevant wikipedia article to an AI “Answer” that is almost always wrong.
Google lens image search used to be amazing, I tried a repeat of a search I did before of a piece of art, it showed the same piece but confidently listed the artist and year wrong by about 300 years.
I’ve had relatives do “research” about things I mentioned I needed to do, and they’ve just sent screenshots of the incorrect AI answer.
It’s made google almost entirely useless, there is zero incentive for them to try to make search better (vs incentive to make it worse) and even if they did want to make it better the sheer volumes of slop have made that even harder.
We’ve completely sabotaged out ability to collate information at scale as a civilization, for the benefit of a few companies that were already the largest in the world to begin with. And it turns out, very few people notice or even care about this.
Re: I hate AI side projects
#97The influx if these sorts of posts have largely pushed me out of all my previous "programmer" online spots. I have zero interest in seeing something that Claude emitted that the author could never in a million years have written it themselves. Its baffling to me these people think anyone cares about what their claude prompt output.
Do you choose your food/car/housing/etc based on virtue signalling rather than utility as well?
Do you choose your software exclusively based on virtue signalling about which editor they used to write it in?
Re: I hate AI side projects
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
- learning: easier - searching: better - photo edit/enhance/filter: easier and acessible - text summarization: better - quick scripts/tools: faster - brainstorming/iterating ideas: faster - generating list of names: faster - rephrasing text: better - researching topics: faster - stackoverflow: i'm finally free. won't be missed by me - coding: debatable but for me LLMs made possible projects that weren't before due to…
Doing things "faster" and "easier" is an interesting way to put it. It places all of the value on one's personal experience of using the AI, and completely ignores the quality of the thing produced. Which explains why most stuff produced by LLMs is throwaway garbage! It only reinforces the parent comment - there is virtually no emphasis on making things "better".
There is a funny, deep observation made by The Good Place character Michael (a non-human) that has stuck with me since. He says that humans took ice cream, which was perfect, and "ruined it a little" to invent frozen yogurt, just so they could have more of it. There's supposedly a 'guilt' angle there somewhere but I never felt guilty for eating "too much" ice cream so can't relate.
Still, this "making something worse so you can have more of it" shows up pretty much everywhere in human experience. Sometimes it's depressing, other times amazing to see what was achieved with that mentality, and it seems AI is just accelerating it.
Re: I hate AI side projects
#99Blog posts by authors claiming AI has transformed them into godlike engines of productivity: 103728369129 Interviews by celebrities predicting AI will revolutionize the economy: 2837191001747 Software and online things I've used that seem to be better than they were before ChatGPT was introduced: 0
I don't think it's quite at trillions to zero, but I do think the numbers are way, way out of balance so far. I'm still at the point where, if AI disappeared tomorrow, I would be, at worst, mildly inconvenienced.
> if AI disappeared tomorrow, I would be, at worst, mildly inconvenienced
And I think the same is true for quite a lot of people. It’s a thing I said a few months ago while discussing with someone about AI. “If AI was to go away, would you care? Compare with if smartphones were to go away.”
Most people would not blink twice if AI were to be removed. Try to remove their phones, would not be the same!
Re: I hate AI side projects
#100Blog posts by authors claiming AI has transformed them into godlike engines of productivity: 103728369129 Interviews by celebrities predicting AI will revolutionize the economy: 2837191001747 Software and online things I've used that seem to be better than they were before ChatGPT was introduced: 0
> things I've used that seem to be better than they were
A bunch of things got obsolete with emergence of good LLMs, especially in research and working with text tasks. See usage graphs of Stackoverflow, Grammarly and others.