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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

It’s great. I have a stupendous amount of personal software now. Yesterday was a native text editor that was fully integrated into my mediawiki install and would autocomplete links and make syntax easier to use.

No one could have built this software but me because it’s worth nothing to others. And I couldn’t build it because it takes too long. But when I’m using an agent to code the limited resource is my attention which actually does fine so long as every free brain cycle is on a task. So these personal things are great to throw into my tab loop to occupy a free slot.

These have been wonderful times.

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I finished a mod for Quake 2 I started in 1998 finally a few weeks ago. AI is really helping me get past the COVID burnout I was running of too many projects I half did. Fixed terminals (an rdp tool) today. Working on OpenRA bugs I opened issues 10 years ago now - engine is 10x faster and pathfinding mostly works properly.

It's crazy. I have something like 120 personal tools at this point and the pattern you describe is exactly right. The bottleneck moved from implementation to context switching. I started keeping a markdown file at the root of every project that captures state and next steps whenever I stop working on it, purely so I can resume without the 20-minute "wait where was I" tax.

There's just no pressure to handle edge cases or write docs for people who'll never use it. Just solve exactly your problem and move on.

> I started keeping a markdown file at the root of every project that captures state and next steps whenever I stop working on it, purely so I can resume without the 20-minute "wait where was I" tax.

I wonder whether there could be an AI autocomplete specifically for the task of helping you with the markdown file (and collecting your thoughts and writing prompts in general). Not an agent since that wouldn't really save time, but actually an autocomplete.

Maybe a small specially-trained local model running at hyper fast speeds and which already has your project context baked in with prefix caching (with some other larger model having summarized the context beforehand to feed to the small model), so as you type this file it automatically uses the same prompt prefix over and over to suggest autocomplete which actually makes sense.

> It's crazy. I have something like 120 personal tools at this point and the pattern you describe is exactly right. The bottleneck moved from implementation to context switching. I started keeping a markdown file at the root of every project that captures state and next steps whenever I stop working on it, purely so I can resume without the 20-minute "wait where was I" tax.

I sure hope companies double down on leetcode nonsense, because I really don’t have any capacity to compete with this level of ADHD.

I’ve been asking it to make some of my game tools into static websites where possible.

I did pay the $10 for the following domains but i’m ok with that so i can share some of the fun things that come out of the agent.

grandcheaten.com - a save game editor and guide for jagged alliance 3

thedailycheat.com - a save game editor for newstower

Itch.io allows for browser-based app distribution and is probably a better path to a large audience—especially those interested in the two examples you listed—than a custom domain is.

It's not well-known, but Itch's offline Steam equivalent (<https://itch.io/app>) is also open source.

In the beforetimes, I had to be very selective about the tools I spent my attention on, because they could take me 1-4 hours, easy.

Now I can throw ideas for tools at Claude with <15 minutes of my attention. They're so cheap that right now my coworker and I have "competing" versions of CLI Icinga2 tools, and we've been riffing back and forth about features (she added a "select from the above list of services" feature, I added a TUI to do the same).

Last week I shaved off more rough edges of our stack than I've had time to do in the previous quarter, probably closer to a year.

I’m also having a blast with generating userscripts/css to make web SaaS work better for my workflows. Went from waiting for months for a new feature to writing QoL improvesments myself

Yes, I built an app to plan an Easter Scavenger Hunt. How niche is that?!

Just curious, how long did you operate without AI? The burst in productivity I feel implies a time to accumulate these many small needs.

Not the person you are replying to but I have, in version control, around 80 projects dating back to about 2008 that are in various states of completion and Claude has been able to resurrect a lot of them and get them from their "half finished but will never complete" state up to "pull in modern dependencies and implement (me giving a list of what remains to be done)" to the point that they are now usable. I'm more focused on the things that are 7 or less years old because anything older than that I'm not sure I have a need for anymore.

My github is littered with projects dating back to when I started as a dev in 2012. I'd just got burned out before completing them

All my life, I suppose haha. But realistically, this will be my 25th year of any sort of programming.

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