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Comment by Antibabelic | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

Not grandparent, but I'm in the same boat. I've been dreaming for almost 10 years of building a sort of digital bullet journal. I had some feeble attempts to start, but never got to the point where I could actually use it. Last year I started again, heavily LLM assisted. After 1-2 weeks (this was before agents), I had something usable, from which I could benefit, which wanted to make me improve it more, which made me want to use it more.

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.

> By now it's grown to 100k lines of code

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, it's a personal pet project, I've thrown in everything and the kitchen sink. There's a telegram integration so I can submit entries via telegram, there's a chatbot integration so that I can "talk to my entries" and ask questions about what I did when). It imports weather data, Garmin data, and so on.

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.

How does that work? Are you running the agents on a server? Are you using gnu screen and termux? Can you respond to prompts asking for permission to e.g. run ls or grep?

I can do that (via something like VibeTunnel), but usually I just use the Claude Code web/mobile app.

All the big providers offer this. Usually they just work on your Github repo.

I see. So you're running an agent on a server against your github repo. Not working on your local machine. Thanks.

I have at least two projects that I estimated to take a week or two but aren't finished after years. There might be others that just got abandoned that should be included in the count.

Then there are things that work but aren't polished enough or should really have documentation.

Why did you abandon them? Every time I ask this question, I get lots of sob stories, but not a single explanation.

I can’t (due to other priorities) give consistent time to a project unless it is very important. That lack of consistency means I have to spend time re-learning what I was thinking and doing which is both inefficient and not fun. Since the projects are either experimental or not that important, I’m generally more motivated to do something else.

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.

lack of character, distracted by other things for to long, drowning in unforeseen complexity, much slower progression than expected, bored with it, force majeure, etc

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