Wow. To me the point of code has always been the crazy ideas and playing around. I love to create just for me and every once in a while for others is ok too. If you only think of code as 'a tool to build useful things' and everything else as wasted then sure, this is the philosophy for you. However, creating a bunch of random not going to follow up on it but I explored and played moments seems like a plus and not a negative to me.
This actually really resonates with me, particularly the part about his AI tools for blogging and note taking.
I have zero interest in AI note-taking apps. I write notes for myself to process the meaningful outcomes of a meeting. My notes are short, only capture stuff I actually think I will care about in the future, and after I've written them I have a better mental model of the meeting than I did before.
If I gave the task to an AI, no matter how advanced, it would produce much more unfocused content than the focused notes I am used to writing, and I would lose the process of synthesis that helps me absorb the meeting outcomes. More work product, but actually less productivity.
> In recent times, at least once per month someone sends a screenshot for an awesome tool they are working on. I'm like whoa, that's really something and the sender is obviously proud and enthusiastic. I try not to ask, but am always thinking "and where will you market it?"
What a strange perspective. His dismissal of the long list of projects at the top is also odd.
What's wrong with making something cool and functional (if not "useful"), even if just for yourself, without any profit motive or plan to turn it into some huge business?
I spent the last weekend vibing some plugins for Quod Libet -- a custom bookmark/preview function, a click-to-jump lyrics sidebar, thinking about a search-within-lyrics thing now. It all works beautifully, but I have no illusions about it being some kind of moneymaker -- heck, I doubt it's even worth the time beautifying/minimizing the code to get it acceptable to submit to the Github. But it makes me happy and makes using my library more enjoyable. Isn't that enough? Do they go around asking garage tinkerers and hobby crafters what their marketing plan is, too?
Some people, if not most, will at some point look back (and forward) in their life and wonder if they made anything out of it. And what they are really asking is "how much of an impact on others have I made?"
The problem is, that working on lots of little random code projects makes you fall into some kind of local minimum of overall joy and satisfaction. You are robbing yourself of the motivation of focusing on something truly substantial, that is still just a hobby, but the end result will leave you far more proud and fulfilled.
At the end of your life, if all you've done are little half baked throwaway projects, you might look back and realize one day you never made anything of any particular significance, just thrashed around building stuff people had already done so many times before that some unthinking, unfeeling LLM can spit it out almost verbatim just so you can say "me too".
This applies to more than just AI, it can be about any type of "side project" really, or any context where you have a wealth of so many possible options that focusing on one intensely forces you to deliberately ignore most of them.
An example for me lately is hackernews. I used to jump around wildy, looking at comments not really even reading articles. I felt like I was learning a lot. But lately I've taken another approach. Instead of clicking a bunch of things, I'm actually determining what is the most interesting article of the day, reading it thoroughly and truly thinking about it, and then after pausing for reflection, forming my own thoughts about it. I have found this to be a far more enriching experience than my previous habit. I think a lot of things in life turn out this way.
The only reason to use AI to build is when you don't really care too much about things, you just want something, anything. An image here, some code there, a ridiculous video. Cheap thrills with no soul required.
I've been having the opposite experience; I've been GAINING focus through AI use.
In my day, when there's something that is distracting me from moving my objectives forward, I'm asking "Can AI help me automate this?" The answer is surprisingly often "yes". I call these "rough edges" and have been doing a lot of work over the last few weeks to "file the rough edges down".
AI reduces the time cost of making the initial product, bypassing the need for genuine commitment, investment, strong interest, and dedication - which are vital in keeping a project alive.
Every time you need to make an update, you need to bring up the old context, or otherwise get the AI up to speed, which especially if you're using one of the frontier models could be a significant financial drain long term.
You don't get the same dopamine hit too, because you're just making boring updates to something which you threw together in 5 minutes with zero effort. The time and financial cost of building all this stuff may have been better spent on one, good, properly architected project.
Maintaining the project manually also assumes you can quickly understand the codebase which has been produced, otherwise you're completely dependent on Anthropic and them maintaining prices which you can afford. Bearing in mind that as you add new features, the cost of getting the LLM to understand the project increases, right? I might have a naive perspective here.
All that being said - sometimes there really are one-off niche things that are just for personal use that you do continue to use long term. Usually the simpler stuff where you can easily grasp the codebase at a quick glance. It's also great for debugging back and forths.
Personally I just run my local setup with a bunch of MCP stuff and the primary way it helps me is to keep me functional and on task. In some ways it's good if the AI can supervise you as opposed to you supervising it - at least from an ADHD perspective.
It's an interesting idea for sure, I like this article and agree with it.
What if you then use AI to try and maintain only one, a single product into which you’ll put your care and craft to try to make something that’s better than “some dopamine hits”?
That’s how I use it. I might be working on two or three features at a time (iterating, iterating, iterating…), but they’re all scoped and of user value; I don’t feel that I’m just off chasing rabbits.
But I’m also one of those people for whom the “fun” was always solving human problems rather than solving computer problems. I can see how if you are in the latter category AI has already sucked out a lot of joy and how rapidly project switching could be the least-unfun option.
As someone constantly nerd-sniped, the difficulty is that our instincts are still being formed about what this current era of AI tools can and cannot do.
So when a blocker or an idea pops up, it's very easy to use that magic-like tool to solve it quickly and then go back to whatever it's you were doing before.
However, if you care about the quality of your output, that won't be a quick detour. It will pile up with the other "quick" tasks you were doing simultaneously and that's how you end up with 5-10 sessions working on totally unrelated projects.
Sure, but for many folks the distraction is irresistible. It was difficult already to put care and craft into a product, having a slot machine for your attention makes it damn impossible.
The lucky normies have work to do, and they use their attention to meet the challenges. Us unlucky different-brained folks operate more like we have a lot of attention, and we have learned to fill it with computer stuff. AI is great for filling it but it’s often ultra processed weirdness and doesn’t seem to leave a trail of learning and productivity.
> On that last point, this technology is horrific for attention. It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends. Folk running 3 screens simultaneously working on totally unrelated "projects" they have little hope of maintaining, and such little commitment to the outcome that the time is obviously wasted.
This part reminded me of a recent article and it’s interesting that he brings up ADHD because that’s probably the bigger issue then. Because what I got from the article and the related conversation, specifically the top comment:
> > Sometimes, tools don’t move the needle because there’s no needle to move.
> It reminds me of something my old CS mentor, now elderly, had said about LLMs a few months ago: "it's a force multiplier, but there has to be some force to multiply."
The fact that it turned out that “Human Bottlenecks” post was written by the same person who wrote “Notes on Managing ADHD” which I had printed and studied for tips not that long ago made sense.
So, to connect the dots, the fact he made all of those things without them being part of a bigger plan is, I think, the problem. In the framework of the above quote, there’s no needle there, nothing to multiply.
I’ve been trying to think more about whether what I’m doing is going somewhere, or if I can skip it and simplify things.
This is not an AI problem. Or rather, AI just made it worse. Focus can be hard. The thing is, AI can help you focus, by making code maintenance easier too.
It seems like the author is overindexing on useful and underindexing on wonderful. He clearly had fun building these products — and in hindsight is disavowing them because they didn’t generate income? An oddly capitalist view of play.
Some really good points on how these bots are incentivized to reward mindless engagement though and the bit about voice transcription not producing useful writing landed. When the barrier to release drops the quality naturally does too.
I think the next stage of us learning to harness these tools is us building the ability to reach for excellence even when we are not required to. To accustom ourselves to going beyond minimum viable bar for functionality and to reach for qualities or standards beyond that which the AI brings to the table unaided. A new kind of engineering rigor.
I move that this was always true and is now only far more so.
In the old days, producing all those things would be tremendous learning opportunity. Today it's a pure waste, not producing income is not a problem, not producing anything is.
If it wasn’t a learning opportunity to build those things, that was the waste. You can learn from an AI far more easily than from a book — only now it’s far more easy not to and many people unconsciously choose that route.
Learning how to use AI effectively was the learning opportunity here, what was created is completely incidental. You're effectively obsessing over programming languages obscuring the machine code that actually runs. "Imagine all the missed learning opportunity of digging into all that machine code!"
Sure, but also, who cares? The machine code is completely incidental for most purposes.
I work with AI everyday, despite what many people suggest there is so little to learn. After a couple of hours you are good to go. You don't even need gstack.
This is patently false. I work with and on AI every day at multiple levels of the stack, and every day I'm learning massive new swathes of information. I'm honestly shocked how deep the field goes and how much more effective you can be with time. The floor is falling and the ceiling is rising and the gap between them is widening every day.
There is pleasure in making something yourself. There is learning. There is pride.
With generative AI you are just stealing other people's work. You are learning nothing. Anything could have generated the same projects. There was no skill involved, just enough disposable income to pay for tokens.
And yes some people develop some weird psychosis and think that they did the thing and not the AI. Everyone else is vibe coding but they got the special sauce, the perfect prompts. They are delusional.
> And I don't read anything indicated they had fun.
Maybe I'm just projecting. I enjoy making things. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Sounds like you don't.
> There is pleasure in making something yourself. There is learning. There is pride.
You're speaking second person, when you should really be speaking first person. You enjoy making everything yourself, by hand. That is fine. It's also your personal perspective.
> You are learning nothing.
If you really aren't learning anything, you're doing AI wrong.
> Everyone else is vibe coding but they got the special sauce, the perfect prompts. They are delusional.
The delusion here is constructing a strawman out of the worst qualities you can imagine and berating that instead of actually looking at what other people are doing and trying to work out what they're thinking / how they feel. I can guarantee you that virtually nobody thinks they are the only person that can prompt a particular piece of software into existence.
I know this post probably won't land with you, because I'm a little annoyed while I write it (if only because your post comes off emotional and annoyed as well) (and, sorry in advance), but I do encourage you to consider that perhaps there are other worldviews than the clearly embittered and deeply entrenched one you've espoused. And perhaps those other worldviews are more suited to surviving the oncoming storm.
article points out a real problem - simplicity is one of the hardest things to achieve. the act of reduction is important.
buts its a refreshing that there is an initial list of half baked projects, i suppose meant to evoke horror at the untidiness and wasted time. but honestly each of those projects sound cool as hell.
not necessarily durable - but who cares. i’d argue there is a skill, one that is different than traditional programming, that the author was building up over that period.
discipline is important. focus is hard. but allowing yourself to play is not a bad thing at all and i dont think building little interesting side projects should be a shameful act.
> On that last point, this technology is horrific for attention. It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends.
For me the sweet spot has been next suggested edit. I’m still writing code but the autocomplete does make it faster. That’s made coding more fun for me. What’s not fun is prompting then waiting around to find out it’s not what you wanted.
> Except for the SaaS, almost none of this is useful and I don't want to maintain any of it.
So don’t. Nobody’s twisting your arm.
Nobody told the author to sit down and write a bunch of random useless stuff.
This is like blaming your bicycle for enabling you to stop at too many shops that you didn’t mean to go to when you originally meant to ride straight to the grocery store.
I don’t think he’s blaming the technology he’s saying that AI is like crack for people with certain types of ADHD who are always thinking up new projects or going down rabbit holes.
I can relate to this greatly I have started dozens of projects since last summer but have been having a hard time turning these into real value. Not even money but just something that people find useful beyond my own learnings.
AI make easy work even easier, at the same time it shortens the attention span making it more difficult to do any difficult work. That's why there is so little real progress despite huge productivity gains.
I think the lack of progress is lack of understanding. If everything is generated and not viewed, does it exist? Like if a tree fell in the forest. Strip the observer and suddenly there is no universe. Strip the engineer and there is no codebase
I have ADHD, and for the last 2+ years, virtually 100% of my AI-assisted coding has gone into one product, which is a SaaS that supports my family. I have no end of ideas for little side projects, things to spin off, components I can open source from what I’ve built, etc. But unlike when I was younger (I’m old now), I’ve been able to resist the siren song of the ADHD side quest, and instead channel that towards the one project I know I should be focused on.
In other words, the issue isn’t the AI subscription, it’s the ADHD.
> and such little commitment to the outcome that the time is obviously wasted.
Why is it wasted? A powerful new tool was invented, and enthusiasts are exploring ways to harness it. They'll come away with the skill to wield this new tool effectively. The programs they're writing are completely secondary.
AI makes single purpose throw away tools easy to create. This is GREAT. I had to migrate an old Windows 2012 file server share to SharePoint. Microsoft's tools don't work on this old OS. Their SharePoint migration tool running on other machines on the local network constantly failed for nebulous reasons. I finally got fed up and spent a few hours with Gemini Pro and Claude and created a sync tool using C# that does the migration and keeps the network share in sync with SharePoint until we do the final cutover. I don't expect to ever use this tool again, and that's totally fine. I'll still put it on GitHub in case someone has a use for it, but I'm not sure why I should lament the fact that this tool exists and may never see another use or the fact that I won't maintain it.
Don't waste your life playing with shiny new toys, sure, but learning how to use AI by creating things is not a waste of time.
>exploring AI as a lens in Marshall McLuhan-like thinking
I would be wary of using McLuhan-like media analysis of AI. His central argument is that media are tools that extend man's ability. A calculator or a spell checker extend our thinking and writing. AI does not extend those abilities so much as it completely replaces it.
The way in which it does resemble media is insofar as it captures the same urge that McLuhan wrote about to see ourselves extended into the world. McLuhan tied this to the myth of Narcissus. The difference is that where Narcissus falsely believed it wasn't him and fell in love with what he saw, we falsely believe the image we see is ourselves and fall in love with it.
A calculator does replace our ability to do math in a certain sense.
At the grocery store there's countless (no pun) opportunities to do math in the sense of comparing prices and calculating unit costs etc, but most people can't do that math easily in their head because the calculator has made that skill less important.
But people also don't pull out the calculator repeatedly to do this in the grocery store, so the math just doesn't get done.
I have zero interest in AI note-taking apps. I write notes for myself to process the meaningful outcomes of a meeting. My notes are short, only capture stuff I actually think I will care about in the future, and after I've written them I have a better mental model of the meeting than I did before.
If I gave the task to an AI, no matter how advanced, it would produce much more unfocused content than the focused notes I am used to writing, and I would lose the process of synthesis that helps me absorb the meeting outcomes. More work product, but actually less productivity.
What a strange perspective. His dismissal of the long list of projects at the top is also odd.
What's wrong with making something cool and functional (if not "useful"), even if just for yourself, without any profit motive or plan to turn it into some huge business?
I spent the last weekend vibing some plugins for Quod Libet -- a custom bookmark/preview function, a click-to-jump lyrics sidebar, thinking about a search-within-lyrics thing now. It all works beautifully, but I have no illusions about it being some kind of moneymaker -- heck, I doubt it's even worth the time beautifying/minimizing the code to get it acceptable to submit to the Github. But it makes me happy and makes using my library more enjoyable. Isn't that enough? Do they go around asking garage tinkerers and hobby crafters what their marketing plan is, too?
YMMV
At the end of your life, if all you've done are little half baked throwaway projects, you might look back and realize one day you never made anything of any particular significance, just thrashed around building stuff people had already done so many times before that some unthinking, unfeeling LLM can spit it out almost verbatim just so you can say "me too".
This applies to more than just AI, it can be about any type of "side project" really, or any context where you have a wealth of so many possible options that focusing on one intensely forces you to deliberately ignore most of them.
An example for me lately is hackernews. I used to jump around wildy, looking at comments not really even reading articles. I felt like I was learning a lot. But lately I've taken another approach. Instead of clicking a bunch of things, I'm actually determining what is the most interesting article of the day, reading it thoroughly and truly thinking about it, and then after pausing for reflection, forming my own thoughts about it. I have found this to be a far more enriching experience than my previous habit. I think a lot of things in life turn out this way.
The only reason to use AI to build is when you don't really care too much about things, you just want something, anything. An image here, some code there, a ridiculous video. Cheap thrills with no soul required.
In my day, when there's something that is distracting me from moving my objectives forward, I'm asking "Can AI help me automate this?" The answer is surprisingly often "yes". I call these "rough edges" and have been doing a lot of work over the last few weeks to "file the rough edges down".
Every time you need to make an update, you need to bring up the old context, or otherwise get the AI up to speed, which especially if you're using one of the frontier models could be a significant financial drain long term.
You don't get the same dopamine hit too, because you're just making boring updates to something which you threw together in 5 minutes with zero effort. The time and financial cost of building all this stuff may have been better spent on one, good, properly architected project.
Maintaining the project manually also assumes you can quickly understand the codebase which has been produced, otherwise you're completely dependent on Anthropic and them maintaining prices which you can afford. Bearing in mind that as you add new features, the cost of getting the LLM to understand the project increases, right? I might have a naive perspective here.
All that being said - sometimes there really are one-off niche things that are just for personal use that you do continue to use long term. Usually the simpler stuff where you can easily grasp the codebase at a quick glance. It's also great for debugging back and forths.
Personally I just run my local setup with a bunch of MCP stuff and the primary way it helps me is to keep me functional and on task. In some ways it's good if the AI can supervise you as opposed to you supervising it - at least from an ADHD perspective.
It's an interesting idea for sure, I like this article and agree with it.
But I’m also one of those people for whom the “fun” was always solving human problems rather than solving computer problems. I can see how if you are in the latter category AI has already sucked out a lot of joy and how rapidly project switching could be the least-unfun option.
So when a blocker or an idea pops up, it's very easy to use that magic-like tool to solve it quickly and then go back to whatever it's you were doing before.
However, if you care about the quality of your output, that won't be a quick detour. It will pile up with the other "quick" tasks you were doing simultaneously and that's how you end up with 5-10 sessions working on totally unrelated projects.
https://www.tyleo.com/blog/the-terminal-star
A lot of good comes out but it can be hard to separate from the parts that just take advantage of your brain.
This part reminded me of a recent article and it’s interesting that he brings up ADHD because that’s probably the bigger issue then. Because what I got from the article and the related conversation, specifically the top comment:
> > Sometimes, tools don’t move the needle because there’s no needle to move.
> It reminds me of something my old CS mentor, now elderly, had said about LLMs a few months ago: "it's a force multiplier, but there has to be some force to multiply."
From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254336
The fact that it turned out that “Human Bottlenecks” post was written by the same person who wrote “Notes on Managing ADHD” which I had printed and studied for tips not that long ago made sense.
So, to connect the dots, the fact he made all of those things without them being part of a bigger plan is, I think, the problem. In the framework of the above quote, there’s no needle there, nothing to multiply.
I’ve been trying to think more about whether what I’m doing is going somewhere, or if I can skip it and simplify things.
Some really good points on how these bots are incentivized to reward mindless engagement though and the bit about voice transcription not producing useful writing landed. When the barrier to release drops the quality naturally does too.
I think the next stage of us learning to harness these tools is us building the ability to reach for excellence even when we are not required to. To accustom ourselves to going beyond minimum viable bar for functionality and to reach for qualities or standards beyond that which the AI brings to the table unaided. A new kind of engineering rigor.
I move that this was always true and is now only far more so.
Sure, but also, who cares? The machine code is completely incidental for most purposes.
The author did not build those products. AI did.
And I don't read anything indicated they had fun.
There is pleasure in making something yourself. There is learning. There is pride.
With generative AI you are just stealing other people's work. You are learning nothing. Anything could have generated the same projects. There was no skill involved, just enough disposable income to pay for tokens.
And yes some people develop some weird psychosis and think that they did the thing and not the AI. Everyone else is vibe coding but they got the special sauce, the perfect prompts. They are delusional.
Maybe I'm just projecting. I enjoy making things. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Sounds like you don't.
> There is pleasure in making something yourself. There is learning. There is pride.
You're speaking second person, when you should really be speaking first person. You enjoy making everything yourself, by hand. That is fine. It's also your personal perspective.
> You are learning nothing.
If you really aren't learning anything, you're doing AI wrong.
> Everyone else is vibe coding but they got the special sauce, the perfect prompts. They are delusional.
The delusion here is constructing a strawman out of the worst qualities you can imagine and berating that instead of actually looking at what other people are doing and trying to work out what they're thinking / how they feel. I can guarantee you that virtually nobody thinks they are the only person that can prompt a particular piece of software into existence.
I know this post probably won't land with you, because I'm a little annoyed while I write it (if only because your post comes off emotional and annoyed as well) (and, sorry in advance), but I do encourage you to consider that perhaps there are other worldviews than the clearly embittered and deeply entrenched one you've espoused. And perhaps those other worldviews are more suited to surviving the oncoming storm.
buts its a refreshing that there is an initial list of half baked projects, i suppose meant to evoke horror at the untidiness and wasted time. but honestly each of those projects sound cool as hell. not necessarily durable - but who cares. i’d argue there is a skill, one that is different than traditional programming, that the author was building up over that period.
discipline is important. focus is hard. but allowing yourself to play is not a bad thing at all and i dont think building little interesting side projects should be a shameful act.
Yeah.
> Except for the SaaS, almost none of this is useful and I don't want to maintain any of it.
So don’t. Nobody’s twisting your arm.
Nobody told the author to sit down and write a bunch of random useless stuff.
This is like blaming your bicycle for enabling you to stop at too many shops that you didn’t mean to go to when you originally meant to ride straight to the grocery store.
I can relate to this greatly I have started dozens of projects since last summer but have been having a hard time turning these into real value. Not even money but just something that people find useful beyond my own learnings.
In other words, the issue isn’t the AI subscription, it’s the ADHD.
Why is it wasted? A powerful new tool was invented, and enthusiasts are exploring ways to harness it. They'll come away with the skill to wield this new tool effectively. The programs they're writing are completely secondary.
AI makes single purpose throw away tools easy to create. This is GREAT. I had to migrate an old Windows 2012 file server share to SharePoint. Microsoft's tools don't work on this old OS. Their SharePoint migration tool running on other machines on the local network constantly failed for nebulous reasons. I finally got fed up and spent a few hours with Gemini Pro and Claude and created a sync tool using C# that does the migration and keeps the network share in sync with SharePoint until we do the final cutover. I don't expect to ever use this tool again, and that's totally fine. I'll still put it on GitHub in case someone has a use for it, but I'm not sure why I should lament the fact that this tool exists and may never see another use or the fact that I won't maintain it.
Don't waste your life playing with shiny new toys, sure, but learning how to use AI by creating things is not a waste of time.
I would be wary of using McLuhan-like media analysis of AI. His central argument is that media are tools that extend man's ability. A calculator or a spell checker extend our thinking and writing. AI does not extend those abilities so much as it completely replaces it.
The way in which it does resemble media is insofar as it captures the same urge that McLuhan wrote about to see ourselves extended into the world. McLuhan tied this to the myth of Narcissus. The difference is that where Narcissus falsely believed it wasn't him and fell in love with what he saw, we falsely believe the image we see is ourselves and fall in love with it.
At the grocery store there's countless (no pun) opportunities to do math in the sense of comparing prices and calculating unit costs etc, but most people can't do that math easily in their head because the calculator has made that skill less important.
But people also don't pull out the calculator repeatedly to do this in the grocery store, so the math just doesn't get done.