A lot of the time, the LLM outputs the code, I test my idea, and realize I really don't care or the idea wasn't that great, and now I can move on to something else.
I really do
Why is this, idunno a better way to say it, good?
So ok you don't get into the weeds and you're proud of that, but also nothing you can think of wanting to do turns out to be worth doing.
Those things are wholly related. Opportunity never comes exactly the time and the way you expect. You have to be open to it, you have to be seeking out new experiences and new ideas. You have to get into the weeds and try things without being entirely sure what the outcome might be, what insight you might gain, or when that insight might become useful.
Github is full of half forgotten saved games waiting for money to be thrown at them.
I did vibe code the first version. It runs, but it is utterly unmaintainable. I'm now rewriting it using the LLM as if it were a junior or outsourced programmer (not a developer, that remains my job) and I go over every line of application code. I love it, I'm pushing out decent quality code and very focused git commits. I write every commit message myself, no LLM there. But I don't even bother checking the LLM's unit and integration tests.
I would have never gotten to this stage of my dream project without AI tooling.
Why not? People have been writing successful personal projects without LLMs for years.
By now it's grown to 100k lines of code. I've not read all of them, but I do have a high level overview of the app, I've done several refactorings to keep it maintainable.
This would not have happened without AI agents. I don't have the time, period. With AI agents, I can kickoff a task while I'm going to the park with my kids. Instead of scrolling HN, I look every now and then to what the agent is doing.
Did you add an extra zero there? A journal with 100k lines of code, presumably not counting the framework it is built on?
That doesn't sound correct.
So yes, it's around 100k lines of code (Python, HTML, JS and CSS).
> With AI agents, I can kickoff a task while I'm going to the park with my kids. Instead of scrolling HN, I look every now and then to what the agent is doing.
Then there are things that work but aren't polished enough or should really have documentation.
Over time I’ve learned to not even start such projects, but LLMs have made it easier to complete such projects by making the work faster reducing the time variable in time over importance and easing the refamiliarization problem, adding to the set of such projects I’m willing to tackle.