Comment by dematz
10 hours ago
>if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it
AI might (might not, but often does!) also save you from doing original thinking in the domain, which in a show my side project is what people are interested in
10 hours ago
>if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it
AI might (might not, but often does!) also save you from doing original thinking in the domain, which in a show my side project is what people are interested in
I don’t know if that’s true, I made a little web app for displaying the schedule for my team based on our billable hours, and I didn’t do any of the scripting myself but I did have to think a lot about what the app would do and what it would look like and what kind of functionality I wanted, tradeoffs between functionality and specific use cases, etc. It just made the scripting part go faster, that’s all.
That's still less thinking overall that someone who thought about all of that and thought about the scripting would have done.
And even less than someone who wrote an interpreter for the script, less than someone who also chanted times tables while doing it.
More thinking isn’t a simple good thing. Given a limit to how much thought I can give any specific task, adding extra work may mean less where it’s most useful.
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That adds up over time, though, and it works in reverse. AI will always be able to read and write faster than a person can. You may be able to write the script, but in the time it would take to /literally/ write it, you're on to the next thing. And if that script is actually a feature that spans two or three or 10 files, now you're really cooking.
Why I like using AI right now is that I get to try out far more of my own ideas quickly (and find issues with them!)
Before, it was like:
"Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... (loses interest before idea validated)
Now: "Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... with AI, I get to actually validate that it works (ideally), or reformulate the idea if it doesn't.
Even more than validating ideas, I think my personal AI use falls into two categories:
- Exploration: I am "vibe coding" to explore a domain, add many features, refactor the app over and over, as a real time exploration of the domain to see what works and what doesn't
- Specific Execution: I have a full design, a full idea, I've thought about architecture, we're making a plan and we're executing this extremely coherent vision
I've enjoyed using AI for both cases.
i particularly like that right now i get to hear about different small practices people do that arent the AI itself, but that i wouldnt have considered otherwise.
git worktrees as an example.
> Why I like using AI right now is that I get to try out far more of my own ideas quickly (and find issues with them!)
This.
Coding assistants handle a great deal of the drudge work involved in refactoring. I find myself doing far more deep refactoring work as quick proofs of concept than before. It's also quite convenient to have coding assistants handle troubleshooting steps for you.
Not likely. Original thinking in a "side project" is almost never about the code itself, but the ideas and end product implementation. You might be able to invent things like Carmack's BSP implementation, Torvald's Content Addressable Storage, etc. but even things like that can be aided by LLMs at this point, at least in the prototyping/idea phases. AI doesn't prevent you from having good ideas or doing original thinking if that is your goal.
But I might want some cool original project with a boring but working web UI, so that other people can actually try out what I have created.
For sure, I'm doing something very similar, asking an AI to make a boring but working web app using an API I'm working on. The API is the interesting part and the web app is basically just to test it.
I do think though if I were to delegate the API itself to AI and say something like the code doesn't matter, the high level thinking would suffer from lack of pain working through implementation details.
Sure... and it might also help you do more original thinking in that domain, and hence help you get a lot more learning value out of the time you have for those side projects.
The trick is to deliberately use it in a way that helps you learn.