Comment by theshrike79

I have written multiple IRC bots in the last 20+ years. It's my go-to project to test a new language, mostly because I know the protocol inside and out and it has some gotchas that languages can't handle comfortably (managing a bunch of open TCP sockets with threads/subprocesses mostly).

Have I tried to write my own IRC client yet? Nope. Because even though I know how to, the time spent wouldn't have been worth it. Getting from zero to feature parity would've taken me weeks or months of evenings doing nothing else.

I've got my own irccloud/thelounge clone running now, took me two weeks of calendar time and I spent maybe 6-7 evenings on it and a few hare-brained ideas with Claude on my phone.

The amount of "lubrication" LLMs have given me in going from idea to something good enough just for me is completely bonkers.