[dmh2000]

I'm 72, a dev for 40 years. I've lost a step or two. It's harder to buckle down and focus, but using AI tools have enabled me to keep building stuff. I can spec a project, have an agent build it then make sure it works. I just code for fun anyway.

[iKlsR]

I love using AI to prototype that something is possible then go and build it myself while borrowing bits from that initial MVP. The other night I wanted to build a browser extension that could intercept requests from a tab, claude got me something working in about 10 minutes with a couple prompts and a local storage session and then I toyed with the UI a bit to see what was possible.

Now after a weekend morning I have something much slimmer, predictable and sophisticated running... my extension shows a list of repeated responses and I can toggle which one to send to a localhost api that has a simple job queue to update a sqlite db with each new entry, extract the important parts and send it to my lm studio gpt oss 20b endpoint for some analysis and finally and send me a summary on telegram.

I know what I want in my head but cutting down the experimenting or PoC step down to minutes vs hours is pretty useful and as a competent enough dev it's elevated what I can get done now so I can take on more work than I would have by myself previously.