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Comment by rpastuszak | Hacker News Reader

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rpastuszak

+100000

Worst case you’ve learned something new or had fun.

I am yet to regret a single instance when I regretted sharing unfinished, scrappy work:

https://untested.sonnet.io/Share+your+unfinished%2C+scrappy+...

One approach I really liked was the 2/2/2 rule:

2 hours for a poc → does this even make sense?

2 days for a prototype to share with friends

2 weeks to build something useful (paid if your goal is to charge for it)

You can leave the process at any stage. Each stage teaches you something new.

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> I've been delaying sharing a complete list of my personal work for about 10 years

Can relate. I think the problematic word is "complete"; it's a kind of perfect. Initially aim at incomplete/minimal, then build.

Damn you are productive. I have spent longer on building simple circuits.

I think this is really important, because pushing through on one project that's not working makes you neglect other projects that are more deserving of your time, attention, effort, love, blood, sweat and tears. Opportunity cost.

I had a really compelling but unproven idea once, for a gap in the market for a library. I made an absurdly ruthlessly minimal prototype in 2 hours; then spent 1 long day (9 hours) making a website. My rule was if no one appreciated it in 10 days, I'd forget it. Someone did, and it ended up making me ramen-FU-money.

Wow, I really like that rule. I’ll often discourage myself from playing with a POC because of how nebulous the timeline can feel. I’m going to this that next time.

With LLMs nowadays getting a PoC banged out in a couple hours is easier than ever. The things make boilerplate and you can focus on the value.

Author here and I 100% agree. The reason I was able to get a lot of the prototyping done within the first few days is by using ChatGPT. On the flipside I think the code that it wrote was not very maintainable so I should have started from scratch after validating my PoC.

Bless your mess !

Haha thanks for reading!

2 hours seems short for a poc, in my experience. What general criteria do you have for such a barebones poc?

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