Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/its-ok-to-use-coding-assistance-tools-to-revive-the-projects-you-never-were-going-to-finish/

88•speckx•5h ago

Comments

cyanydeez•1h ago

There certainly is some relaxing value in working on projects to vibe code them; but not enough to pay some random corporation. Get yourself a Mac Studio or AMD395+ and pi or opencode, and a few plugins and they're pretty capable. Since they're not speed demons but reliable compaions who are always there, you don't ever feel compelled to constantly attend to whatever they're doing.

And when you inevitably get bored with it, well, you've not done much anyway. You can always get back up to speed in a month and have the LLM remind you of what it was doing.

AntiUSAbah•1h ago

I find $200/month for the pro/max subscriptions cost prohibivitve, but as a software enginere $20/month is just lunch.

And with a Claude or GPT $20 Subscription, i can do other fun things too like using it for real things (emails) or image generation.

A Mac Studio or AMD395 is neither of it. And its not just a basic setup either. I need to buy it, configure it, put it somewhere. That alone is a grand and more + a whole weekend.

IanCal•1h ago

Buying hardware is paying a "random corporation". Make the massive hardware purchase after finding out if you have enough demand to buy rather than rent,

kowbell•1h ago

> And when you inevitably get bored with it, well, you've not done much anyway.

I'm very interested in Local LLMs but the cheapest Mac Studio right now is more expensive than 8 years of a Claude Code Pro subscription, and incomparably slower/less capable. If I get bored with it, I will have a piece of unused hardware and a couple grand less in my bank account.

politelemon•1h ago

If you already have a gaming pc, then it's worth exploring as the cost of boredom is negligible.

kowbell•55m ago

I did tinker a lil with mine! RTX3080 with 10GB VRAM, 5600x with 64GB DDR4 - not very good but it was very fun and exciting to tinker with :)

My partner on the otherhand has an M3 Max 64GB which I've had way more success with. Setting up opencode and doing a tiny spec-driven Rust project and watching it kiiinda work was extraordinarily exciting!

binary0010•1h ago

I have opencode with qwen 3.6 on my local machine. Just get the setup right and it's surprisingly fun to work with.

kowbell•49m ago

I had a ton of fun setting up and trying it out locally (also opencode and one of the qwens.) I still don't have hardware powerful enough to feel like it's meaningfully productive, but all the learning I had to do (and all the bonus things I got curious about as the curtain peeled back) got my nerd brain all worked up, and finally seeing it work was exciting in that cool-new-experience way you don't often get to enjoy :)

binary0010•11m ago

Yeah this is exactly how I felt! Never really felt excited about llms or agentic workflows before. Getting everything setup 100% local and tweaking it to exactly what I want and having it actually working quite well has been a really cool experience.

binary0010•1h ago

Yeah. I setup opencode + qwen 3.6 last weekend.

It's actually really cool to have it work on some internal tooling and stuff while I work on my primary projects.

I'm surprised how easy it is to setup and that it can handle modestly complex planning and development flows.

nike-17•1h ago

[flagged]

dang•1h ago

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079

ogig•1h ago

My most abandoned type of projects are video games. I have a folder with tens of abandoned projects, I re-frame them as experiments at that point. This last week I decided to give Claude a go at one of these, and it's been a blast, it picked up the general path immediately. Since I said to CC they were abandon projects, he explicitly pushed into "lets have V0 game play loop finished, then we can compound and have fun = not giving up". Its been awesome at game dev, I gave him game design ideas, he comes with working code. I gave him papers about procedural algos, and he comes with the implementation, brainstorm items, create graphic assets (he created a set of procedural 2d generators as external tools), he even helped me build the lore. These have been one of the most fun times using a computer in a long time. Claude Code + Godot = fun. Going back to it.

aleksiy123•1h ago

On the topic of procedural, one thing I experiment with is having the llm part of the procedural loop.

Sort of writing a narrative on top live.

Unfortunately, local models are still a bit slow and weak but was interesting to see what it came up with nonetheless.

quietbritishjim•1h ago

I think this is the first time I've seen someone refer to an LLM as "he" rather than "it". No judgement, but I definitely found it interesting (and disconcerting).

folkrav•1h ago

I've heard it quite a bit before, but mostly from second-language speakers whose first language don't have impersonal third-person pronouns - e.g. French uses "il" or "elle" for all of "he", "she" or "it".

It doesn't help that the marketing leans heavily on anthropomorphizing LLMs either, IMHO.

osener•1h ago

It is common amongst French, Dutch etc speakers where saying "it said x" sounds unnatural.

Anonyneko•41m ago

Russian too. There is a subset of words which are referred to as "it", but for most words "he" or "she" are used regardless of whether these are living things or not. With loanwords we just decide by similarity to other words. Claude is definitely a "he" as the word is the same as a common male name.

This trips me up occasionally when I'm translating things into English. Once, when I referred to an indefinite gender player character in a gacha game as a "he" (because the word "player" is a "he"), quite a few people got mad! Even though in my head I was never trying to imply one way or the other.

Dou8Le•9m ago

For future reference, in this case you could use the singular "they" to refer to an ambiguously-gendered person or character. "<MC> drew their sword, for they would not tolerate such vile deeds."

mejutoco•1h ago

Reminds me of the main character of the show Mrs Davis. She insists on calling the ai it through the entire show.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14759574/

torben-friis•41m ago

I wouldn't read too much into it, it's natural for non native speakers. In Spanish for example, objects have grammatical gender as well, so it's easy to slip.

isjdkwjdown•17m ago

> No judgment

Yes judgment. Loads of it. Judge away.

This is just bizarre. Do not refer to this product of marketing-technology as you refer to a person. EVER.

dsvf•8m ago

As a native German speaker, I have also referred to a chatbot in English as "he", and similar to you, a native English speaker, felt jarred by it. It was definitely not out of any personification or humanization though. In German, I would say it is "der Chatbot" (from "der Roboter"), which in German is a male noun so I would refer to it as "er" (the male pronoun) - which in my head I autotranslated to "he". Most of the time, though, I think of it (and refer to it) as an LLM, which is "das Sprachmodell" (neutrum), so I automatically translate it to "it".

So that's another, maybe more harmless reason for it.

arcatek•1h ago

Isn't Godot a little ill-designed to work well with LLMs? for example I ended up a couple of times with incorrect tres files, and letting the llm generate IDs feel a little fragile.

operatingthetan•1h ago

I have taken many stabs at it and Claude will produce stuff but the output is very far away from useful. E.g. "I've created a road and beautiful trees" and what I see is a mess of colors and shapes.

ogig•57m ago

I concur it's bad at directly visual concepts, your prompt is akin to the svg pelican. What I do is asking him for procedural algos, automatas, quadtrees, layered noises, and rig those into the game. Yes, it can't "make the next gta", but with a reasonable scope and knowing what it does best, it has been very easy for me to produce satisfying results.

cyclopeanutopia•46m ago

Would you care to show a few pictures?

ogig•25m ago

Sure! Two are gameplay pics. An enemy sprite sheet generation, and the results of the map generators. Of course these are basic placeholders for a few hours of work, but I will definitely go heavy on this route with more layering and details.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A7kfcjHjSmCNidqc9t731uoglzL... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Bl_n0ECqc78LGGf7SsOx38mRUOP... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JMcgzqcnZ2ncboeyAXvscRWagqR... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-luJ6y7YslNfwmFnCdIDbJ871i0... https://drive.google.com/file/d/14n4TLAVywk_1GMhLLGOuukQwUmb...

operatingthetan•31m ago

My problem is I don't really have video game engineering experience. I was going off a concept that a different AI nailed with video creation and was trying to replicate it in the game engine.

ogig•1h ago

I had very few issues, sometimes I had to direct CC to the godot docs and we could keep moving. Specifically the tile configuration was a "read the docs" moment. All the functionality is available through code, so nothing CC can't reach afaik. Is there any LLM oriented game engine?

kowbell•1h ago

Are any LLMs suited at directly modifying game scene/asset/prefabs for any engine?

riddlemethat•1h ago

What’s fun for me these days is picking up a project I started with an LLM doing agent driven development a few months ago or even a year ago and hit a wall and stopped being able to be picked up by the latest version of Claude and/or codex and bringing it further. Some can now launch some still are too complex for the agent to build. But, it’s getting easier and easier to build personal apps. We are not far off from being able to say “Alexa, build me an app on my iPhone that lets me take pictures of the food in my fridge to compile the nutritional benefits and sync it with my workout app then compare it to the ideal ingredients I should eat based on my fitness goals in my health app and have it set to send me emails where it can find me better ingredients to buy that are cost effective, local, and meet my diet restrictions” and in 15 minutes that app suddenly exists.

maccard•36m ago

I’d love to see your attempts at this. I think we’re close to something vaguely resembling this at a first glance but nothing that actually works.

sdevonoes•1h ago

But why give Anthropic/openai our money? Nonsense. Use open models

theshrike79•1h ago

The author got $50 free credits.

Also Anthropic is by far the best, open (local) models are glorified autocomplete at best unless you casually have 20k€ worth of hardware at home.

eikenberry•1h ago

Why assume local when you can easily use any of the open models via openrouter or any number of similar services.

binary0010•1h ago

Disagree. Qwen 3.6 and opencode have built and helped plan entire feature sets such as vectorizing and searching, setting up UI to manage categorized search data. Some test systems around this, etc.

Very usable locally assuming you setup your local tooling correctly and you are an actual programmer who can generally help drive this stuff correctly and not just a vibe coder.

AntiUSAbah•1h ago

Quality, simplicity, speed.

I have a ML Setup with 2 4090 and 128gb of ram, its warm when i use them for finetuning or batch processes.

I do not run them for coding. Its a lot easier and nicer to play around with better models for just 20 $.

operatingthetan•1h ago

Well they are subsidizing us for starters.

dang•1h ago

[stub for offtopicness]

[we've hopefully deprovokified the title now]

WaxProlix•1h ago

To use agentic what? Off topic as heck but I really dislike this trend of coercing adjectives into true nominals - we're using programmatic! - like some sort of even-more-obnoxious variant on the verb to noun ('the ask') process.

Why does it bother me so? I have no idea.

tensegrist•1h ago

blame the hn title rules (although i would just have substituted "AI")

i doubt anyone is nouning "agentic" of their own accord (yet)

operatingthetan•1h ago

Just "leaders" at consulting firms mostly

sailfast•1h ago

It’s ok to use coding assistance tools for anything you’d like! Not that you needed the permission of some random on the internet.

hard_times•1h ago

Oh? How very kind of the author to allow me to.

theshrike79•1h ago

> In my mind there are different buckets for personal projects. One is things I do to learn and grow and the other is things I really wish existed.

Pretty much 100% of projects I've done with vibe coding/engineering is in the second category. Stuff I need that either doesn't exist or exists, but is either horribly complex to configure or is a mess of 420 features even though I just need one of them.

It's a lot easier for me to implement that one specific feature just for myself than keep vigilant on an existing app's eventual scope creep as it progresses to the eventual ability to read email[0] =).

[0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

ozim•1h ago

With AI coding I was able to build three applications I always wanted but never had time to code them.

Now it is different in a way — I don’t have time to use them.

bdangubic•1h ago

projects you were never going to finish should stay projects that are never finished :)

throwatdem12311•34m ago

effort needed used to be a gatekeeper for bad ideas

now Claude will gas you up and tell you your bad ideas are actually the most amazing thing it’s ever heard

jedberg•9m ago

12 years ago I tried to make a simple app for myself. It would display bars that got smaller as the day/week/month got shorter, and would show the weather as a set of bars between max temp and min, cloud cover, etc.

I got it working well enough to display what I wanted in text and ascii, but I could never get the interface good enough to want to use it daily, and certainly couldn't get the graphical interface working. I threw it a Claude Code, told it what I wanted the graphical interface to look like, and let it run.

It got an app exactly what I wanted, and even found a bug in the date parser that I hadn't noticed. I now have it running in the corner of my screen at all times.

The next app I'm going to build is an iPhone app that turns off all my morning alarms when the kids' don't have school. Something I've wanted forever, but never could build because I know nothing about making iPhone apps and don't have time to learn (because of the aforementioned children).

Claude Code is brilliant for personal apps. The code quality doesn't really matter, so you can just take what it gives you and use it.

codybloem•4m ago

When it comes to side projects, most of the time, if the spirit isn't willing I find it not worth doing. Process/experience over results, I call leisure. Results over process, I call work. If you have many side projects done mainly for the results, than you are working in your free time, and looking at it like that: is it really free? The modern age already requires of us more results than the spirit is good for. I say: leave the side projects for the good of the spirit. An exception could be results for the greater good that one really believes in. This can give purpose and enrich the process and experience of doing.

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