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Comment by bapak | Hacker News Reader

This is the most "just build your own Linux" comment I read this year.

Just download some tool and be productive within seconds, I'd say.

Kinda odd to be so dismissive of this mindset given this websites title. Whipping up your own chatui really is not that hard and is a pretty fun exercise. Knowing how your tools work and being able to tweak them to your specific usecases kinda rules!

There is a big difference between fun exercise and actually creating something that competes with the apps you can download. Building something on par with Claude Desktop, ChatGPT Desktop, etc. would be a lot of work. And I don't think the payoff would be there for most people.

Most people aren't hackers. Thanks to LLMs and vibe coding, even they can now take a can-do attitude to life that feels empowering. There's no longer any excuse to languish in helpless misery and negativity. You can just build things.

But you can build something new instead of reinventing the wheel for the thousandth time.

I've only been lucky enough to find one opportunity in my entire twenty-seven year career to write something novel and new. Most of the time we're reinventing the wheel. What separates the winners from the losers is whether or not it's your wheel.

I don't know, you don't have to invent cosmopolitan libc to qualify as new, but my bar is higher than another LLM chat app.

Then again, maybe OP's app will have some new twist that will revolutionise everything.

I have other things to do with my day than vibe-coding yet another stupid chat app with fewer features than one I can just download and get running in minutes. It’s not helplessness or misery, it’s just the finite number of hours I have in a day and the fact that other things are more interesting than that. I don’t grow my own wheat or maintain my own OS, either.

Yeah, ok, don't do it then. That doesn't mean because you do not want to bother, the suggestion is invalid for everyone here. There are a lot of people who just love to do their own thing, tinker with whatever they have on hand and then use the stuff they have created themselves.

its ok to let other people have fun programming and code dumb tools. you can decide yourself what you want to or not to work on, doesn't mean you should be so negative towards the idea of people who do want to code these things

I only did it once some 15 years back (in a happy memory) using LFS. It took about a week to get to a functional system with basic necessities. A code finetuned model can write a functional chat UI with all common features and a decent UX in under a minute.

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