[PaulRobinson]

Congrats on finding something like that, and can't wait to see the Show HN thread!

What do you think made it something you could believe in? Was it the opportunity, that it aligned with something you were personally interested in or something else?

I had a project a few years ago that was a bit like that. I'd be coding it up every hour I could find around the day job, and loved it. Perhaps I need to reflect on that some more.

[90s_dev]

Thanks! It's hard to know exactly why. What I do know is that I'm surprised week after week with breakthroughs I never dreamed possible and which I think other people will find very useful, and these each renew my excitement.

[patcon]

I don't suppose you're using LLMs for coding? The number of my older friends who've found energy for side-projects since LLM coding became a thing is very notable

In the most extreme case: a new father of twins just uses his IDE and home projector to put up the work on the wall and builds little things by voice and reading, as he's home with his daughters. It's pretty eye-opening.

Obviously, he won't want to divide his attention so obviously in the near future, but he's the sort who will likely be making things with and for them very early -- I imagine it will be like kids spending lots of time growing up in their father's woodshop.

[TeMPOraL]

This is me. I just put up an LCARS MQTT logger and a clock with touch support, on a Raspberry Pi 2B V1.1 with a 3.5' TFT touchscreen, all of which I bought for that purpose 10 years ago. I took a few stabs at it over the years, but in that time I also married and started a family and ultimately could never find enough time or sustained drive to do it.

Five days ago, I stumbled upon that package again, and in between my work tasks I casually chatted with o3 on how to get that screen to show something. I explored my original idea (driving via SPI interface directly) but that turned out to be a dead-end - and then went back to the framebuffer approach (system overlay handles the screen, I write to /dev/fb0); o3 made me a quick prototype to prove the concept - and then I fired up Aider with gemini-2.5-pro, and got the MVP the same day. I casually iterated on it over the next 4 days, improving performance, functionality, style and adding touch support.

I can tell you, if not for LLMs, that board would continue to gather dust in the drawer for the next decade. Instead, I'm on my way to extending this to realize my other old dream - making it into LCARS A/C control panel to replace the vendor-provided wall-mounted one.

Also, in the past couple months, I explored many other ideas and did a few prototypes, and started feeling again the energy I last had in high school. LLMs are just that good at removing the "blank page syndrome" and making every incremental task just more cost-effective, to the point they start to fit in my otherwise busy adult schedule.

[aaronbaugher]

I'm not using an LLM for programming (at least not yet), but I'm using it for business planning, estimating target audiences, summarizing research, etc. All stuff I could do myself, and that I have to verify, but it saves time. More importantly, it's making some work more interesting that was previously too tedious to ever get started on. Maybe that benefit will wear off for me once it's not novel anymore, I don't know.

[90s_dev]

I've never touched an LLM and won't use AI. Everything I ever have and will make is hand crafted.

[jonwinstanley]

I use Cursor and still think of my work as hand crafted, the project is exactly what I wanted, I just didn’t have to press every single key

[90s_dev]

I don't even use editor suggestions for the next word I should write. For me, something I didn't think of myself is not mine.

[patcon]

Heh thanks for sharing. my boundary between self and other feels much more blurry :)

Like if I overhear a conversation, watch a documentary, and read a billboard, and ideas from each recombine in my head to create some interpolated idea, I'm not even sure how much I get credit for that, I suppose

My role seems just to tend to the garden of my mind, so new things might grow there that I can share. AI is just another plant, or maybe it's another gardener who brings me clippings or seeds.

I dunno, just the idea of me doing almost anything "myself" feels a bit challenging to my worldview. I see no particularly honour in thinking of something in isolation (in fact, being immersed in other ideas/ppl/inspiration seems the key ingredient)... except insofar as stealing ideas or failing to attribute seems dishonest

(I'm not saying my worldview is the right one btw)

EDIT: recently heard about the Schwartz theory of basic human values, and guessing you score much higher than me on "self-direction" :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_basic_human_values

[patcon]

Same

[90s_dev]

Actually maybe this is one way to explan it:

When Pico 8 came out, I immediately had a feeling of recognition and familiarity: "Oh! So this is the app I was half dreaming of making all these years!*

The app I'm making now gives me the exact same feeling, which is already a reward in itself, but it also means it'll probably give others that feeling too. So it's doubly exciting.