| I support this take especially since you added the "I don't care if nobody else uses what I make", but you should at least acknowledge what you're talking about is pretty unrelated to the article, as the author's entire context seems to be making something for other people to use and building it together with other people. Since you said you want to make those things that you list, I assume none of these things have been built yet. If so, I would encourage you to consider how excited you will be to constantly maintain those things you build. But even if the maintainence cycle won't be as exciting, since you are the sole user you have the advantage of being able to proceed at a leisurely pace even while doing maintainence work. In a professional setting, the dopamine hit of being able to build something quickly that works in an area that you have little to no knowledge in makes you more dependent on the AI in the maintaince cycle as you want to chase that dopamine high by maintaining the same development speed. This in turn leads to a bigger burnout crash after that peak dopamine hit. Maintainence is a phase of diminishing returns even without AI, but when your coding agents are introducing new bugs at record pace with their bugfixes with no new features to write home about you are in a special place in Hell. I'm all for using AI to build ambitious projects. I have yet to see a person/company/organization continuously release huge software endeavours in a stable professional manner day in and day out with a coding agent harem in tow. If something like the Ladybird browser, or any browser that is "built by scratch", achieved Chrome parity in six months and consistently maintained the same level of stability with continuous releases then I would see that as proof that this approach has become professionaly sustainable. The reason people are getting away with so much using AI is because of the open secret in most enterprise engineering practices: the customer cares more about the response time for fixes they report than they do about overall or longterm product quality. |
Why should I consider that?
Its funny how the default with programming is that the piece of software exists forever. I've been learning to play the piano lately. The default with piano is that every piece is ephemeral. If I don't go out of my way to record something I play, after the notes have run out, the piece is gone forever. The same is true of cooking - except you can't record a meal at all. Once you eat it, its gone. Lots of art forms are like this - theatre. Dance. The circus. They're no less beautiful for being ephemeral.
Why do we assume software has to be maintained indefinitely? Why even think about that right now? Maybe I'll work on these projects for awhile, maintain them as long as I want, and then in a few years someone will make something way better and I'll use that instead? Would that make the effort I put in pointless? I don't think so. I think it would make programming more like playing the piano. How lovely.
> I'm all for using AI to build ambitious projects. I have yet to see a person/company/organization continuously release huge software endeavours in a stable professional manner day in and day out with a coding agent harem in tow.
Yes, I've burned through enough claude tokens now that I find myself agreeing with you. I wouldn't use an LLM to make and maintain google chrome. But I wasn't planning on doing that anyway. There are also a lot more options than (1) write everything yourself and (2) vibe code the whole thing.
LLMs are good at small-to-medium scope tasks right now. Fine. I'll use them - or not use them - with their limitations in mind.