Comment by tredre3
20 hours ago
The point being made by GP was that your projects have no value and their non-existence wouldn't be a negative to this world.
And that is likely a fair assessment, though I understand perfectly the feeling that you have that you are accomplishing great(er) things thanks to AI.
I was certainly not saying that all the author's projects, in general, have no value! That would be rude, mean and most of all, incorrect.
But yes, it's likely that the ease of which code can now be outout lets us produce lots of unnecessary code just because we can, and the author says as much in a below comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48303890
I certainly hope that's not true, given that I've dedicated 7+ years to my main open source projects at this point.
I take some reassurance from knowing that they are indeed used by real people to solve real problems though.
Now what percentage of the 200$ have been used on the useful stuff and how much on exploration or other stuff.
How long would it taken you to do it yourself? How much longer will the next task take you, compared to when you would’ve written the code yourself. How is the mental model compared to when you would’ve written it yourself?.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, again there are use cases. But the calculation is not plain and simple it goes deep into our perception, perceived productivity versus actual productivity.
I’ve 2 months maxxed out all 6k of Claude Code and bought Antigravity on top. My codebase became 140k lines. I introduced tons of bugs and spent another 2 months, deleting 80k of code. I wish I would’ve just chatted with AI and not let agents touch my codebase. I would’ve saved approx 300$ subscription prices a month and 2 months of my life.
I had that experience back in January! I used it for a joke in a talk recently... did anyone really need a half-finished buggy slow implementation of a JavaScript interpreter in Python? They did not. https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript
It's taken me the best part of this year to readjust and find a pace and level of ambition that fits.
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This is the economic theory of value creation though - arguably the world is better off because new projects can be created, and they are marginally cheaper than they would have been previously