| > I would encourage you to consider how excited you will be to constantly maintain those things you build. 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. |
By all means don't consider it if you don't plan on using them for a considerable amount of time, but there's a lot of of distance between a decent amount of time and "forever". You listed a mini OS and a UI toolkit among your projects, I hope you can forgive me for assuming you were planning to use those things to build more things, which would in turn often entail improving and maintaining these building blocks while they are actively used.