[wahnfrieden]

Just regret waiting until I was 35 to attempt it and now I'm already going on 40. Wasted good years on easy mode.

edit:

But this part is wild to me: "I use AI for some things. It helped me fix a few bugs a couple of times"

I can't imagine being solo indie and not leaning hard into Codex, CC, or Composer at this point. To use it only sometimes for the rare bug or copy editing sounds tragic. It's been an incredible boon for me at least - extending, refactoring, prototyping etc. within a complex codebase I wrote myself and in new ones that I guide it on.

> It’s especially bad with new APIs.

It's great if you give it the context

[kranner]

> I can't imagine being solo indie and not leaning hard into Codex, CC, or Composer at this point.

Some of us don't want to because we like our artisanal programming, and being indie is great because we don't have to capitulate to management forcing us to use AI all the time.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

That's sort of my feeling. I really enjoy coding.

What's that saying? "If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life."

I use LLMs every day, but not to write my software. I use them like really good personal assistants. They are now a standard (and invaluable) part of my daily workflow.

I'm not exactly "indie" (retired at 55, and working for free), but I can relate to a lot of what's being discussed, here.

[kranner]

Similar situation here. Laid off last year (at 45), can just about afford to retire to a frugal life (which I wouldn't mind at all).

But now that I am finally free to write only software that I want to bring into the world, I cannot imagine playing roulette with LLMs all day for something as mundane as productivity, giving up all the intellectual joys of the craft as well.

And the relief of not having to justify to a manager why things are taking longer than expected! It's like the giant finger that had been pressing down on me almost all my working life has finally been lifted. Sweet semi-retirement, how I love thee.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> Sweet semi-retirement, how I love thee.

I feel the same. Not having people crapping all over my work, is bliss.

I would have loved another decade of salary, but my savings were perfectly adequate for a reasonable retirement.

[wahnfrieden]

That's nice for you that you made enough money from your careers to not optimize your productivity, and to enjoy spending your time with code as leisure.

You two are retired or semi-retired and interested in the pleasure of coding apparently as an unpaid hobby. But I am speaking only to the utility of LLMs for business needs as an indie - the blog post is also about making a living as an indie and speaks to LLM use in terms of what they found productive. Indie in this case means independent business, not independently retired from business...

[kranner]

I should have put "productivity" in double-quotes. What I meant is I don't have to worry about justifying why I'm not using AI to "optimize" my "productivity" to a pointy-haired boss as my FAANG friends seem to be having to do.

As I said I'm only semi-retired. There's a very expensive fortnightly life-saving medicine I depend on which I'm currently getting for free on a government programme. But it's tied to my current place of residence and other places in my country either don't offer it at all, or not to people who haven't been living there for decades. I would like to afford ending my dependence on the government programme because it might end someday anyway, and also so that I can travel a little.

All this is to say, if the newest AI tools actually increased my productivity, I would be stupid not to use them. But I haven't found that to be the case. It's fine to use for autocomplete and to look things up now and then, but every time I've had it generate a substantial amount of code it has messed things up and in the long run cost me the same amount of time I could have done the job in myself. And doing it myself has always been more engaging, fun and satisfying, and has left me with a much better understanding of a complex system that I'm going to have to maintain and extend for years.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Yes. Note that I mentioned that, in my comment.

BTW: I didn't actually make that much money. Kids coming out of college, make more than I ever did, at my peak. I just lived very frugally, avoided personal debt, and saved and invested as best as I could.

I guarantee that a lot of folks here, would sneer at the way that I lived, and live now.

[cube00]

> Wasted good years on easy mode.

I wouldn't say I wasted the good years on easy mode, but I did have a misguided plan that I needed to become a team lead and then I could start on my side projects.

I thought I'd have more time because I saw just how little my team leads actually did at work, and no, they weren't doing it behind the scenes, they wouldn't even show up to meetings with the business.

Of course I cared too much, burnt out my best years, quit and now have jack to show for it on the wrong side of 40 when I could have built up my own indie empire.

[_9za9]

It seems like these people don't paste in the API documentation and say, " based on the document... ". Did I just reveal too much?

[dSebastien]

Haha, same