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• Hacker News
• This, I’ve completely lost interest in side projects outside of work since the emergence of LLMs. It does nothing for me any more
  by hbcdbff
• Complete opposite for me, and it is important you hear this. I spend $200 a month Anthropic on Claude Code uplift more free time while no boilerplate yet success and is much more fulfilling now than in the pre-agentic era of hobby coding.
  by haickernews
• Interesting - I'm just the opposite. I had 100 side projects rattling around in my skull for years but had no desire to spend even more time on the computer after all the time at work on one, even though all of them from a technical perspective were well within my skillset. So now I can actually get them out of my head and basically for free with almost no effort. Maybe the way we view side projects is different - if you were doing a side project just for the love of the game, then yes I can see LLM outputs not scratching that itch. But if you are doing the side project because of some tangible benefit of it, then LLMs are great.
  by IncreasePosts
• Exactly the opposite for me. I've gotten into a whirlwind of productivity, working through my lifetime backlog of "somebody out to do thing X" — now I'm doing ALL of them (all open source naturally), plus parametric 3d printing, hardware projects and more.
  by darkstarsys
• I found _many_ of my side projects just evaporated. Total disinterest. But some were now front and center. I think the distinction was some of them were for learning or technically complex accomplishments, and some were genuinely things I wanted to have/use. That second category is getting ground down by LLMs now, and I enjoy that. The first category has only a few very slow/analog learning projects left.
  by jvanderbot
• It's the complete opposite for me, my interest in side projects has exploded.

  It was never about writing every line by hand, it was about solving a problem and making my life better. LLMs let me do that at a speed never seen before.

  I was and am and avid Home Assistant fan but the number of automations/scripts I now have is higher by a magnitude than ever before. Few things would reach the level where it made sense to spend my time writing and debugging a workflow but now I can speak my automations into existence.

  Yesterday I got a candle warmer, I wanted to set it up so when I turned it on it started a timer to turn off and I wanted a push notification to see if I wanted to extend the timer when it was close to finishing. All things I knew were possible but HA YAML is miserable (all YAML is) and the UI is not much better (it's a hard problem, I get it). I prompted Claude and had a working implementation in <10min. Additionally it asked if I wanted to auto-turn off if I left the house (yes!) and if it should auto-start the timer if ever detected the candle warmer was on without a timer set (power loss, HA restart, manual interaction with warmer).

  My HA automations have never been more bulletproof and if they do something wrong it's as simple as telling Claude Code and having it fix the problem. For example, my motion activated lights (motion sensor -> HA -> smart switch) were working great but I realize that while in the shower my main bathroom lights would sometimes turn off. 1 prompt later and Claude grouped up my motion sensor in the shower to the one in the bathroom so if motion on either was detected the lights would stay on but the shower light would only turn on if its motion detector detected motion.

  HA is only one small part of my LLM usage but it's representative of my overall point.

  by joshstrange
• I'm the opposite. Between work and family, I don't get a lot of time to hole up in a cave with an IDE for fun. Prior to LLMs, it was a struggle to get much of anything done. So, I rarely tried. But, now I can get ideas fleshed out and even get code down in the small breaks I get to myself. Now I'm making progress where I wasn't before.

  Sometimes I'm not interested in the inner workings of a technology, I just want a one-off tool. Ex: No interest in web tech. But, vibe-coded a tool to scrape and cross-reference a couple of online reports. Now I have the info I need for other projects.

  Sometimes I know exactly what I want and it's quicker to hand-hold the AI through making it for me. Ex: Put together yet another SIMD math lib recently. SIMD intrisics are an obnoxious API. But, a non-SIMD implementation is easy to verify and many SIMD implementations are easy to validate vs. the non-SIMD reference. It's just a huge amount of obtuse code.

  Sometimes I don't know exactly what I want and it's great to have a always-online partner to bounce questions off of, do rapid-prototyping for me, do code reviews for me. AIs aren't perfect. But, being instant, patient and often right makes them a huge improvement over online forums.

  by corysama
• I have been grappling with a similar sentiment for a while now. I hate to think of myself as a Luddite, but I love the act of writing code. A blank VS Code in front of me is a beautiful sight full of wonder and possibilities :-) Here is how I rationalize the two - the pride and satisfaction I get from my work depends on how much effort I put in applying some previously acquired specialist knowledge, which itself took some decent amount of effort to acquire. This is why a beginner programmer is just as proud of their temperature convertor as a professional distributed systems engineer of their new 2PC module.

  A quote that I read somewhere, possibly by Naval Ravikant, strikes at the heart of this - "a creation without a (human) creator is meaningless".

  by avilay
• I struggle to even remember the course grained details of things I've had AI do recently.

  Conversely, there are 100k+ LoC codebases from years ago that I can still generally walk through in my mind's eye

  by jddj
• I can look at a project I worked with others on a decade ago, and pick out which parts I wrote, which parts others wrote, remember pitfalls from this part, a struggle we had in that part, even if I have no memory of actually doing them.

  I can't do that with a project we worked with AI on two weeks ago. It all just blurs together into "someone wrote a prompt and code came out".

  by sevenseacat
• Whoa, I had no idea Beej is teaching at OSU!

  Back when I was an OSU student I taught myself a lot about practical systems programming, and I was consulting Beej's Guide to Network Programming daily. I kept lamenting to myself that I wished the expensive university was proving as useful as this guy's free website.

  Awesome that it has come full circle, great hire by someone.

  by russell_h
• Thanks! :) Crazy time for it, for sure. I'm teaching the two Software Engineering courses next year and have basically thrown the existing ones out. We'll see what rises from the ashes. More systems-level design stuff, more AI forward, larger projects, larger teams.

  I still believe it's vital to learn how to code, but now we have to front-load more of the SE skills that have historically been obtained on the job.

  "What a time to be alive!" I admit that I wouldn't have minded if all this LLM stuff has waited another 15 years to happen. :)

  by beej71
• Captures my feelings as well. I don't get the same joy I used to because I end up using an LLM because it'll be faster. I need to come to terms with speed not taking precedence over fun. The act of writing is something I need to learn to refocus on again without the thought of the "inefficiency" of doing so. I want to feel like I did when I was 13 and writing code in the middle of the night.

  Beej's writing always impresses me.

  by jjice
• steve vai the guitarist talks about how learning and doing the act gives you dignity and self respect for having done something. That's what's being cutout when you just 'prompt' it, be it words, code, or music.
  by fantasizr
• I find this topic super interesting because I recently created some side-projects using Claude (not in their entirety, but major parts of them) and felt strangely disconnected to them afterwards, even though they accomplished what I was looking for. That made me think about how AI usage for me should look like in my free time.

  Maybe what the author is talking about, and what I felt to a degree, is the act of deciding and formulating decisions. Looking at the compiler vs. AI example for machine code, one aspect that immediately stands out to me is that a compiler should deterministically produce consistent outcomes for precise instructions. Claude, on the other hand, will take your instructions, which are likely less precise than code, and "reason" about them. It will produce output that varies each time you would ask it and it will bake in behavior you didn't explicitly ask for. AI makes decisions for you. And maybe that's what makes AI so useful in the first place.

  One way around this may be to be just as strict with your instructions. Giving AI an exact spec to work with, like large Markdown specs or detailed tests to run against. But then again, if you take the time to formulate those, is it much of a jump to write the code yourself?

  What's clear is that AI is awesome for helping with issues you can't resolve, or explaining concepts in a personalized way. But letting it make decisions for you prioritizes outcome over creation, and for side-projects you build out of the love for creation, that may just not make sense, just like as a consumer I feel disinterested in "AI art". AI is for products, not for art, and that dumb little idea to work on in the afternoon might just be more art than product.

  by maxrimue
• I'm trying to get it back. I went through a period of 2 months or so where I didn't want to do anything not even watch TV except drink. So I've been sober for a couple weeks now, think I'm starting to get it back. But I'm still lazy af right now. I miss making hardware, I design/make my own cameras and little self navigating robots. I did finally fix my camera after it rolled across the floor of my car during a tight turn and something inside it broke/wouldn't turn on. Idk... I bought so many old vintage c-mount lenses and would take each one out, produce a video, and then I lost interest doing that... so now I have a bin of random vintage c-mount lenses and a desk trinket (camera). The positive though is I got two SWE jobs out of these hardware projects. But yeah hope I get it back.

  I usually do instantly lose respect when I hear some project is vibe coded... I get that's how it is now but yeah. To me when you say "I made this" but it's actually claude code that shat out the code well... ultimately though it's about money and freedom. You can do whatever you want to do, I need to get my own freedom then do what I enjoy.

  by ge96
• I think don't be too hard on yourself. If you haven't already, it may be worth considering whether ADHD or something else might be playing a role. We aren't machines, we're messy bundles of biology and understanding our own particular messy bundle can go a long way towards getting it rolling in the right direction.
  by vector_spaces
• Very well said. I don’t like seeing hackernews submissions that are LLM generated.

  The joy of hackernews was seeing applied human ingenuity, most of these weren’t successful products anyway. Just like I don’t watch computer chess games, we should have an easy way to distinguish AI generated software, art etc and then I can happily avoid them.

  by sashank_1509
• > What's the real difference in that gray area? I'm not sure. I think it hinges on something that has to do with making versus asking to be made, even if that line isn't particularly clear.

  For me the difference is in the extent that I can reason about how changes in the input affect the observable behavior of the output. When the executable the compiler outputs doesn’t behave in the way I intended, then in 99.99% of cases this is completely on me, and, importantly, I could have predicted it from the source code. Conversely, I can analyze any such misbehavior by reasoning on the source code. This doesn’t hold to any remotely comparable extent for the relation between vibecoded programs and the prompts used to create them.

  by layer8
• This seems like a very clear way of thinking about it.

  In making something, you develop a tangible understanding of and opinions for how and why your creation is how it is.

  I have a lot of vibecoded projects. I feel "ownership" in varying degrees proportional to the amount of care and depth I put into them.

  by ike_a
• Sounds very much like agency over the process versus agency over the outcome.

  Some are ok with deciding if and when the process should be started and whether the outcome is good and bad. But often they lack the judgment to truly decide what is good and what is bad. They trust the makers to provide equally good options in terms of lower concerns (that matters to the makers) and only make the judgment according to some other concerns.

  The main difference when using a compiler is that the compiler will (99.999...%) produce correct binary code for my programs and will fail loudly if it cannot. But the compiler is not concerned about correctness of the algorithm written in the programming language. Responsibilities are clearly outlined and the compiler does the job perfectly, while I try to do mine as well. So when I do a good job, I don't have to worry about the compiler part and I can assume the result will be good as well.

  LLM usage has no such clear line. Assuming the user can judge whether the outcome is good or bad according to the prompt, the LLM tool is not reliable enough to produce a good result for everything that was not specified in the prompt. Which is different when collaborating with humans. If you say to a professional artist "I want a batman drawing", you needn't check for missing toes and the numbers of arms.

  by skydhash
• But does this mean that a 99.99% reliable LLM would turn us back into the mode of us building it again? I would not say so.

  I think for tasks that are about decisions, having the LLM make decisions is what makes it feel like the LLM did something for me.

  Consider mowing the lawn. Imagine I had a lawnmower robot that does the mowing all on its own. Despite perfect accuracy, I didn't mow the lawn; it did. If I sit on that lawnmower the whole time and start driving it instead of letting it go on its own, then I mowed the lawn. Even if I stand there and control it with a joystick, I still mowed the lawn. Ownership comes from the decisions about where to mow.

  by dmrivers
• I think some people are drawn to technical careers because they like details and others are drawn to them because they like systems (now people are drawn for money too, but I'm talking about people who are more technically oriented). My theory is that if you are a systems person you find using LLMs fun and fulfilling and if you are a details person you find that they are the opposite. I have an acquaintance who is fairly well known for some of the work he did in computer vision (pre-neural net/deep learning), he's a details guy, and he was telling me how software is boring now because when he was young they were still figuring out how to do tons of things for the first time and now most software is just putting things together that we already know how to do. LLMs seem to be continuing this trend.
  by jeffreyrogers
• What if I am a quality person and I am disappointed because LLMs are squandering any remaining commitment to quality in favor of quantity and speed in certain environments?
  by never_inline
• This is the take on this entire thread that I resonate with the most.

  As a systems person, I do not know how to share with a details person how the combination of some magically conjured (and sometimes inscrutable) building blocks can still take us to interesting and joyful end results.

  by hnarayanan
• > My theory is that if you are a systems person you find using LLMs fun and fulfilling and if you are a details person you find that they are the opposite.

  There was echoed by Andrej Karpathy: “LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building.”

  by alberto-m
• I enjoy software more out of a love of maths than a love of technology. My favourite class of problems are the times I can boil a problem down to a simple equation without even touching a keyboard, and I seem to be one of the few people who enjoy algorithmic design. So for me, churning out a script using an LLM hits the same part of my brain as randomly inserting numbers into a sudoku until the app tells me I have the right answer.
  by cryptopian
• Oh boy, my useless art degree is coming in handy here! This is precisely like the authorship debates that occurred when Warhol hit the scene, or Damien Hirst and many others. It goes further back than that. Duchamp and his urinal, renaissance painters and their workshops. On and on, artists making work for other artists and people debating whether the signee is the one who really created it. "Authorship" is the term for this debate.

  If you choose to side with the modern art establishment, this has been a settled debate for decades. Managing signs, systems, instructions, and context is itself a creative act.

  If you choose to side with the atelier movement (as one example) it would be a resounding "no". This does not count.

  by relativeadv
• I know many people agree but I can’t really follow this sentiment. I can still take pride in something I “made” with an LLM even if I did not write a single line of code for it. I wouldn’t show it around and proclaim what a great programmer I am, because I did not program it, but coding was never the main goal, it was always the means to create the finished end product. When I plan a remake of my garden and then hire a professional landscaping company to build it, I can still sit on my patio in the sunset with a cold beer and be proud of my new cozy environment. I feed the same way about software. My vibe coded guitar tab editor has features that no other software has that I needed and it’s solving a real problem I had. I would never have created it without AI, because I simply don’t have the time besides my job, family and other hobbies (like really practicing playing guitar). So fine, tell me I shouldn’t be proud of it, but don’t tell me I did not “make” it because it simply would not exist if I hadn’t created it.
  by planb
• I completely agree with you, because I usually think the same way and I'm more concerned with the result than the path taken to achieve it. But you shouldn't forget that there are definitely people who work the exact opposite way. They don't care at all about having something functional in their hands at the end, because they just enjoy the process of building. And as soon as it's finished, they tear it all down anyway just to start over again with a different approach.
  by alexruf