llm/5888b8dc-b96e-4444-9c3c-465dde409e92/topic-14-6d84afcd-99cf-403e-8204-85566ad97e38-input.json
You are a comment summarizer. Given a topic and a list of comments tagged with that topic, write a single paragraph summarizing the key points and perspectives expressed in the comments. TOPIC: Side project enablement COMMENTS: 1. For me it all the build stuff and scaffolding I have to get in place before I can even start tinkering on a project. I never formally learned all the systems and tools and AI makes all of that 10x easier. When I hit something I cannot figure out instead of googling for 1/2 hour it is 10 minutes in AI. 2. I feel like we are just covering whataboutism tropes now. You can absolutely learn from an LLM. Sometimes.documentation sucks and the LLM has learned how to put stuff together feom examples found in unusual places, and it works, and shows what the documentation failed to demonstrate. And with the people above, I agree - sometimes the fun is in the end process, and sometimes it is just filling in the complexity we do not have time or capacity to grab. I for one just cannot keep up with front end development. Its an insurmountable nightmare of epic proportions. Im pretty skilled at my back end deep dive data and connecting APIs, however. So - AI to help put together a coherent interface over my connectors, and off we go for my side project. It doesnt need to be SOC2 compliant and OWASP proof, nor does it need ISO27001 compliance testing, because after all this is just for fun, for me. 3. Exactly. And I was never particularly good at coding, either. Pairings with Gemini to finally figure out how to decompile an old Java app so I can make little changes to my user profile and some action files? That was fun! And I was never going to be able to figure out how to do it on my own. I had tried! 4. Fair enough. But that particular could be anything that has been bothering you but you didn’t have the time or expertise to fix yourself. I wanted that fixed, and I had given up on ever seeing it fixed. Suddenly, in only two hours, I had it fixed. And I learned a lot in the process, too! 5. Literally shipping a vide-coded feature as my baby sleeps, while reading this comment thread. It's the wild west again. I love it. 6. I use LLMs for code at work, but I've been a bit hesitant to dive in for side projects because I'm worried about the cost. Is it necessary to pay $200/mo to actually ship things or will $20/mo do it? Obviously I could just try it myself and see how far I get bit I'm curious to hear from someone a bit further down the path. 7. I’ve got kids and so seldom find myself with the time or energy to work on something. Cursor has really helped in that regard. I have an extensive media collection of very large VR video files with very unhelpful names. I needed to figure out a good way to review which ones I wanted to keep and discard (over 30TB, almost 2000 files). It was fun sitting using Cursor with Claude to work on setting up a quick web UI, with calls out to ffmpeg to generate snapshots. It handled the “boring parts” with aplomb, getting me a html page with a little JavaScript to serve as my front end, and making a super simple API. All this was still like 1000 lines and would have taken me days, or I would have copied some boilerplate then modified it a little. The problems Claude couldn’t figure out were also similarly interesting, like its syntax to the ffmpeg calls were wrong and not skipping all the frames we didn’t want to generate, so it was taking 100x longer to generate than was necessary seeking through every file, then I made some optimizations in how I had it configured, then realizing I’d generated thumbnails for 3 hours only for them to not display well on the page as it was an 8x1 tile. At that point Claude wanted to regenerate all the thumbnails and I said “just display the image twice, with the first half displayed the first time and the second half displayed the second time, saving myself a few hours. Hacky, but for a personal project, the right solution. I still felt like I was tinkering in a way I haven’t in awhile, and a project that I’d never have gotten around to and instead have just probably bought another new hard drive, took me a couple hours, most of which was actually marking the files as keep or delete. I ended up deleting 12TB of stuff I didn’t want, which it felt cool to write myself a bespoke tool rather than search around on the off chance that such a thing already exists. It also gave me a mental framework of how to approach little products like this in the future, that often a web ui and a simple API backend like Node making external process calls is going to be easier than making a full fat windows UI. I have a similarly sized STL library from 3D printing and think I could apply mostly the same idea to that, in fact it’s 99% the same except for swapping out the ffmpeg call to something to generate a snapshot of the stl at a few different angles. 8. For me it automates a lot of the boilerplate that usually bogs me down on side projects. I cal spin up all of the stuff I hate doing quickly and then fiddle with the interesting parts inside of a working scaffold of code. I recently did this with an elixir wrapper around some Erlang OTP code o wanted to use. Figuring out how to clue together all of the parts that touched the Erlang and tracing all of the arguments through old OTP code would have absolutely stopped me from bothering with this in the past. Instead I’m having fun playing with the interface of my tool in ways that matter for my use case. 9. I enjoy coding for the ability to turn ideas into software. Seeing more rapid feature development, and also more rapid code cleanup and project architecture cleanup is what makes AI assisted coding enjoyable to me 10. I have nearly two decades of programming experience which is mostly server side. The other day I wanted a quick desktop (Linux) program to chat with an LLM. Found out about Viciane launcher, then chalked out an extension in react (which I have never used) to chat with an LLM using OpenAI compatible API. Antigravity wrote a bare minimum working extension in a single prompt. I didn't even need to research how to write an extension for an app released only three to five months ago. I then used AI assistance to add more features and polish the UI. This was a fun weekend but I would have procrastinated forever without a coding agent. 11. Some people build because they enjoy the mechanics. Others build because they want to use the end product. That camp will get from A to B much more easily with AI, because for them it was never about the craft. And that's more than OK. 12. I too have found this. However, I absolutely love being able to mock up a larger idea in 30 minutes to assess feasibility as a proof of concept before I sink a few hours into it. 13. Historically, tinkerers had to stay within an extremely limited scope of what they know well enough to enjoy working on. AI changes that. If someone wants to code in a new area, it's 10000000x easier to get started. What if the # of handwritten lines of code is actually increasing with AI usage? 14. What about the boring parts of fun hobby projects? 15. Look, yeah one shotting stuff makes generic UIs, impressive feat but generic its getting years of sideprojects off the ground for me now in languages I never learned or got professional validation for: rust, lua for roblox … in 2 parallel terminal windows and Claude Code instances all while I get to push frontend development further and more meticulously in a 3rd. UX heavy design with SVG animations? I can do that now, thats fun for me I can make experiences that I would never spend a business Quarter on, I can rapidly iterate in designs in a way I would never pay a Fiverr contractor or three for for me the main skill is knowing what I want, and its entirely questionable about whether that’s a moat at all but for now it is because all those “no code” seeking product managers and ideas guys are just enamored that they can make a generic something compile I know when to point out the AI contradicted itself in a code concept, when to interrupt when its about to go off the rails So far so great and my backend deployment proficiency has gone from CRUD-app only to replicating, understanding and superpassing what the veteran backend devs on my teams could do I would previously call myself full stack, but knowing where my limits in understanding are 16. This matches my experience. A recent anecdote: I took time during a holiday to write an Obsidian plugin 4 years ago to scratch a personal itch as it were. I promptly forgot most of the detail, the Obsidian plugin API and ecosystem have naturally changed since then, and Typescript isn't in my day-to-day lingo. I've been collecting ideas for new plugins since then while dreading the investment needed to get back up to speed on how to implement them. I took a couple hours over a recent winter holiday with Claude and cranked out two new plugins plus improvements to the 4 year old bit-rotting original. Claude handled much of the accidental complexity of ramping up that would have bogged me down in the past--suggesting appropriate API methods to use, writing idiomatic TS, addressing linter findings, ... 17. Another anecdote: I built my first Android app in less than a dozen hours over the holiday, tailored for a specific need I have. I do have many years of experience with Java, C# and JS (Angular), but have never coded anything for mobile. Gemini helped me figure out how to set up a Kotlin app with a reasonable architecture (Hilt for dependency injection, etc). It also helped me find Material3 components and set up the UI in a way that looks not too bad, especially considering my lack of design skills. The whole project was a real joy to do, and I have a couple of more ideas that I'm going to implement over the coming months. As a father of three with a busy life, this would've simply been impossible a couple of years ago. 18. I'm finding that too. I have old stale projects that I'm hesitant to try and fix because I know it will involve hours of frustrating work figuring out how to upgrade core dependencies. Now I can genuinely point Claude Code at them and say "upgrade this to the latest versions" and it will do most of that tedious work for me. I can even have it fill in some missing tests and gaps in the documentation at the same time. 19. You just described my experience exactly. Especially the personal side project time as a parent. Now after bed I can tinker and have fun again because I can move so much more quickly and see real progress even with only an hour or two to spend every few days. 20. Yes! I feel like so many people really fail to appreciate this side of things. Heck, Suno has gotten me to the point where I play so much more piano (the recording -> polished track loop is very rewarding) that not only did I publish an album to Spotify in my favorite genre, of music that I’m really happy with, I’ve also started to produce some polished acoustic recordings with NO AI involvement. That’s just because I’ve been spending so much more time at the piano, because of that reward loop. 21. As someone who is very much in this boat, though with guitar and bass rather than piano, I have really been wanting to get into this. I'm even willing to spend some money on tokens or subscription, but I have no idea how to really get started with it. Are you willing to go into some more detail about what you do with Suno and how you use it? 22. I use it very simply. I pay for the monthly subscription that gives you 2k credits a month. I record a few song ideas every day, usually 2-3min recordings, using my phone and Apple Voice Memos. I export them as mp3 files and upload those to the Suno app with a very short prompt (my album is made of songs generated via the very simple but slightly weird “house string quartet” prompt that I discovered by accident). I generate a bunch, pick the ones that sound good, extend them if necessary, and save. Eventually once I have 30ish I can just pick the top winners and assemble an album. It’s drop dead simple. The only reason I published them is because my family started to get worried that the songs would get “lost,” and at the request of friends also. Not doing it for profit or anything. The recording is the real prompt: the longer of a recording you create, the more Suno adheres to the structure and tone/rhythm/voicings you choose. I use the v5 model. Way better than the v4/4.5 models. 23. Yep, have seen this myself as previously a manager and now with a young family. I can make incredible progress on side-projects that I never would have started with only 2-4 hours carved out over the course of a week. There is a hopefully a Jevon's paradox here that we will have a bloom of side-projects, "what-if" / "if only I had the time" type projects come to fruition. 24. A common policy I've seen from engineering managers who code (and one I've stuck to myself when I've been in engineering management roles) is to avoid writing code that's on the critical path to shipping. That's means your team should never be blocked on code that you are responsible for, because as an engineering manager you can rarely commit dedicated coding time to unblocking them. This still leaves space for quite a few categories of coding: - prototypes and proof of concepts - internal "nice to have" tools that increase developer quality of life (I ended up hacking on plenty of these) - helping debug issues 25. I was very anti AI (mainly because I am scared that I'll take my job). I did a side project that would have took me weeks in just two days. I deployed it. It's there, waiting for customers now. I felt in love with the process to be honest. I complained my wife yesterday: "my only problem now is that I don't have enough time and money to pay all the servers", because it opened to me the opportunities to develop and deploy a lot of new ideas. 26. That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual. How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing plastic bags, often for far, far less? Branding, contracts, quality, pricing -- just through running a business. No guarantee it's gonna work. Vibe-coding something isn't a guarantee the thing is shit. It can be fine. It still takes time and effort, too, but because it can take lot less time to get a "working product", maybe some unique insight the parent commenter had on a problem is what was suddenly worth their time. Will everyone else who has that insight and the vibe coding skills go right for that problem and compete? Maybe, but, also maybe not. If it's a money-maker, they likely will eventually, but that's just business. Maybe you get out of the business after a year, but for a little while it made you some money. 27. All fair points, I think I agree with your take overall but we might each be focusing on situations involving different levels of capital, time, and skill: I'm imagining situations where AI use brought the barrier down substantially for some entrants, but the barriers still meaningfully exist, while it sounds to me like you're considering the essentially zero barrier case. My Glad example was off the cuff but it still feels apt to me for the case I mean: the barrier for an existing plastic product producer who doesn't already to also produce bags is likely very low, but it's still non zero, while the barrier for a random person is quite high. I feel vibe coding made individual projects much cheaper (sometimes zero) for decent programmers, but it hasn't made my mom start producing programming projects -- the barrier still seems quite high for non technical people. 28. > AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. That fits my experience with a chrome extension I created. Instead of having to read the docs, find example projects, etc, I was able to get a working version in less than a hour. 29. I experienced the exact same thing: I needed a web tool, and as far as I could tell from recent reviews, the offerings in the chrome extension store seemed either a little suspicious or broken, so I made my own extension in a little under an hour. It used recent APIs and patterns that I didn't have to go read extensive docs for or do deep learning on. It has an acceptable test suite. The code was easy to read, and reasonable, and I know no one will ever flip it into ad-serving malware by surprise. A big thing is just that the idea of creating a non-trivial tool is suddenly a valid answer to the question. Previously, I know would have had to spend a bunch of time reading docs, finding examples, etc., let alone the inevitable farting around with a minor side-quest because something wasn't working, or rethinking+reworking some design decision that on the whole wasn't that important. Instead, something popped into existence, mostly worked, and I could review and tweak it. It's a little bit like jumping from a problem of "solve a polynomial" to one of "verify a solution for a polynomial". 30. Isn't that still considered cooking? If I describe the dish I want, and someone else makes it for me, I was still the catalyst for that dish. It would not have existed without me. So yes, I did cook it. 31. That IKEA analogy is pretty good, because plenty of people use IKEA furniture to solve the "I need a bookshelf" problem - and often enjoy the process - without feeling like they should call themselves a carpenter. I bet there are professional carpenters out there who occasionally assemble an IKEA bookshelf because they need something quick and don't want to spend hours building one themselves from scratch. 32. I was just getting pretty sick and tired of programming, instead now AI can write the code down while I do the fun things of figuring out how shit works and general device hacking + home projects 33. For personal projects, 10x is a lower bound. This year alone I got several projects done that had been on my mind for years . The baseline isn't what it would have taken had I set aside time to do it.[1] The baseline is reality . I'm easily getting 10x more projects done than in the past. For work, I totally agree with you. [1] Although it's often true even in this case. My first such project was done in 15 minutes. Conceptually it was an easy project. Had I known all the libraries, etc out would have taken about an hour. But I didn't, and the research alone would have taken hours. And most of the knowledge acquired from that research would likely be useless. 34. I recently used AI to help build the majority of a small project (database-driven website with search and admin capabilities) and I'd confidently say I was able to build it 3 to 5 times faster with AI. For context, I'm an experienced developer and know how to tweak the AI code when it's wonky and the AI can't be coerced into fixing its mistakes. 35. 10x probably means “substantial gain”. There is no universal unit of gain. However if the difference is between doing a project vs not doing is, then the gain is much more than 10x. 36. From one personal project, Last month: 128 files changed, 39663 insertions(+), 4439 deletions(-) Range: 8eb4f6a..HEAD Non-merge commits: 174 Date range (non-merge): 2025-12-04 → 2026-01-04 (UTC) Active days (non-merge): 30 Last 7 days: 59 files changed, 19412 insertions(+), 857 deletions(-) Range: c8df64e..HEAD Non-merge commits: 67 Date range (non-merge): 2025-12-28 → 2026-01-04 (UTC) Active days (non-merge): 8 This has a lot of non-trivial stuff in it. In fact, I'm just about done with all of the difficult features that had built up over the past couple years. 37. Numbers don't matter if it makes you "feel" more productive. I've started and finished way more small projects i was too lazy to start without AI. So infinitely more productive? Though I've definitely wasted some time not liking what AI generated and started a new chat. 38. There are simply so many counterexamples out there of people who have developed projects in a small fraction of the time it would take manually. Whether or not AI is having a positive effect on productivity on average in the industry is a valid question, but it's a statistical one. It's ridiculous to argue that AI has a negative effect on productivity in every single individual case. 39. > My problem is that code review has always been the least enjoyable part of the job. The article is about personal projects. The need to review the code is usually 10x less :-) 40. It's amazing to be able to try a bunch of ideas with very minimal cost. That being said, AI code assistants don't have eyeballs and they often make things that don't look very good. Craft, polish and judgement still matter. 41. Last paragraph resonated so deeply with me. Especially this: ```It’s also not the typing of code that I really enjoy, nor is it the syntax or structure or boilerplate that’s required to build anything. It’s the fact you get to build something out of nothing, writing code was just how you got there. And with today’s tooling, that saves a ton of time.``` I never really related with folks that code for beauty or are put off by how AI does the actual coding. The beauty is actually creating something, solving real problems, shipping, and (hopfully) winning. It might be cliche, but it is incredibly true for me to say that using AI feels like a superpower. 42. AI makes finishing projects easier. But I would steer away from starting them. In order for me to be comfortable with a code base and consider it mine I need to have written the foundation, not merely reviewed in. Once the pillars are there, LLMs do make further development faster and I can concentrate on fun details (like tinkering with CSS or thinking about some very specific details). 43. > But I would steer away from starting them. I find just the opposite. Before, starting from nothing was a huge impediment. Now you can have a working prototype and start iterating right away. If you figur e out that you've gone down the wrong path, there's little remorse in tossing it out and starting over. 44. In particular, and speaking as a backend engineer with zero web design skills, building things with charts/graphs is amazing nowadays! You can literally just operate at the level of "add another line representing the foo data", "add a scatterplot below it", "make them line up", "actually, make it a more reddish pink" etc. In the past I've had opinions about d3 and vega-lite and altair and matplotlib etc and learned how to use those ones at a superficial level at least. In my last personal UI with charts I didn't even ask it what framework it had chosen (chart.js is the answer) 45. A product manager here. Thanks to AI, I was able to create my own website on Astro. I was so fascinated by web technologies, that I didn't realize when I created not just a website, but a blazing fast website with extensive amount of metadata generation (Json-LD, OG, microformats, Dublin Core, PRISM, RSL 1.0, Highwire Press, FAIR singposting, MODS generation) and so on. Thanks to this pet project, I'm now quite capable as a software architect of websites. And it is really fun! 46. As someone who always dabbled in code but never was a “real” developer, I’ve found the same thing. I know the concepts, I know good from bad — so all of a sudden I can vibe code things that would have taken me months of studying and debugging and banging my head against the wall. If you’ll forgive a bit of self promotion, I also wrote some brief thoughts on my Adventures In AI Prototyping: https://www.andrew-turnbull.com/adventures-in-ai-prototyping... 47. My guess is that the amount of total software people use will significantly increase, but the total amount of money made from SaaS will significantly decrease I've replaced almost all of the App subscriptions with stuff I built for my self. The only subscriptions I pay for are things that are almost impossible to replace like online storage (iCloud) or Spotify 48. This is exactly how I feel about it. The cognitive load of starting a new project is so small now. It's also made it very easy to switch between projects, something that took way too much headspace to do on a whim in the before times. 49. Related question which might fit here so I'm going to try: What is the absolute cheapest way to get started on AI coding a simple website? I have a couple ideas I want to test out and get out of my head and onto the web but have resisted for years because my webdev knowledge is stuck in 2004 and I've had no desire to change that. These are not complicated things (all static, I think) but... I hate webdev. I am not really willing to pay to do any initial explorations, but if I like where things are going then, sure, I'll pay up. I have a decently powerful machine that can run things locally, but it is Windows (because I'm an EE, sadly), which does matter. 50. Yeah, I had same experience, these days I just vibed some stuff in web, i do think vibe frontend/web is great for backend developer. Checkout the one just finished yesterday. https://slsqp-vis.shuo23333.app/hs_all_cases_viz , a slsqp solver visualization. 51. Agree, I developed a 150K line stock analytics Saas that started with the will to provide my son with some tools to analyse stocks. I enjoyed this experience of CLI coding so much that I developed Market Sentiment parsing 300,000 business articles and news daily, a dividend based strategy with calendar of payouts and AI optimised strategies to extract every drop of interest, an alert system for a strategy you backtested in the playground and its key triggers are tracked automatically so you can react, an ETF risk analysis model with external factors, all quant graphs and then some, time models with Markov, candlestick patterns, Monte Carlo simulation, walk forward and other approaches I had learned over the years. There is much more. I know you don't measure a project in terms of lines of code, but these are optimised, verified, tested, debugged and deployed. There are so much features, because I was having fun and got carried away. I'm semi-retired and this is like having my web agency back again. I used to program in GRASP... I have a data scientist certification, did a lot of Python, Machine Learning, NLP, etc. I really enjoy the prompt based development process as it seems like you are reaching the right resource for your question from a staff of experienced dev. Of course you need to check everything as a junior dev always creeps in when you least expect it. Especially for security. Discuss best practices often and do your research on touchy subjects. Compare various AI on the same topic. GROK has really caught up. OpenAI has slowed down. CLAUDE is simply amazing. This AI thing is work in progress and constantly changing. I have a noticed an amazing progression over the past year. I have a feeling their models are retrained, tweaked on our interactions even if you asked for them not to use the data. The temptation is too high and the payoffs abound in this market for the best AI tools. I'm building a code factory now with agents and key checkpoints for every step. I want to remove human intervention from multiple sub steps that are time consuming so I can be even more productive in 2026... 52. I really agree with this. For me it just feel so much more fun and rewarding to build my weekend projects, especially those projects where I just want to produce and deploy a working mvp out of an idea. If trying out a new framework or whatever I find it quite the opposite though, that AI removes all the fun parts of learning (obviously) 53. I spent probably 150-200 hours coding a money management tool in 2022. This evening, I worked with Claude to make an AI-assisted money manager that is better than the 2022 version I so carefully crafted. I had nothing at all this morning and now I have a full database with all my transactions and really strong reporting. The word “developer” is about to get a lot more expansive and I think that’s cool. 54. Strong agree! Forget all those studies that say “but developers are slower” or whatever — I’m actually building way more hobby projects and having way more fun now. And work is way more fun and easier. And my node_modules folder size is dropping like crazy! 55. One thing is true: now I go to the bar with the other guys in the group, drink whatever and let Claude or Codex do the work while I supervise, then merge PR in the morning... I wish I was kidding, but for non critical projects this is now a reality 56. More related to the title, i've found the same. I was always an aggressive pixel-pusher, so web dev took me AGES. But with shadcn + llms I'm flying through stuff, no lie, 5-20x faster than I was before. And i dont hate it anymore 57. I have learned more - not just about my daily driver languages, but about other languages I wouldn't have even cracked the seal on, as well as layers of hardware and maker skills - in the past two years than I did in the 30 years leading up to them. I truly don't understand how anyone creative wouldn't find their productivity soar using these tools. If computers are bicycles for the mind, LLMs are powered exoskeletons with neural-controlled turret cannons. 58. I'm using it to build things. Here's an example from the other day. I've always been curious about writing custom Python C extensions but I've never been brave enough to really try and do it. I decided it would be interesting to dig into that by having Codex build a C extension for Python that exposed simple SQLite queries with a timeout. It wrote me this: https://github.com/simonw/research/blob/main/sqlite-time-lim... - here's the shared transcript: https://chatgpt.com/s/cd_6958a2f131a081918ed810832f7437a2 I read the code it produced and ran it on my computer to see it work. What did I learn? - Codex can write, compile and test C extensions for Python now - The sqlite3_progress_handler mechanism I've been hooking into for SQLite time limits in my Python code works in C too, and appears to be the recommended way to solve this - How to use PyTuple_New(size) in C and then populate that tuple - What the SQLite C API for running a query and then iterating though the results looks like, including the various SQLITE_INTEGER style constants for column types - The "goto cleanup;" pattern for cleaning up on errors, including releasing resources and calling DECREF for the Python reference counter - That a simple Python extension can be done with ~150 lines of readable and surprisingly non-threatening C - How to use a setup.py and pyproject.toml function together to configure a Python package that compiles an extension Would I have learned more if I had spent realistically a couple of days figuring out enough C and CPython and SQLite and setup.py trivia to do this without LLM help? Yes. But I don't have two days to spend on this flight of curiosity, so actually I would have learned nothing. The LLM project took me ~1 minutes to prompt and then 15 minutes to consume the lessons at the end. And I can do dozens of this kind of thing a day, in between my other work! 59. To me it seems like for OP development was a means towards an end. The act to developing software as a craft does not seem to be of importance to him while the output is. His post is full of references to productivity and lacking references of improving his skills (as opposed to using LLMs as a crutch) or getting better at writing software. I bet OP would be equally happy if he had AGI that would write everything for him. For many in HN, programming is an end in itself and they would not be happy giving that up just because it makes you finish quicker. 60. Yes, so what? That's what I basically do, i need a little framework with this and that and API, 15 minutes later I get exactly what I need and want. Not more, not less.as long as it's not Auth, crypto or something like that, I don't see an issue. 61. I remember when Hacker News felt smaller. Threads were shorter. Context fit in your head. You could read the linked article, skim the comments, and jump in without feeling like you’d missed a prerequisite course. It probably didn’t feel special at the time, but looking back, it was simpler. The entire conversation space was manageable. If you had a thought, you could express it clearly, hit “reply,” and reasonably expect to be understood. As a single commenter, you could hold the whole discussion in your mind. From article to argument to conclusion. Or at least, it felt that way. I’m probably romanticizing it—but you know what I mean. Now, articles are denser. Domains are deeper. Threads splinter instantly. Someone cites a paper, someone else links a counter-paper, a third person references a decades-old mailing list post, and suddenly the discussion assumes years of background you may or may not have. You’re expected to know the state of the art, the historical context, the common rebuttals, the terminology, and the unwritten norms—while also being concise, charitable, and original. Every field has matured—probably for the better—but it demands deeper domain knowledge just to participate without embarrassing yourself. Over time, I found myself backing out of threads I was genuinely interested in, not because I had nothing to say, but because the cognitive load felt too high. As a solo thinker, it became harder to keep up. > AI has entered the chat. They’re far from perfect, but tools like Claude and ChatGPT gave me something I hadn’t felt in a long time: _leverage_. I can now quickly: - Summarize long articles - Recall prior art - Check whether a take is naïve or already debunked - Clarify my own thinking before posting Suddenly, the background complexity matters a lot less. I can go from “half-formed intuition” to “coherent comment” in minutes instead of abandoning the tab entirely. I can re-enter conversations I would’ve previously skipped. > Oh no, you’re outsourcing thinking—bet it’s all slop! Over the years, I’ve read thousands of great HN comments. Thoughtful ones. Careful ones. People who knew when to hedge, when to cite, when to shut up. That pattern is in my head now. With AI, I can lean on that experience. I can sanity-check tone. I can ask, “Is this fair?” or “What am I missing?” I can stress-test an argument before I inflict it on strangers. When AI suggests something wrong, I know it’s wrong. When it’s good, I recognize why. Iteration is fast. Even with back-and-forth refinement, I’m dramatically more effective at expressing what I already think. The goal hasn’t changed: contribute something useful to the discussion. The bar is still high. But now I have a ladder instead of a sheer wall. There’s mental space for curiosity again. My head isn’t constantly overloaded with “did I miss context?”, “is this a known bad take?”, or “will this derail into pedantry?” I can offload that checking to AI and focus on the _idea_. That leaves room to explore. To ask better questions. To write comments that connect ideas instead of defensively hedging every sentence. To participate for the joy of thinking in public again. It was never about typing comments fast, or winning arguments. It was about engaging with interesting people on interesting problems. Writing was just the interface. And with today’s tools, that interface is finally lighter again. AI really has made commenting on Hacker News fun again. 62. honestly, with LLMs, everything is fun again. embedded dev with a billion toolchains, GPU development with each vendors bespoke API, ffmpeg with its billion parameters - if anything, you could say LLMs bailed us out of the impending ultra-specialization. without LLMs, we might be facing a world where 30% of the workforce is in software dev. i am keeping my eyes peeled on vibe-coding PCB layouts and schematics. a lot of eyes in that direction already but its still early. 63. Like, fine, here's a personal example: I wanted to build a system that posts web links I share to a bot account on the fediverse. That seemed like a fun result to me. I wanted to self-host the links, so I installed Linkding. (I didn't write Linkding.) For the fediverse bot, I installed gotosocial as the service host (I didn't write gotosocial.) From there, a cronjob running a small program using Linkding and gotosocial APIs could do the trick. Decided to do it in golang, because the standalone binaries are easy to deploy. Writing that small program didn't seem like fun - I've already played with those APIs and golang. What I wanted, for my enjoyment, was the completed system. So, I took 10 minutes to write out a quick spec for the program and what I wanted it to do. I loaded that up as context for Claude Code along with some pointers for building CLI apps in golang. I let it rip and, in about 20 minutes, Claude produced a functional tool. It also wrote a decent README based on my original prose. I reviewed the code, did some testing, made some tweaks, called it done. My bookmarks are now regularly posted to a bot account on the fediverse. This is an enjoyable outcome for me - and I didn't have to type every line of code myself. For bonus points, I also had Claude Code gin up some GitHub Actions workflows to lint, test, build, and release multi-platform binaries for this tool. I've done these things before, but they're tedious. More enjoyable to have the resulting automations than to build them. And now I have them: I can make tweaks to this tool and get builds just through the GitHub web UI. I've since repeated this pattern with a handful of other small personal tools. In each case, I wanted the tool and the utility it offered. I didn't care about the process of writing the code. It's working pretty well for me. 64. I agree with this. I've been able to tackle projects I've been wanting to for ages with LLMs because they let me focus on abstractions first and get over the friction of starting the project. Once I get my footing, I can use them to generate more and more specialized code and ultimately get to a place where the code is good. Write a concise, engaging paragraph (3-5 sentences) that captures the main ideas, notable perspectives, and overall sentiment of these comments regarding the topic. Focus on the most interesting and representative viewpoints. Do not use bullet points or lists - write flowing prose.
Side project enablement
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