Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI
1–10 of 70 posts
Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI
#2in 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 marketplace for silly little side-projects, but i'm not sure how you keep it from getting overrun
Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI
#3I’m in agreement with the blog post. I’ve been treating AI more like a tool and less like a science experiment and I’ve gotten some good results when working on my various side projects. In the past much of my time was taken up by research and learning the various little parts of how everything works. What starts as a little python project to play around with APIs ends with me spending 5 hours learning tkinter and barely making any API calls.
Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI
#4I’m in agreement with the blog post. I’ve been treating AI more like a tool and less like a science experiment and I’ve gotten some good results when working on my various side projects. In the past much of my time was taken up by research and learning the various little parts of how everything works. What starts as a little python project to play around with APIs ends with me spending 5 hours learning tkinter and ba…
LLMs have finally freed me from the shackles of yak shaving. Some dumb inconsequential tooling thing doesn't work? Agent will take care of it in a background session and I can get back to building things I do care about.
Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI
#5in 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…
Unfortunately, demand for silly little side projects is at an all-time low.
I'm debating whether to share the one I'm working on at all. I made it for myself so maybe it should stay that way.
Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI
#6in 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…
Unfortunately, demand for silly little side projects is at an all-time low. I'm debating whether to share the one I'm working on at all. I made it for myself so maybe it should stay that way.
i really want to see the silly little side projects that everybody is making!
not because i think i'll actually use any of them, but because they could inspire me to do something different in my silly little side projects
the goal isn't "product release", it's elementary school "show and tell"
Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI
#7in 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…
There are places like r/sideprojects but as with all non-niche boards it can get crowded pretty fast.
I’ve often thought about standing up a subreddit specifically for side projects but with the proviso of:
- No sign up
- No ads
- No subscription/payments of any kind
Open-source is welcome but optional.
Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI
#8I’m in agreement with the blog post. I’ve been treating AI more like a tool and less like a science experiment and I’ve gotten some good results when working on my various side projects. In the past much of my time was taken up by research and learning the various little parts of how everything works. What starts as a little python project to play around with APIs ends with me spending 5 hours learning tkinter and ba…
LLMs have finally freed me from the shackles of yak shaving. Some dumb inconsequential tooling thing doesn't work? Agent will take care of it in a background session and I can get back to building things I do care about.
I'm finding that in several kinds of projects ranging from spare-time amusements to serious work, LLMs have become useful to me by (1) engaging me in a conversation that elicits thoughts and ideas from me more quickly than I come up with them without the conversation, and (2) pointing me at where I can get answers to technical questions so that I get the research part of my work done more quickly.
Talking with other knowledgeable humans works just as well for the first thing, but suitable other humans are not as readily available all the time as an LLM, and suitably-chosen LLMs do a pretty good job of engaging whatever part of my brain or personality it is that is stimulated through conversation to think inventively.
For the second thing, LLMs can just answer most of the questions I ask, but I don't trust their answers for reasons that we all know very well, so instead I ask them to point me at technical sources as well, and that often gets me information more quickly than I would have by just starting from a relatively uninformed google search (though Google is getting better at doing the same job, too).
Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI
#9This 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 design principles in general help in actually getting AI to build something useful.
A simple example is knowing to tell AI that a window should be 'modal' or that null values should default to xyz.
Re: Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI
#10in 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…
Consider Tiny Tool Town? "A place for stupid-delightful tools made with love."