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

cyanydeez

There certainly is some relaxing value in working on projects to vibe code them; but not enough to pay some random corporation. Get yourself a Mac Studio or AMD395+ and pi or opencode, and a few plugins and they're pretty capable. Since they're not speed demons but reliable compaions who are always there, you don't ever feel compelled to constantly attend to whatever they're doing. And when you inevitably get bored with it, well, you've not done much anyway. You can always get back up to speed in a month and have the LLM remind you of what it was doing.

ogig

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 = not giving up". Its been awesome at game dev, I gave him game design ideas, he comes with working code. I gave him papers about procedural algos, and he comes with the implementation, brainstorm items, create graphic assets (he created a set of procedural 2d generators as external tools), he even helped me build the lore. These have been one of the most fun times using a computer in a long time. Claude Code + Godot = fun. Going back to it.

sdevonoes

But why give Anthropic/openai our money? Nonsense. Use open models

dang

[stub for offtopicness] [we've hopefully deprovokified the title now]

theshrike79

> In my mind there are different buckets for personal projects. One is things I do to learn and grow and the other is things I really wish existed. Pretty much 100% of projects I've done with vibe coding/engineering is in the second category. Stuff I need that either doesn't exist or exists, but is either horribly complex to configure or is a mess of 420 features even though I just need one of them. It's a lot easier for me to implement that one specific feature just for myself than keep vigilant on an existing app's eventual scope creep as it progresses to the eventual ability to read email[0] =). [0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

ozim

With AI coding I was able to build three applications I always wanted but never had time to code them. Now it is different in a way — I don’t have time to use them.

bdangubic

projects you were never going to finish should stay projects that are never finished :)

jedberg

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. I threw it a Claude Code, told it what I wanted the graphical interface to look like, and let it run. It got an app exactly what I wanted, and even found a bug in the date parser that I hadn't noticed. I now have it running in the corner of my screen at all times. The next app I'm going to build is an iPhone app that turns off all my morning alarms when the kids' don't have school. Something I've wanted forever, but never could build because I know nothing about making iPhone apps and don't have time to learn (because of the aforementioned children). Claude Code is brilliant for personal apps. The code quality doesn't really matter, so you can just take what it gives you and use it.

codybloem

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 like to leave side projects for the good of the spirit. An exception could be results for a greater good that one really believes in. This can give purpose and enrich the process and experience of doing.

aifactory5

The tooling landscape has changed so much in the last two years that I find myself re-evaluating automation setups that were solid 18 months ago. The time investment to rebuild is real but the efficiency gains on the other side are worth it for anything you're doing more than a few times a week.

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.

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.

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?

cedws

In the time I’ve had agents I’ve never abandoned more projects. Vibe coding especially just leads me to feel no attachment. I don’t feel proud to put my name on it. Despite coding from a young age I always thought that I cared more about the outcome than the code. Turns out that’s not entirely the case.

nothinkjustai

What is the point of using AI for a side project? Isn’t the point of a side project to A) have fun writing code or B) challenge yourself or C) learn something new, and usually all 3? Slopping out random stuff you have no attachment to, taught you nothing, and that feels bad to pass off as your own work accomplishes nothing.

thegrim33

Every time I see a story like this I like to play the game "does this person just happen to work for a company that sells AI solutions?". And yes, yes they do. Almost never will see you a story promoting AI solutions from someone that isn't directly involved in selling AI solutions.

aokdi

Yes, you can revive it into worthless slop. Learning next to nothing for yourself and achieving a hollow sense of satisfaction at best. Maybe even shamelessly post it as a Show HN along with the other 99% of worthless slop submissions there.

NetOpWibby

In 2020 I was in the Codemirror forums trying to get help with a project that replaces React in GraphiQL for Svelte. It was too difficult for me to figure out so I shelved it. Yesterday I asked Claude to make this happen and it referenced that very thread I made. Anyhoo, I'm working on making it pretty (it works!!) before integrating it into my opinionated GraphQL server[1]. There really is no excuse for NOT being the change you wish to see in the world anymore. --- [1]: https://code.webb.page/eol/gq.git/about

jliptzin

We have closed-source and open-source software, I think the next phase is going to be self-source or llm-source software (not sure what the term will ultimately end up being), but basically if you have a need for something that is not filled exactly by any app, you will just give the spec to an LLM and in X amount of minutes/hours you will have bespoke software built just for you to use personally, fully tested and to spec. For example, I still haven't found a workout/weight lifting tracking app that does 100% of what I want and at this point I may just build it myself because I could probably do it in half a day with claude and won't have to pay any annoying subscription fees. Maybe it'll still be called AI slop but if it works it works.