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Comment by whstl | Hacker News Reader

I think this is perfectly fine.

If you explore Github, you're gonna see thousands of abandoned game engines, compilers for made-up languages. And that has been happening since before the LLM era.

I used to be part of an OS messaging board in the early 2000s and almost everyone had their own OS. A dozen people or so could even run Firefox! I remember (now legend) Terry bothering us to check out LoseThos or GodOS or whatever was its name, but quite a few people had OSs that could do more than that.

Not all software needs to be commercial to be useful, even if it's just for a learning experience. I have learned a lot from those experiments, even if they're not polished.

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> If you explore Github, you're gonna see thousands of abandoned game engines, compilers for made-up languages. And that has been happening since before the LLM era.

Yeah, but the people authoring those learned something.

> I used to be part of an OS messaging board in the early 2000s and almost everyone had their own OS.

Great example! I, too, once had my own toy OS, and browsed OSDev wiki nonstop. The thing is no one in the OS dev community were writing things they intended to place in front of actual users!

The difference now is that these incomplete projects:

a) Don't leave their owners any wiser than when they started, and

b) Are actually intended by their owners to be used by actual users.

> I have learned a lot from those experiments, even if they're not polished.

Would you have learned as much if you told a magic box "Make me an OS" and then slapped your name on it and uploaded it to GH?

Probably not, but sometimes I wonder if the lowered activation bump lets more people try it, even if they just vibecode the whole thing, and maybe learn a thing or two in the process? They wouldn't learn as much as they would if they did it by hand, but they would've never done it by hand in the first place - so this is better maybe? I don't know. The whole field is in a weird place right now, all previous rules of thumb might be wrong.

My gut says there are fewer people in that group than there are people who would've learned something who now decided learning something isn't worth the effort. A net loss.

> Yeah, but the people authoring those learned something.

I've built tools myself with AI assistance and I've learned a bunch, and will still keep learning.

> (now legend) Terry bothering us to check out LoseThos or GodOS or whatever was its name

Temple OS :)

That was half memory-loss, half joke, since Terry was always changing the OSs name. Wish he was still with us, renaming it every year!

> Not all software needs to be commercial to be useful, even if it's just for a learning experience. I have learned a lot from those experiments, even if they're not polished.

This is fine so long as the author is learning something (questionable) and not polluting the commons with "I made this in a weekend" vibe slop.

> This is fine so long as the author is learning something (questionable) and not polluting the commons with "I made this in a weekend" vibe slop.

Almost all of my prototypes are made this way. "I made this in a weekend", is more often, "I made this in a day". Like any trad-coded project, time to vibe code a backend vs frontend time is 1:N

> This is fine so long as the author is learning something (questionable) and not polluting the commons with "I made this in a weekend" vibe slop

This is exactly the same as demanding, that people who post their thoughts always post original, useful thoughts. It's just not going to happen. Making something easy will increase the total volume and the majority of that volume will be junk. It's inevitable. What is needed is a search engine for quality software. Perhaps LLMs can do that, since they are better at understanding concepts than generating them.

LoseThOS didn't burn through hundreds of thousands of dollars of expensive and environmentally questionable compute.

True! It just burned though other forum contributors patience! I miss the Terry from back in the day (early 2000s?) though.

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