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> What's wrong with making something cool and functional (if not "useful"), even if just for yourself, without any profit motive or plan to turn it into some huge business?

The problem I've had is two-fold.

1. I'm making amazing things (from my perspective) but nobody is paying me for it. I have many friends like this. We're older, very senior engineers with decades of experience and a love of computers/computer science. And we're building the platforms and tools we always wanted to exist. Summoning them into existence.

And nobody is going to pay us a single cent for it.

That's fine, until your roof needs replacing or your AC unit dies, like mine did.

"Dismissing the long list of projects" may in fact be a result of this.

What we have now with these tools is the ability to do more projects than ever, and the result is the marginal value of each of the projects is dropping like a rock.

2. Given the choice between attending meat-space issues and making these things, guess what I choose?

That's a me-shaped problem, I know, but I think it reflects the personality of a lot of people on this forum.

I feel like I'm on a roller coaster, and am simultaneously on the leading edge of being able to do more than ever while the value of all that "more" plummets plummet plummets.

You can do more than ever and unless you're independently wealthy (or incredibly well connected) it will go nowhere at all.

Also half the joy of writing code was having other people use it.

When everyone is a conjurer with a staff, nobody is going to care about what you just brought into existence. Build it and they won't come.

The problem is, that working on lots of little random code projects makes you fall into some kind of local minimum of overall joy and satisfaction. You are robbing yourself of the motivation of focusing on something truly substantial, that is still just a hobby, but the end result will leave you far more proud and fulfilled.

At the end of your life, if all you've done are little half baked throwaway projects, you might look back and realize one day you never made anything of any particular significance, just thrashed around building stuff people had already done so many times before that some unthinking, unfeeling LLM can spit it out almost verbatim just so you can say "me too".

This applies to more than just AI, it can be about any type of "side project" really, or any context where you have a wealth of so many possible options that focusing on one intensely forces you to deliberately ignore most of them.

An example for me lately is hackernews. I used to jump around wildy, looking at comments not really even reading articles. I felt like I was learning a lot. But lately I've taken another approach. Instead of clicking a bunch of things, I'm actually determining what is the most interesting article of the day, reading it thoroughly and truly thinking about it, and then after pausing for reflection, forming my own thoughts about it. I have found this to be a far more enriching experience than my previous habit. I think a lot of things in life turn out this way.

The only reason to use AI to build is when you don't really care too much about things, you just want something, anything. An image here, some code there, a ridiculous video. Cheap thrills with no soul required.

Idk, I'd put it in the same category as doing a crossword puzzle, building a LEGO set, doing some DIY task around the house, etc. A nice diversion that's not entirely creative but stimulating enough, and at the end you have something functional/interesting or at least satisfaction that a particular problem has been solved. It won't change the world or your life or make a million bucks, but not everything has to.

Very much agreed.

There is a difference between learning woodworking as a fun hobby that would allow you to make a chair for yourself vs. doing it in hopes of turning it into a profitable business venture that would make an impact on the world.

By the grandparent comment logic, there is no point in doing anything, unless it can somehow lead you to making an outsized impact on the world. Thus essentially declaring most hobby pursuits (that are done mostly just for the sake of fun and learning) as wasteful.

The analogy would be more like just buying a premade wood chair and assembling it vs doing any actual woodworking.

> At the end of your life, if all you've done are little half baked throwaway projects, you might look back and realize one day you never made anything of any particular significance, just thrashed around building stuff people had already done so many times before that some unthinking, unfeeling LLM can spit it out almost verbatim just so you can say "me too".

The big difference is, prior to LLMs, that you spent no money but gained something in the process of doing that little half-baked throwaway project.

Now, you spend some money, and get nothing in return.

Those other projects certainly weren't actually totally free, and if that's youd issue, just use the free version of ChatGPT.

Some people, if not most, will at some point look back (and forward) in their life and wonder if they made anything out of it. And what they are really asking is "how much of an impact on others have I made?"

YMMV

and marketing something is the answer?

Indeed, if you make something that improved many people’s lives, you‘ll probably see it as a great success.

That often requires marketing it.

Sure, if all you did was work on a hobby, that wouldn't deliver satisfaction. But a hobby as a part of a life rich with relationships and people depending on you? Seems like a worthwhile pursuit to me.

You might as well be arguing for gambling as a form of leisure. That's okay, but don't delude yourself into thinking you're somehow being productive by pulling the vibecoding slot machine handle.