in 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
I’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.
This 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.
It's a massive accelerator for my dumb and small hobby projects. If they take to long I tend to give up and do something else.
Recently I designed and 3d printed a case for a raspberry pi, some encoders and buttons, a touchscreen, just to contol a 500 EUR audio effects paddel (eventide H9)
They official android app was over if the worst apps I ever used. They even blocked paste in the login screen...
Few people have this fx box, and even fewer would need my custom controller for it., build it for an audience of one. But thanks to llms it was not that big of a deal. It allowed me to concentrate on what was fun.
I have more than a few side projects that began as late night discussions with an llm. A couple of those projects reached a level of completion where I use the products daily, and one project reached production (a game you can find referenced on my profile).
I have had similar experiences to the author, and I’ve found that just working with a single agent in Antigravity (on the Gemini Pro subscription) is adequate. The extra perceived speed and power of multiple agents and/or Claude Code really didn’t match the output.
With a single Gemini (or sometimes switching to Claude Opus which inexplicably Google provides a generous amount of for free via AG) gives me incremental results so fast that I spend most of my time thinking about what I want (answering unplanned product questions or deciding how to handle edge cases).
I’m fact, sometimes I just get exhausted with so much decision making. However, that’s what it takes to build something useful; we just aren’t accustomed to iterating so fast!
> Start with a conversation, and explore the problem space with the LLM. The idea here is to gather options and ideas. Once you have a clear vision of what you want to build, ask for a detailed specification. Iterate on the spec until you understand it fully and are happy with it.
Maybe its just the specific language being used here but I really hate talking to these things. They inject way too much personality into things, especially Claude and are still too sychophantic and could lead you down a wrong path. I'd much rather just give them instructions.
I'm in the same camp. The last few months I've been building a couple of applications (editors) for my own work - and since it's so fast I've had Claude spin off to build Zig tools and libraries for markdown parsing, PDF generation, a Scheme implementation for embedding and more. (If anyone's interested they are at my Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/sicher)
I've always been unhappy with the way tasking/todo app (don't) work for me. I just started building a TUI in Zig (with the help of Codex) to manage my daily tasks. And since I'm building it just for me, the scope is mine to determine too.
>The age of actually finishing side projects is here
This is a really good summary of how I've experienced AI put into words. I'm not really sure how this can be monetized though.
I'm not going to burn $200-1k per day on agents to do some side projects that have been on the back burner. The only reason I'm doing it now is the heavily subsidized or free available models all over the place.
> Sidenote: I wonder what's going to happen when the crazy money runs out and Anthropic, OpenAI & co have to start charging for more than it costs them to run the models. Hopefully by then the open source models will have caught up?
How brutal will the enshittification phase of these products be?
Will the 10x cost or whatever be something that future employers will have to pay, or will it be a more visible impact for all of us? Assuming no AGI scenario here and the investments will have to be paid back with further subscription services like today.
I really hope Open Source (Open Weights) keep up with the development, and that a continuation of Moore's Law (the bastardized performance per € version) makes local models increasingly accessible.
Right now I'm trying to get an AI (actually two ChatGPT and Grok) to write me a simple HomeAssistant integration that blinks a virtual light on and off driven by a random boolean virtual sensor. I just started using HomeAssistant and don't know it well. +2H and a few iterations in, still doesn't work. Winning.
Thia ia exactly how I use Claude and it makes my life easier. I'm not a dev, started learning Python somewhere around a year ago. Then tried to play around with Claude and to be honest, I got pretty good at it :D Built several websites, apps (the bottom ones mostly for myself - but one is being used by a record label my friends run and I'm pretty proud of it). There are a lot of pros and cons for doing these things (not sure I'd dare to go production and distribute anything publicly before a full code audit), but I'm sure that these tools are gonna get so good at it (if they're not already) that I'll be confident to release stuff. The best thing that happened with me playing with Claude is - even though I can't code, I leared a lot about stuff around it - git, terminal, deps, etc. So I'm definitely enjoying this
This has been exactly my experience too. I switched from Spotify to Plex, but discovered there really isn't a music focused desktop player. So I vibe coded one, exactly how I want my music player to work (albums not playlists/tracks as the central item). I was so happy with my desktop app, I built a mobile version to use instead of PlexAmp. There are some bugs I'm ironing out, but they are both I've stopped using PlexAmp and Spotify entirely.
I feel like the coding assistants are opening doors for hobbyists the same way 3d printing did. If you’re into a hobby with physical components like rc-anything, robotics, or just need a one off part to fix something a 3D printer is a game changer. In the same way, if you’re into writing software for personal projects or just filling a discreet need ClaudeCode is a game changer.
It’s insane and wonderful. I always wanted to get into slipcasting pottery, but of course straight from CAD without all the “make something 20% larger than hou want, fire it, make mold using plaster and expertise” part.
Kicked it around for years, but CAD mold-making, especially multi-part mold-making, is reslly hard. Geometry, physics, understanding the process of using it… it was way more than I could find the time to develop expertise in.
Claude code, an MCP server to controll grasshopper (MCP server entirely written by claude of course), and maybe 8 hours total and I’ve got a fully algorithic multi-part mold-making program that designs the plastic tools I need to print, so I can pour silicone into plastic, so I can pour plaster into silicone, and the plaster parts fit goether perfectly for the final mold.
And it was fun. AI has brought joy back into coding projects I used to put off because they felt like a grind.
20 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 40.5 ms ] threadi 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
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.
It's a massive accelerator for my dumb and small hobby projects. If they take to long I tend to give up and do something else.
Recently I designed and 3d printed a case for a raspberry pi, some encoders and buttons, a touchscreen, just to contol a 500 EUR audio effects paddel (eventide H9)
They official android app was over if the worst apps I ever used. They even blocked paste in the login screen...
Few people have this fx box, and even fewer would need my custom controller for it., build it for an audience of one. But thanks to llms it was not that big of a deal. It allowed me to concentrate on what was fun.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1461079634354639132/1...
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1461079634354639132/1...
I have had similar experiences to the author, and I’ve found that just working with a single agent in Antigravity (on the Gemini Pro subscription) is adequate. The extra perceived speed and power of multiple agents and/or Claude Code really didn’t match the output.
With a single Gemini (or sometimes switching to Claude Opus which inexplicably Google provides a generous amount of for free via AG) gives me incremental results so fast that I spend most of my time thinking about what I want (answering unplanned product questions or deciding how to handle edge cases).
I’m fact, sometimes I just get exhausted with so much decision making. However, that’s what it takes to build something useful; we just aren’t accustomed to iterating so fast!
Maybe its just the specific language being used here but I really hate talking to these things. They inject way too much personality into things, especially Claude and are still too sychophantic and could lead you down a wrong path. I'd much rather just give them instructions.
It consumes lots of tokens, required more setup and at the end of the day had pretty much the same output as if I had used a single agent.
I've always been unhappy with the way tasking/todo app (don't) work for me. I just started building a TUI in Zig (with the help of Codex) to manage my daily tasks. And since I'm building it just for me, the scope is mine to determine too.
This is a really good summary of how I've experienced AI put into words. I'm not really sure how this can be monetized though.
I'm not going to burn $200-1k per day on agents to do some side projects that have been on the back burner. The only reason I'm doing it now is the heavily subsidized or free available models all over the place.
How brutal will the enshittification phase of these products be?
Will the 10x cost or whatever be something that future employers will have to pay, or will it be a more visible impact for all of us? Assuming no AGI scenario here and the investments will have to be paid back with further subscription services like today.
I really hope Open Source (Open Weights) keep up with the development, and that a continuation of Moore's Law (the bastardized performance per € version) makes local models increasingly accessible.
Kicked it around for years, but CAD mold-making, especially multi-part mold-making, is reslly hard. Geometry, physics, understanding the process of using it… it was way more than I could find the time to develop expertise in.
Claude code, an MCP server to controll grasshopper (MCP server entirely written by claude of course), and maybe 8 hours total and I’ve got a fully algorithic multi-part mold-making program that designs the plastic tools I need to print, so I can pour silicone into plastic, so I can pour plaster into silicone, and the plaster parts fit goether perfectly for the final mold.
And it was fun. AI has brought joy back into coding projects I used to put off because they felt like a grind.