Worth Building
armstr.ng
armstr.ng
I think "polished" is doing some very heavy lifting in that sentence.
Don't get me wrong: I literally spend every weekday generating web UIs with Claude: I'm not anti-AI at all.
But to claim anything Claude produces as "polished" means limiting yourself to a very narrow definition of that term! If it didn't, people like me wouldn't get paid six figure salaries still (we'd be replaced by the AI that produces "polished" code).
If anything: too polished!
(Like the words in this blog post, by the way).
I think you can use these tools to get something very polished. I have found that a lot of people get "tricked" into thinking that their result is good, but the people making these things and the people with expertise in the domain are often not that close to each other.
It is valuable for a thing to get used to figure out if it's actually any good.
Though the obvious glib thing is a lot of people build these tools and then don't use it.
(No not you, person who decides to reply to this saying 'but _I_ use it')
Each time I've tried to get some Web UI going with the AIs, they all look terrible. They may work, but, they're terrible. I know they're terrible. I can't really express why they're terrible, just that I don't like them. So, I cannot really explain to the AI why they're bad so they can fix it.
Its just a blindness of mine that I've had forever.
tfmbot.com - an implementation of my favourite board game complete with ai that plays against you
thedailycheat.com - a save game editor for a game Newstower that was fun but a little grindy ao i asked ai to figure out the save game format and make this online save editor
grandcheaten.com - a guide and save game editor for jagged alliance 3
Basically all personal projects but i find sharing them out rewarding. Occasionally i’ll get abuse or large amounts of downvotes for daring to share ai generated content but, shrug, it’s useful to me and i’ve also had lots of messages of appreciation.
Which is silly because it doesn't help anything to deride creators that use the same tools the big corporations use.
I think the author nailed it with this sentence:
> The audience can be one person.
In the past, the effort it took to make a polished tool was much higher and hardly worth it for one self alone. We've pushed that bar up significantly.
Idk, maybe this is why compared to my peers I don't have much money, or the co-op I founded doesn't generate as much revenue as it probably could, but something just feels icky about it. I don't want to try to stick my head above the water of ten thousand of the same people doing the same thing. The effort to payoff ratio seems broken. I just want to build things, some of which are useful or fun. Maybe I'm too much of a dirty anarchist but it seems a lot more fun to me to make something and give it away for free that someone else is trying to charge for, than to try to monetize everything I do.
But I do wonder what's going to happen to indie game devs and hackers. I suspect that the burn-fast quick ramp up and validation strategy will begin fail, and what will make software worth paying for in the future is software that grew slowly and proved out its usefulness, maintenance, and development cadence over a long period of time. Before, you could validate an idea relatively quickly, maybe now you can just pick a couple ideas, stick to them, and cross your fingers.
We will find out who's good at game design, and who was just OK at game design and really good at coding.
Whether you think it's doing a good job or not, I suppose that's your call
It's how we ended up with more niche job boards with scraped postings than there are altcoins and seven million sites that are nomadlist but in a different niche with bad data.
But that means that the product you are launching is trying to undercut 4.57$/mo for 0$/mo, which is a losing proposition. Any proposition that tries to undercut a market that has already been driven to bottom prices will die of hunger.
Also, in terms of execution, there's a design choice "recent lookups" that is quite unconventional, and will kill the trust of your product, and your personal reputation.
By leaking your user's input and data, you have outed yourself as someone that cannot be trusted with user or commercial data.
You have died twice, first from hunger and then from reputational death. I am in a better position for having launched nothing than you are in for launching this.
What if I'm doing this on purpose on my own dime, to kill for profit corporations out of spite?
Aka the Manfred Macx doctrine of startups.