The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

https://thoughts.hmmz.org/2026-05-31.html

by dmw_ng • 2 months ago

388 243 2 months ago

thoughts.hmmz.org

elliotbnvl6• 2 months ago

It seems like the author is overindexing on useful and underindexing on wonderful. He clearly had fun building these products — and in hindsight is disavowing them because they didn’t generate income? An oddly capitalist view of play.

Some really good points on how these bots are incentivized to reward mindless engagement though and the bit about voice transcription not producing useful writing landed. When the barrier to release drops the quality naturally does too.

I think the next stage of us learning to harness these tools is us building the ability to reach for excellence even when we are not required to. To accustom ourselves to going beyond minimum viable bar for functionality and to reach for qualities or standards beyond that which the AI brings to the table unaided. A new kind of engineering rigor.

I move that this was always true and is now only far more so.

xendo6• 2 months ago

In the old days, producing all those things would be tremendous learning opportunity. Today it's a pure waste, not producing income is not a problem, not producing anything is.

elliotbnvl6• 2 months ago

If it wasn’t a learning opportunity to build those things, that was the waste. You can learn from an AI far more easily than from a book — only now it’s far more easy not to and many people unconsciously choose that route.

naasking5• 2 months ago

Learning how to use AI effectively was the learning opportunity here, what was created is completely incidental. You're effectively obsessing over programming languages obscuring the machine code that actually runs. "Imagine all the missed learning opportunity of digging into all that machine code!"

Sure, but also, who cares? The machine code is completely incidental for most purposes.

cardanome• 2 months ago

He clearly had fun building these products

The author did not build those products. AI did.

And I don't read anything indicated they had fun.

There is pleasure in making something yourself. There is learning. There is pride.

With generative AI you are just stealing other people's work. You are learning nothing. Anything could have generated the same projects. There was no skill involved, just enough disposable income to pay for tokens.

And yes some people develop some weird psychosis and think that they did the thing and not the AI. Everyone else is vibe coding but they got the special sauce, the perfect prompts. They are delusional.

elliotbnvl6• 2 months ago

And I don't read anything indicated they had fun.

Maybe I'm just projecting. I enjoy making things. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Sounds like you don't.

There is pleasure in making something yourself. There is learning. There is pride.

You're speaking second person, when you should really be speaking first person. You enjoy making everything yourself, by hand. That is fine. It's also your personal perspective.

You are learning nothing.

If you really aren't learning anything, you're doing AI wrong.

Everyone else is vibe coding but they got the special sauce, the perfect prompts. They are delusional.

The delusion here is constructing a strawman out of the worst qualities you can imagine and berating that instead of actually looking at what other people are doing and trying to work out what they're thinking / how they feel. I can guarantee you that virtually nobody thinks they are the only person that can prompt a particular piece of software into existence.

I know this post probably won't land with you, because I'm a little annoyed while I write it (if only because your post comes off emotional and annoyed as well) (and, sorry in advance), but I do encourage you to consider that perhaps there are other worldviews than the clearly embittered and deeply entrenched one you've espoused. And perhaps those other worldviews are more suited to surviving the oncoming storm.

GuB-42• 2 months ago

It is not just about not generating income, it is also about learning very little.

I like to compare AI to GPS navigation. At least my experience of it. With GPS, I enter my destination, follow the direction and get to it. Problem is, I have no idea how I got there, I didn't pay attention to the landmarks, time and orientation, only to the arrow on the screen telling me where I should go, I learned nothing and should I go back, I will need the GPS again. And if the GPS is wrong, maybe because some road closed and it didn't get the update, too bad.

One may argue that using AI is a skill, yeah, sure, as much as following an arrow on a navigation screen is. It is nothing like actual development/navigation.

Personally, I have a terrible sense of direction, so I fully embrace GPS, and importantly, it isn't my job, no one pays me to navigate (they would want their money back anyways :)). But programming is my job, and I believe that if I want to keep it, I have to offer more than mindless vibe coding, that is a part that anyone can do, and practicing is the way to go. And even without the capitalist view, passion is about doing things the hard way because it is more rewarding, the easy way is wonderful at first, but it gets boring quickly.

Now, more specifically for AI, I think it has its uses. It can be a good rapid prototyping tool. I used to write some quick and dirty scripts, but rewrote them completely in a different language, with proper design, once I realized it would grow in complexity and have to be maintained. The first part can be vibe coded, before scrapping everything and doing it over by hand before it starts to grow. It is not an AI problem, it is more like a language problem, plain english simply isn't great for telling computers what to do exactly, in fact it is not good enough for telling other people what to do precisely, that's why many professions evolved their own language, math, chemical diagrams, blueprints, music scores, etc... In fact, that why porting is what AI does best: it already has a precise description of what to do in a programming language, human programmers already did the hard work, the AI just has to translate into another programming language. In the best case scenario, someone even wrote unit test so the AI can go over if it screwed up.

xendo6• 2 months ago

AI make easy work even easier, at the same time it shortens the attention span making it more difficult to do any difficult work. That's why there is so little real progress despite huge productivity gains.

glouwbug• 2 months ago

I think the lack of progress is lack of understanding. If everything is generated and not viewed, does it exist? Like if a tree fell in the forest. Strip the observer and suddenly there is no universe. Strip the engineer and there is no codebase

brunooliv• 2 months ago

What if you then use AI to try and maintain only one, a single product into which you’ll put your care and craft to try to make something that’s better than “some dopamine hits”?

xendo6• 2 months ago

Sure, but for many folks the distraction is irresistible. It was difficult already to put care and craft into a product, having a slot machine for your attention makes it damn impossible.

gtirloni• 2 months ago

As someone constantly nerd-sniped, the difficulty is that our instincts are still being formed about what this current era of AI tools can and cannot do.

So when a blocker or an idea pops up, it's very easy to use that magic-like tool to solve it quickly and then go back to whatever it's you were doing before.

However, if you care about the quality of your output, that won't be a quick detour. It will pile up with the other "quick" tasks you were doing simultaneously and that's how you end up with 5-10 sessions working on totally unrelated projects.

toomuchtodo• 2 months ago

Shades of https://xkcd.com/1319/

542458• 2 months ago

That’s how I use it. I might be working on two or three features at a time (iterating, iterating, iterating…), but they’re all scoped and of user value; I don’t feel that I’m just off chasing rabbits.

But I’m also one of those people for whom the “fun” was always solving human problems rather than solving computer problems. I can see how if you are in the latter category AI has already sucked out a lot of joy and how rapidly project switching could be the least-unfun option.

peab• 2 months ago

That's funny, that's the exact conclusion I'm starting to come to

viccis• 2 months ago

exploring AI as a lens in Marshall McLuhan-like thinking

I would be wary of using McLuhan-like media analysis of AI. His central argument is that media are tools that extend man's ability. A calculator or a spell checker extend our thinking and writing. AI does not extend those abilities so much as it completely replaces it.

The way in which it does resemble media is insofar as it captures the same urge that McLuhan wrote about to see ourselves extended into the world. McLuhan tied this to the myth of Narcissus. The difference is that where Narcissus falsely believed it wasn't him and fell in love with what he saw, we falsely believe the image we see is ourselves and fall in love with it.

gdulli• 2 months ago

A calculator does replace our ability to do math in a certain sense.

At the grocery store there's countless (no pun) opportunities to do math in the sense of comparing prices and calculating unit costs etc, but most people can't do that math easily in their head because the calculator has made that skill less important.

But people also don't pull out the calculator repeatedly to do this in the grocery store, so the math just doesn't get done.

tolerance• 2 months ago

AI does not extend those abilities so much as it completely replaces it.

These two elements (extend/replace) are not mutually opposed according to McLuhan's tetrad.

hyperhello• 2 months ago

The lucky normies have work to do, and they use their attention to meet the challenges. Us unlucky different-brained folks operate more like we have a lot of attention, and we have learned to fill it with computer stuff. AI is great for filling it but it’s often ultra processed weirdness and doesn’t seem to leave a trail of learning and productivity.

senordevnyc• 2 months ago

I have ADHD, and for the last 2+ years, virtually 100% of my AI-assisted coding has gone into one product, which is a SaaS that supports my family. I have no end of ideas for little side projects, things to spin off, components I can open source from what I’ve built, etc. But unlike when I was younger (I’m old now), I’ve been able to resist the siren song of the ADHD side quest, and instead channel that towards the one project I know I should be focused on.

In other words, the issue isn’t the AI subscription, it’s the ADHD.

ruguo• 2 months ago

AI makes me far more productive, but I’ve lost quite a bit too. There’s less fun in coding these days, and it leaves me feeling adrift at times.

naasking5• 2 months ago

Coding has engaging parts, and plenty of drudgery. AI is generally good at the latter, and you don't need to use it for the former.

dawnerd• 2 months ago

For me the sweet spot has been next suggested edit. I’m still writing code but the autocomplete does make it faster. That’s made coding more fun for me. What’s not fun is prompting then waiting around to find out it’s not what you wanted.

naasking5• 2 months ago

and such little commitment to the outcome that the time is obviously wasted.

Why is it wasted? A powerful new tool was invented, and enthusiasts are exploring ways to harness it. They'll come away with the skill to wield this new tool effectively. The programs they're writing are completely secondary.

AI makes single purpose throw away tools easy to create. This is GREAT. I had to migrate an old Windows 2012 file server share to SharePoint. Microsoft's tools don't work on this old OS. Their SharePoint migration tool running on other machines on the local network constantly failed for nebulous reasons. I finally got fed up and spent a few hours with Gemini Pro and Claude and created a sync tool using C# that does the migration and keeps the network share in sync with SharePoint until we do the final cutover. I don't expect to ever use this tool again, and that's totally fine. I'll still put it on GitHub in case someone has a use for it, but I'm not sure why I should lament the fact that this tool exists and may never see another use or the fact that I won't maintain it.

Don't waste your life playing with shiny new toys, sure, but learning how to use AI by creating things is not a waste of time.

slashdave• 2 months ago

This is not an AI problem. Or rather, AI just made it worse. Focus can be hard. The thing is, AI can help you focus, by making code maintenance easier too.

Trasmatta• 2 months ago

AI makes code maintenance harder

drivers99• 2 months ago

On that last point, this technology is horrific for attention. It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends. Folk running 3 screens simultaneously working on totally unrelated "projects" they have little hope of maintaining, and such little commitment to the outcome that the time is obviously wasted.

This part reminded me of a recent article and it’s interesting that he brings up ADHD because that’s probably the bigger issue then. Because what I got from the article and the related conversation, specifically the top comment:

> Sometimes, tools don’t move the needle because there’s no needle to move.
It reminds me of something my old CS mentor, now elderly, had said about LLMs a few months ago: "it's a force multiplier, but there has to be some force to multiply."

From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254336

The fact that it turned out that “Human Bottlenecks” post was written by the same person who wrote “Notes on Managing ADHD” which I had printed and studied for tips not that long ago made sense.

So, to connect the dots, the fact he made all of those things without them being part of a bigger plan is, I think, the problem. In the framework of the above quote, there’s no needle there, nothing to multiply.

I’ve been trying to think more about whether what I’m doing is going somewhere, or if I can skip it and simplify things.

dangus2• 2 months ago

I think this blames the technology way too much.

Except for the SaaS, almost none of this is useful and I don't want to maintain any of it.

So don’t. Nobody’s twisting your arm.

Nobody told the author to sit down and write a bunch of random useless stuff.

This is like blaming your bicycle for enabling you to stop at too many shops that you didn’t mean to go to when you originally meant to ride straight to the grocery store.

ianm2182• 2 months ago

I don’t think he’s blaming the technology he’s saying that AI is like crack for people with certain types of ADHD who are always thinking up new projects or going down rabbit holes.

I can relate to this greatly I have started dozens of projects since last summer but have been having a hard time turning these into real value. Not even money but just something that people find useful beyond my own learnings.

gitaarik4• 2 months ago

You mean like how bikes are like crack to people that are always out and about to do useless errands?

Yeah I think we should protect these people from accessing these technologies, because they clearly can't handle it!

dangus2• 2 months ago

AI isn’t an addictive thing at the level of sugar, nicotine, or alcohol.

We can’t blame bicycles or dumbbells for exercise addiction.

You started those projects because you felt like starting those projects.

Jordan-1172• 2 months ago

In recent times, at least once per month someone sends a screenshot for an awesome tool they are working on. I'm like whoa, that's really something and the sender is obviously proud and enthusiastic. I try not to ask, but am always thinking "and where will you market it?"

What a strange perspective. His dismissal of the long list of projects at the top is also odd.

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?

I spent the last weekend vibing some plugins for Quod Libet -- a custom bookmark/preview function, a click-to-jump lyrics sidebar, thinking about a search-within-lyrics thing now. It all works beautifully, but I have no illusions about it being some kind of moneymaker -- heck, I doubt it's even worth the time beautifying/minimizing the code to get it acceptable to submit to the Github. But it makes me happy and makes using my library more enjoyable. Isn't that enough? Do they go around asking garage tinkerers and hobby crafters what their marketing plan is, too?

deadbabe2• 2 months ago

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.

Jordan-1172• 2 months ago

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.

lelanthran6• 2 months ago

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.

YesBox• 2 months ago

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

FabHK• 2 months ago

and marketing something is the answer?

linkregister• 2 months ago

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.

cmrdporcupine2• 2 months ago

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.

slopinthebag• 2 months ago

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.

jmward01• 2 months ago

Wow. To me the point of code has always been the crazy ideas and playing around. I love to create just for me and every once in a while for others is ok too. If you only think of code as 'a tool to build useful things' and everything else as wasted then sure, this is the philosophy for you. However, creating a bunch of random not going to follow up on it but I explored and played moments seems like a plus and not a negative to me.

DJBunnies• 2 months ago

Playing with legos is fine if you can afford them.

mrkeen• 2 months ago

OP paid a machine to have those moments instead of him.

hparadiz13• 2 months ago

As opposed to the old days when people would just blindly copy/paste random shit from Stackoverflow?

Ya'll need to stop with this cope. It's not a good look.

onel• 2 months ago

Yeah that's a good point. With these side projects, the pleasure is in the tinkering, and just playing around with an idea

techblueberry• 2 months ago

It’s not binary, it’s a plus until it’s not. I agree with the author that the problem is “what happens if code is free” can change the incentives so much you forget why you were there in the first place.

You’re very reasonable response may be “well, why don’t you just do more of what you want to do and less of what you don’t want to do” but that’s not how incentives work.

You could talk about revealed preferences, and how obviously if this person did these things maybe that’s obviously what he wanted to do. And great, feel good about that.

There’s an uncomfortable reality for most of us normies (maybe not popular with the libertarian HN crowd) that an increase in freedom can make it much more difficult to find meaning and purpose. Friction can be good actually.

I do theorize that this is one of the mechanisms by which productivity could be tanked by AI.

skydhash6• 2 months ago

That reminds me of a "We get Letters" by Michael W. Lucas[0](FreeBSD Journal)

The most important point was:

  It’s uncomfortable. The discomfort is the point.

  Pain is the greatest teacher, but nobody willingly 
  attends her classes.

Learning what's important is only truly possible after loosing it (or not having it in the first place). Having anything granted to us does not prepare for when it's taken away and it's also blinds us on what other possible paths there is.

[0] https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/journal/browser-based...

dgellow• 2 months ago

What did the author learn through their experience? They learned how to get AI to generate those projects, but that's pretty much it.

With such a list of side projects you would learn just SO MUCH by doing it yourself, which IMHO is the whole point of playing around and what makes the experience satisfying. Here they get the artifacts, but nothing else.

Certify7513• 2 months ago

AI reduces the time cost of making the initial product, bypassing the need for genuine commitment, investment, strong interest, and dedication - which are vital in keeping a project alive.

Every time you need to make an update, you need to bring up the old context, or otherwise get the AI up to speed, which especially if you're using one of the frontier models could be a significant financial drain long term.

You don't get the same dopamine hit too, because you're just making boring updates to something which you threw together in 5 minutes with zero effort. The time and financial cost of building all this stuff may have been better spent on one, good, properly architected project.

Maintaining the project manually also assumes you can quickly understand the codebase which has been produced, otherwise you're completely dependent on Anthropic and them maintaining prices which you can afford. Bearing in mind that as you add new features, the cost of getting the LLM to understand the project increases, right? I might have a naive perspective here.

All that being said - sometimes there really are one-off niche things that are just for personal use that you do continue to use long term. Usually the simpler stuff where you can easily grasp the codebase at a quick glance. It's also great for debugging back and forths.

Personally I just run my local setup with a bunch of MCP stuff and the primary way it helps me is to keep me functional and on task. In some ways it's good if the AI can supervise you as opposed to you supervising it - at least from an ADHD perspective.

It's an interesting idea for sure, I like this article and agree with it.

joshuamoyers• 2 months ago

article points out a real problem - simplicity is one of the hardest things to achieve. the act of reduction is important.

buts its a refreshing that there is an initial list of half baked projects, i suppose meant to evoke horror at the untidiness and wasted time. but honestly each of those projects sound cool as hell. not necessarily durable - but who cares. i’d argue there is a skill, one that is different than traditional programming, that the author was building up over that period.

discipline is important. focus is hard. but allowing yourself to play is not a bad thing at all and i dont think building little interesting side projects should be a shameful act.

linsomniac2• 2 months ago

I've been having the opposite experience; I've been GAINING focus through AI use.

In my day, when there's something that is distracting me from moving my objectives forward, I'm asking "Can AI help me automate this?" The answer is surprisingly often "yes". I call these "rough edges" and have been doing a lot of work over the last few weeks to "file the rough edges down".

bsiverly2• 2 months ago

Same. I focus on the part that matters. As someone with ADHD I feel like AI is a salve for my mind. I used to listen to intense EDM while working. Now I sit in silence and talk to my agents. I maintain inbox zero. I absorb and comment across all relevant projects, even outside my team. I literally feel like I have a support team for the first time.

danielbln• 2 months ago

This is me. I found AI to be an incredible provider of structure, focus and productivity, its an externalized executive function provider. No longer do I forget what last week's meetings were about, no longer am I paralyzed by seemingly I surmountable tasks it all just flows, and I get to rubber duck against an endlessly patient system. I love it, and I'm somewhat bewildered by some of the takes in this thread. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.

thingsilearned• 2 months ago

What's your setup for using voice with the agents and for handling your inbox zero? OpenClaw?

augment_me2• 2 months ago

I feel like the whole blog and the point can be reversed. If your bottlenecks are meetings and emails, and you make an agent take notes and summarize things for you, you gained focus to work on what you find meaningful.

He explains that this happens because knowledge work often relies on “pseudo productivity,” where visible busyness is treated as a proxy for real value. Digital tools reinforce this by making people look active: sending more messages, producing more drafts, attending more meetings, and generating more work artifacts. To avoid the trap, he recommends measuring real outcomes, identifying the true bottlenecks in one’s work, and separating deep work from shallow work so that digital tools support meaningful progress instead of consuming attention.

---

Like, you are just as well make the argument that if you replace the pseudo-work, you end up with 8 hours of deep work for things that bring you value.

prmoustache• 2 months ago

your bottlenecks are meetings [...], and you make an agent take notes and summarize things for you.

An agent taking notes and summarizing things is of no use. You are supposed to participate to a meeting, otherwise it is just a memo and the meeting doesn't have to take place. The correct solution is just to not attend it if you know you aren't requested to participate and are just here to grow the numbers and make your company waste money.

AlecSchueler• 2 months ago

Has it been part of a longer term shift or just something for the past few weeks? What will happen once all the rough edges are filed down?

linsomniac2• 2 months ago

I've been using the AIs heavily for ~3 years, but really about Feb/Mar I feel like they really ticked up in quality. For about the last 6-12 months I've been using them to file off the really rough edges ("build a CLI tool that implements commands to simplify this workflow"). The last 2-3 months my tooling has felt really competent, and so it was only really the last month where I felt like I could reasonably start having it automate the more subtle stuff.

What will happen once all the rough edges are filed down?

You're new around here? ;-) Or maybe I'm just old and jaded, and feel like there's always infinite more work to do. My boss, the CTO, has said "if you are getting twice your pre-AI work done in half the time, the rest of the time is yours." Unfortunately that statement came after "I'm not sure how the CEO feels about this but..."

My company has 25 years of tech debt built up, and the AI tooling has allowed us to make amazing headway on that, but I'm ~5 years from retirement, even working 10X I'm not expecting we can catch up in that time.

tyleo• 2 months ago

I wrote about this a little bit today too. You’re up against a dopamine machine that writes code for you.

https://www.tyleo.com/blog/the-terminal-star

A lot of good comes out but it can be hard to separate from the parts that just take advantage of your brain.

frozenseven• 2 months ago

Cal Newport is a grifter whose one and only output nowadays is posting anti-AI rhetoric.

propter_hoc• 2 months ago

This actually really resonates with me, particularly the part about his AI tools for blogging and note taking.

I have zero interest in AI note-taking apps. I write notes for myself to process the meaningful outcomes of a meeting. My notes are short, only capture stuff I actually think I will care about in the future, and after I've written them I have a better mental model of the meeting than I did before.

If I gave the task to an AI, no matter how advanced, it would produce much more unfocused content than the focused notes I am used to writing, and I would lose the process of synthesis that helps me absorb the meeting outcomes. More work product, but actually less productivity.

CoffeeOnWrite2• 2 months ago

Author sounds like they are missing meaning in what they do. If they had a life mission, AI is just an aid in accomplishing that mission, and they wouldn't get sidetracked by all the unfulfilling projects (modulus the ADHD, that has its own bearing on the experience using AI, and is the most interesting part of this post to me).

Perhaps at a population scale AI inhibits people from finding fulfillment.

But on an anecdotal basis, "just go find something meaningful". For some of us that "hate the AI timeline", we are still finding purpose and fulfillment by applying AI toward our personal missions.

godot2• 2 months ago

I agree with this. AI is a tool and amplifier. If one is already disciplined and strong-minded and has clear meaning and purpose in their life, AI is a very powerful aid in accomplishing missions. But I'm afraid most people in the world are not like that, too.

tete4• 2 months ago

Out of curiosity: What is your clear meaning and purpose in your life and the related missions?

chairmansteve• 2 months ago

Very well said. The author was noodling around bored, generating random crap on AI. Not surprising the result is meaningless junk.

sudosteph• 2 months ago

Only mentioning this because the OP did - but for me (also ADHD) it's kind of the opposite. I'm finishing side projects for the first time ever because I can actually get them working before I get bored of them. My projects are more infra-leaning, and not all of them get much use, but some do. Others let me explore certain ideas and then sometimes serve as a reference point later when I run into something that reminds me of that.

icauroboros• 2 months ago

I feel the same. I not sure if I have ADHD, but I always have 2 mode of focusing on something, first one is shot burst of focus and other one is real locked in mode where I forgot to eat or drink water. While second one is much better at delivering value it mostly activated on management/strategy games that I love :D But with AI assisted coding now I can really work on my side project while having first focus mode. Im just writing or designing the parts I excited about, and then I let AI to handle boring task.

onlyrealcuzzo• 2 months ago

I guess I'm between you and OP.

I've definitely spent too many sprints where LLMs told me that something would be easy and they could definitely do it, and then... 2 days later I'm still debugging their crap before it dawns on me... WTF am I doing with my time?!

Overall, I've built a memory safe programming language that solves a lot of problems I personally have - predominately in my spare time over 8 months - and I've learned A TON in the process.

I'm close to a release stage, and on top of that - I've built a lot of good tooling for Ruby that I think other people will find helpful once I polish it (especially if anyone plans to vibe code something non-trivial in Ruby - which I honestly wouldn't recommend).

But... I'm not really sure this is what I actually wanted to do with my time, and I'm constantly questioning how much time I'm sinking into this and why...

It started off as utter amazement of what LLMs can do, and then incredible frustration at what they can't do, and my unending desire to figure out why they're so bad at things so close to what they are exceptionally good at, and if there's anything I can do to bridge that gap.

That's partially what the language is designed for (before I even started using LLMs).

But after all this time... I'm not even sure I've really figured anything out tbh.

disiplus• 2 months ago

Diagnosed with ADHD, ultimately does not change anything for me even through i had the same idea as you. Reason is that i can now start even more stuff in parallel. And some part of them get finished more before i can just prompt more when in focus, but instead of finishing i add more features.

WhiteDawn• 2 months ago

Honestly it’s been amazing for me for similar reasons. Also diagnosed ADHD.

Starting projects has always been easy. But once I figured out the hard stuff and then had everything figured out and only saw the long road ahead of drudgery and pipe laying my motivation fizzles out unless my paycheck depends on it.

Now? I still get to figure out the fun hard part and then go send a cheap fast working dumb minion to do the tedium.

I’ve finished 3 things in the past month that have been on my hobby list for years with no progress. It’s been really freeing.

The real moment of truth will be if it’s still worth the cost for tasks that have human value and users but aren’t profitable, which is where most of my side projects live. At current rates it is for me, but once the VC subsidies evaporate then maybe not.

brailsafe• 2 months ago

I’ve finished 3 things in the past month that have been on my hobby list for years with no progress. It’s been really freeing.

For me, rather than cling to the notion that these are things I need to complete and should feel guilty about not having done so, I just started accepting that they either will be completed when the time is right if they're worth my focus, or they weren't meant to be completed and there's probably something better that's come along since starting. I usually keep them all in an archive as a timeline of tinkering and a record of how much time I didn't waste on trying to complete them

noisy_boy• 2 months ago

I am the same. Most my projects were infra leaning and I had a very general idea of what I wanted, not clear steps. I learned a ton in the process of cleaning up my home networking, understood network topology and restrictions, how to work around ISP imposed bullshit and setup a home network accessible remotely and securely. I also learned about stacks like Portainer/Adguard etc. Setting up Raspberry pi as a general purpose server including media serving via Jellyfin. Until you do it, even with the LLM doing the heavy lifting, you won't learn how to work around the issues.

I setup exactly one personal finance service/dashboard and one Android app for a specific purpose. Then I stopped because my needs were met. I'm sure I will get into it when I need to again.

You can either use it as a PoC testing enabler in which case it will be bunch of unfinished things. Or you can be deliberate and focused about your goals and the results will match that. Of course being a software developer helps.

OneAsterisk• 2 months ago

Also diagnosed. It has definitely helped me work on more things. Heck even before I got remedicated, it helped me build an MCP server to help create notes easier for my classes because I struggled with that.

But sometimes, I feel it is too easy to bounce from thing to thing.

theshrike793• 2 months ago

ADHD here too. So far I've replaced a few tools I paid money for with bespoke ones just for me. If I get a stupid idea of a feature I could add to something, I can just prompt the AI and go do something else. It'll wait for me to come back later.

I moved my docker compose stack to opentofu so that (in theory) I can just run tofu apply on any server and the setup will be 1:1 what I want and need.

Maybe some day I'll see if even AI can figure out NixOS :D

docheinestages• 2 months ago

We're still in the phase where we're having our first reaction to the software development lifecycle with the help of AI. We're quickly starting to realize what AI is making cheap, and where the new bottlenecks are. How most people are currently using AI is rather naive and superficial. One-shotting only takes you so far.

spudlyo2• 2 months ago

It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends.

You make this sound like a bad thing. ADHD isn't always about attention deficit, although it is right there in the name. It's more about attention dysregulation. For those of us prone to hyperfocus, working with AI can provide the kinds of stimulation we crave. I can hardly remember a time when I've felt more engaged with my work, more productive, and more badass.

I actually enjoy the collaborative programming process, and was pair programming with folks before the term was coined. At the end of the day I have the satisfaction of browsing the pretty, readable, DRY, maintainable code we end up with after rounds of refactoring and back and forth. I have always employed linters and code formatters, and this is no different, and my standards are still the same. I yell at the clanker about code duplication, hard-coded assumptions, tightly coupled logic, and in the end, while I don't understand the details of every algorithm, I really understand what we've built and the architecture we've designed.

cheschire• 2 months ago

Absolutely. I can't tell you how many times I've been in a conversation and halfway through a sentence I need to whip out AI to scratch the mental itch so I can continue with the conversation.

But prior to this I would rabbit hole. I would try desperately to remember some nuance, or I would not be able to move off a point until I got the validation I was looking for.

The worst is when speaking a foreign language and I hit some complex word in my native language that isn't present in my foreign lexicon. My brain just halts. It wants THAT word or phrase, not a 3 minute detour describing a whole concept.

AI has empowered me to move past these unnecessarily difficult speed bumps in my thinking.

gabrieledarrigo• 2 months ago

I actually enjoy the collaborative programming process, and was pair programming with folks before the term was coined

Yep, the same here, I'm a long pair programming enjoyer, but I'd like to raise that collaboration is usually meant with a human being in the context of pp, and prompting and agent to execute a task is nothing like that.

spudlyo2• 2 months ago

Prompting an agent to execute a task assumes you know what the task should be, have done some research on available options, weighed the pros and cons of various approaches, bounced your ideas off a colleague, have written a few test programs to validate your assumptions, considered how the new code will integrate with existing systems, figured out the parts that you should have tests for, and have generally charted a path forward that gives you a reasonable chance of success.

rossjudson2• 2 months ago

For me it's been useful as an idea categorizer: "oh well, that turned out to be a crap idea."

It's allowed me to clear out some long-standing brush on the forest floor. And burn it down once or twice.

bluegatty• 2 months ago

The point about interruptions is valid.

'Waiting for AI to finish' - even if it's only 1 minute segments, is real, especially if we are delegating. (Maybe I'm interrupted right now!)

But this - it's not the fault of the tool that you're not focused on building something useful, long lasting or material.

That's an entirely different question - and I think if you look into most people's 'experiment' folders, that tendency was always there. Just more code now.

That's on us.

throwatdem123114• 2 months ago

Every time I try to let Claude go off and do stuff on its own it’s always pinging me to approve something. Even in auto mode. Impossible to really run at length without either constantly having your focus broken, or just running it with permissions disabled. I do it in a container from time to time, but then by the time I get back to it sometimes there’s just so much slop it’s impossible to reason.

It’s a way of working that I really despise and if it’s the future of the profession I want nothing to do with it.

gitaarik4• 2 months ago

As developers, we often hack our own tools to make then behave in the way we want. But it does take some effort to look up documentation and to think of creative solutions. That's what makes a good developer.

throwatdem123114• 2 months ago

There’s a difference between a little one off back and completely reorganizing the entire industry around these hacks just to prove a point.

iainctduncan• 2 months ago

I wonder how many of the responses here bifurcate by age. The post resonates with me, but I am now in my early fifties. When I was in my 20's and 30's, I would have happily chased rabbits down all those holes, but now that time seems so brutally finite, I feel that anything encouring me to spend time on stuff other than what really matters is a strong negative. (Where "what matters" includes work, family, friends, and recreation).

When friends start dying within 10 years of your age, it's a hell of a wake up.

"I wish I'd made more throw away apps I never use" ... said no one on their death bed, ever.

nba456_2• 2 months ago

Of course it is. Young people are always more eager to adapt new tech while older people yell at clouds. AI usage is MUCH higher among young people.

mschuster91• 2 months ago

Young people are always more eager to adapt new tech while older people yell at clouds.

That's not just because young people have time like GP explained, but it is also because young people haven't been through the endless rounds of getting beaten up at work over daring to suggest that the "old ways" of one's superiors might be outdated, inefficient or just plain wrong.

a3764• 2 months ago

No, GenZ is AI critical, no matter what a one-liner optimized model trained to discredit comments says.

goatlover• 2 months ago

Not sure the college graduating class feels great about AI.

Aurornis5• 2 months ago

I think the bifurcation is between people who want to write code and people who want to have the end product of the code.

People who want to write code hate AI because it's doing the part they wanted to do.

People who want the end product of the code love AI because they want anything that helps them get to the end product faster.

The person who wrote this post feels oddly in neither camp. They like playing with the AI and seeing what comes out the other end. Some of the projects they boast about having built aren't even usable projects, like when they had it mock up a UI of a product and then got bored and moved on to the next before writing a backend.

groundzeros2015• 2 months ago

I don’t think this is the full picture. Plenty of people who like writing code are happy to delete code too.

FuckButtons• 2 months ago

Well, you are learning something, just the thing you’re learning has an even shorter usable lifespan than programming languages, namely you’re learning what works to get useful responses from ai agents. Whether or not that has value to you is a different matter, but it’s worth bearing in mind something is being learned, even if it’s not engineering or programming.

coffeefirst• 2 months ago

I’m not sure that’s true. All my side projects exist to scratch my own itch, so the appeal to hop straight from design to done is really appealing.

But it’s never really that straightforward.

There is some truth to the idea that some people enjoy it and others do not. I haven’t seen a pattern between them.

pydry• 2 months ago

The bifurcation is probably mostly just along the lines of slop tolerance than whether they "like" to code or whether they're a boomer or whatever.

There are a lot of people with high slop tolerance and who are seemingly prepared to endure the side effects of that.

tyoma• 2 months ago

Agree this is largely the hidden issue much AI discussion misses.

AI industrialized a previously creative output. If you enjoyed the writing of code this is a nightmare. If writing code was a chore to solve a problem, this is a blessing.

chamomeal• 2 months ago

I think the bifurcation is between people who want to write code and people who want to have the end product of the code

I think most developers are both! Depends on the task. Sometimes I want the result, sometimes I want the process.

Also sometimes, if I want the process, it’s because it’s something I want to have intimate knowledge of. There’s a practical benefit to writing stuff yourself, even if most of the time that benefit is tiny.

frankc• 2 months ago

I agree but I think its also more nuanced. I am also happy to use AI to operate at a higher level faster. I think that is somewhere in between. For instance, maybe I have some specific ideas and architecture I want to try for building a durable workflow engine. I dont just say 'make me a durable workout engine'. I'm very intentional about what it's doing at a system level but I am happy to cede the low level implementation details. If things work out, refactoring those details to my liking is also easy.

johndhi• 2 months ago

Agreed with this until the last sentence, haha! I recently have been building throwaway apps and it has helped me scratch a bucket list itch I've had since childhood. Father is a programmer but I could never figure it out until vibe coding.

jwr• 2 months ago

Similar age here. And I have similar thoughts, although not about AI specifically. AI helps me get more done and not spend time on trivia and yak shaving, which is great. I do get more projects done, but those are projects I always wanted to do, just never had the time (or, sometimes the motivation, because of yak shaving tasks).

I think the biggest difference is that I no longer care about what people think about me and how I am perceived, so the motivation to publish my work went down to near zero. I used to build open source stuff, I no longer want to spend time on preparing stuff for publishing, making it available, dealing with people who will inevitably want something of me eventually. There just isn't enough time.

I can still be baited into responding on HN for some reason, and I am trying to work on that, because that is the ultimate waste of time.

ALittleLight• 2 months ago

I don't understand the "deathbed" perspective. Are you going to wish you made more hackernews comments on your deathbed? Probably not. Does this mean you should stop using hackernews?

If you optimized for minimizing deathbed regret perhaps you'd regret that on your deathbed!

If I have cogent thoughts on my deathbed I expect they'll be along the lines of "I wish I wasn't dying" and not regretting the many ways I enjoyed my time on Earth (which includes vibe coding apps nobody uses).

throwaway98797• 2 months ago

yea find this so unproductive

as we grow we change

that is life

lots of things i cared deeply about 10 years ago that i don’t even remember now

i find self loathing a previous version of yourself to be a by product of religious thinking

yes the original sin is that you were born but for now you can enjoy your life do so

CrzyLngPwd• 2 months ago

I'm also in my fifties, and sold my first software (6502 assemblewr) when I was 17!

My younger self was always excited when the latest tech came out, when the latest MSDN arrived, etc. But the last 15 or so years, I totally lost interest. I still love writing code but the desire for the latest and greatest had fade.

These LLMs were dogshit for a while, but I would keep returning to them.

Now I am excited again.

I work on a large web project with lots of legacy that is slowly being rewritten and copilot and codex are helping a lot by first writing tests for the old code, and then converting to the new.

I thought we'd never finish, but now I can see how we can do it.

It's brought a bit of the fun back into the game.

sgustard• 2 months ago

Well, making throw-away things you never use could also be the definition of a hobby ... and hobbies are arguably good, and differ from "work" in that your goal is not to ship a product, but to scratch an itch. For some people AI assisted vibe coding scratches an itch. For others, not. Of course some hobbies turn into an unhealthy obsession, but that's not a new phenomenon.

csomar• 2 months ago

In my experience meeting people in real life, age wasn't the factor but programming experience. More seasoned developers tend to push back on letting LLMs run the full show. Less experienced ones are more open to it. Those with no experience at all, they are all in.

stanmancan• 2 months ago

This lands for me. I’m pushing 40 and over the last few years I’ve definitely been eliminating distractions. Anything with scrolling or algorithms meant to suck you in is gone. Deleting apps and blocking websites on my phone to prevent distractions. Phones getting much less use. Just yesterday replaced my Apple Watch with a regular watch.

lelanthran6• 2 months ago

"I wish I'd made more throw away apps I never use" ... said no one on their death bed, ever.

Yeah, it does make me wonder though - have these AI boosters never written their own tools before? I've written, for my own personal use, literally thousands of tiny little bash scripts, vim scripts, emacs scripts, Python programs, C programs, etc. I still daily use a music player (wish wrapper around mpg123) that I did in 2001[1]!

And yet, I'd be the first to admit that, for each 1000 things I wrote, probably 1 got permanent use for a significant length of time; the value, over time, to me was the lessons learned.

Now people are going through that cycle faster (i.e. instead of doing 5000 persona-use programs over 30 years, they're doing it in a single year), but the end result is still going to be the same - no one is ever gonna use it, including themselves!

It comes with an additional downside - you don't actually learn anything by having the AI generate your programs for you.

--------------------------------

[1] In case anyone is interested why I wanted a wrapper - it uses the locatedb so that I don't have to search for my mp3s:

    #!/usr/bin/wish
    # Copyright Lelanthran K. Manickum 2002, provided under BSD license
    #

    set version "1.0"

    proc playSong {songname} {
       set rc [catch { exec killall -9 mpg123 }]
       if {$songname=="\[Stop Playback]"} {
          .midFrame.lblPlaying configure -text "Stopped"
          return 0;
       }
       set rc [catch { exec mpg123 --loop -1 "$songname" & }]
       if {$rc==0} {
          .midFrame.lblPlaying configure -text "Playing: $songname"
       }
    }

    proc locateSongs {pattern} {
       .lstResults delete 0 999999999
       set tmpvar [split [exec locate -i "*$pattern*.mp3"] "\n"]
       .lstResults insert 0 "\[Stop Playback]"
       foreach title $tmpvar {
          .lstResults insert 1 $title
       }
    }

    frame .topFrame 
    frame .midFrame

    entry .topFrame.entSearchString -text "Search String"
    button .topFrame.btnSearch -text "Search" -command {locateSongs [.topFrame.entSearchString get]}
    listbox .lstResults -yscrollcommand {.sby set} -xscrollcommand {.sbx set}
    scrollbar .sby -orien vert -command {.lstResults yview}
    scrollbar .sbx -orien horiz -command {.lstResults xview}
    label .midFrame.lblPlaying -text "Stopped"

    locateSongs ""
    focus .topFrame.entSearchString

    bind .topFrame.entSearchString <Return> ".topFrame.btnSearch invoke"
    bind .lstResults <Double-B1-ButtonRelease> {playSong [.lstResults get active]}
    bind .lstResults <Return> {playSong [.lstResults get active]}


    grid .topFrame -row 0 -column 0 -sticky nsew
    grid .topFrame.entSearchString -column 0 -row 0 -sticky nsew
    grid .topFrame.btnSearch -column 1 -row 0 -sticky nsew
    grid .midFrame -column 0 -row 1 -sticky nsew
    grid .midFrame.lblPlaying -column 0 -row 0 -sticky nsew
    grid .lstResults -column 0 -row 2 -sticky nsew 
    grid .sby -column 1 -row 2 -sticky nsew 
    grid .sbx -column 0 -row 3 -sticky nsew 

    grid rowconfigure .topFrame 0 -weight 1
    grid columnconfigure .topFrame 0 -weight 1
    grid rowconfigure . 2 -weight 2
    grid columnconfigure . 0 -weight 2

    wm protocol . WM_DELETE_WINDOW {
        set rc [catch { exec killall -9 mpg123 } ]
        destroy .
    }

    wm title . "Simple Music Player - v$version"
    wm geometry . 700x500

footy• 2 months ago

I'm 39 and the post resonates with me too. I think it's more a temperamental or values thing than an age one, but I might be wrong.

elAhmo• 2 months ago

The author has a problem with spending too much time at computer.

root-parent• 2 months ago

For 20 years, Google had access to infinite amount of human based Phds, and fresh computer science graduates, and effectively unlimited budgets...and have been "hiring the best" for 20 years straight.

This what they have been spending their human tokens on: https://killedbygoogle.com/

They are a decreasing quality searching engine who shows ads. It has never been about intelligence, or lack of resources. Its about incentives and execution.

Your AI wont save you, or make you rich or increase your productivity.

rafterydj• 2 months ago

Wow. I've essentially been circling that exact thought for awhile now. But your blunt phrasing really strikes a chord with me.

johnbarron• 2 months ago

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/5/29/800046344/cartoon...

https://imgur.com/gallery/google-ai-sota-llDaUDr

chopete3• 2 months ago

I think they got most of it right. Whenever there is a tool that helps one super active, it is a one off cliff. Smart ones will figure that out and get back to using it for meaningful purpose. A small percentage weaker ones will get addicted.

Nothing different from all innovations.

maleero• 2 months ago

Your car can drive 100+mph, but it’s probably not a good idea to drive around corners, in town or in your neighborhood at top speed. LLMs are the same. They can go 1,000+MPH, but what you need and what’s safe is 20-80mph. Practice restraint and focus and LLMs will make you more productive and give you some good results.

tolya_• 2 months ago

"The output was unbridled garbage. Because the effort was removed, so was the commitment, and with the commitment the focus, and with the focus any meaningful product at all. " -- i've noticed that fact first when I started to use linux. It didn't click untill I've built Gentoo from handbook. The commitment: i've asked on Gentoo IRC and it turns out a lot of people had a similar story.

Then, I've built a keyboard for myself and I'm still using it. I liked the process and started to build them basically for giveaway. My hope was that it will help people who eager to switch to ergonomic keyboards but the bar is too high for them to build, to figure out things etc.. But it turned out that people who get it without this effort they just try, fail, and leave it dusting on the shelf. They lack commitment, nothing fuels their enthusiasm.

pkilgore• 2 months ago

AI is great for programs but every product ever kinda sucks if you don't understand a lot of things computers are pretty bad at, generally.

moomoo11• 2 months ago

what if…

we just used ai to improve products and services

instead of all this wanking off showing how you go through 1 billion tokens a month (not really that impressive)

what would be way more cool is

i made something that reliably saves others 8 hours a month of busywork

randomdev123• 2 months ago

I have a friend who considers himself very humanist. He is really into UBI and more into socialist than me. He is environmentally conscious, all the bells and whistles. He is also Catholic.

He always asked me to help him build this app and that app and thinks his ideas are million dollar ideas. He has ADHD.

Surprisingly, he really loves LLM. He doesn't care that LLM destroys knowledge worker bargains by stealing work without compensating the original authors. He doesn't care that LLM uses a lot of energy. He doesn't care that LLM will concentrate money in the hands of the few. He doesn't care that the Pope has a crusade against LLM. For someone with humanist tendencies this seems to contradict his beliefs.

All he cares is, "I can make apps now and my 5 year old kids are making games by prompting, and we can make money using this, those who don't will be left behind, including you".

rossjudson2• 2 months ago

Quoting:

"Because the effort was removed, so was the commitment, and with the commitment the focus, and with the focus any meaningful product at all."

This is the truth. Otherwise known as "easy come, easy go".

cladopa• 2 months ago

I don't thing the problem is AI, but the mindset and trainning. I have probably as many or more AI projects that this man has but they are extremely useful, even if most of them I won't even sell.

This is like a kid playing videogames instead of studying, you take the console away and force the kid in front of a book and the kid will spend most of his time looking at the wall and dreaming.

I am engineer with very deep programming background that have managed people, with real experience in the real world.

One of the best things about AIs is that you can test crazy ideas and create prototypes very fast. Only one in a hundred will work great in the real world, but you have to create the 100 before to know.

Creating the 100 before AI was extremely expensive, and took so much time.

For me it is liberating and gives me focus because I can spend so little time testing prototypes and spend real time in what is really important and works.

This is something I learned from game developers: If you are going to create a game, you spend a weekend testing the dynamics and the gameplay of your prototype to know if is is fun. You use boxes, no textures, no complex sounds of music.

Then if it works and is is so fun, you create the game! You can spend 2 years creating the game after that.

You don't spend two years doing a Game only to realise later that is not fun, and you either spend 3 more years or abandon it at this moment.

CamperBob22• 2 months ago

You don't spend two years doing a Game only to realise later that is not fun

That does happen on occasion, the commonly-cited example being Half-Life. How awesome would it have been if the Valve team hadn't had to waste so much time, money, and personal energy on their initial failed prototype?

Unfortunately most studios ship their failures, either because they don't realize they built something crappy or because the alternative is bankruptcy. A cynic would say that if AI can reduce the cost of experimentation, it will only result in more bad games, while an optimist would argue that it will result in more good games. I think we'll find that they're both right.

Aurornis5• 2 months ago

You don't spend two years doing a Game only to realise later that is not fun, and you either spend 3 more years or abandon it at this moment.

People do this all the time. It's such a common problem in startups that all of the books, courses, advisors, and everyone else with experience talks about finding product market fit early and shipping MVPs to validate the product.

It's the most common startup advice and people still ignore it and build unvalidated things for years anyway.

It's too easy to get started on your big idea and then switch to a rhythm of working on the next task without ever stopping to validate the big direction

prmph• 2 months ago

But it is also not always or often the best to flit from one idea to the other, never going deep, chasing signs of validation that may never come unless you put in enough work.

Almost any reasonable idea that is not obviously bad (as in having some clearly insurmountable technical or market hurdles, etc) can be made to work.

What makes ideas work (and this is what separates those with a true entrepreneurs mindset from those just playing the lottery of "MVP"s) is the creation of what I call a viability field around them.

When a person decides to create an app, or some other product, or a certain business, they have not exhaustively considered all the possible things they could do and decided that this is the objectively most viable thing to pursue. They commit to a space they like ot be in, that feels like a good match for their skills and temperament, etc.

Then, within the general idea, the key I think is to begin creating a product, the development and marketing of which acts as a substrate for the learnings you need to succeed in that market. AI used judiciously can help you to cover ground more quickly, or at least be a bit more fearless about attempting that.

Basically you should build something that allows you to learn, to pivot, to adapt as necessary until you find product market fit. Rarely, you'd need to throw everything out, but even then I often argue it is matter of personal decision rather than any fundamental roadblock. If you you are really committed to an idea, and have developed it enough (not just a 1 week MVP) to deeply understand its context, there is almost always a tangent you can take that brings you to success without throwing out everything.

bwfan1232• 2 months ago

friction = focus, focus = product

AI tools have put friction where it should be - by eliminating incidental friction. By incidental friction I mean, things that were really not ambiguous, but were made so due to lack of access to resources.

As an example, if i needed to navigate, I used a paper map. There was friction in pulling out a map, planning a route etc. This took time. With digital mapping apps this sort of incidental friction is not there.

Real friction is inherent ambiguity. For example, what product does the market need ? By eliminating incidental friction, AI allows us to focus on the smallest hard-problem where there is real-friction.

leedrake5• 2 months ago

This distinction between ambiguous and incidental friction is brilliant. Was just talking about it with my wife because your specific example of a map has been a running debate between us. I just pick the least cost path via the algorithm to the point where I have poor spatial awareness. My father in law insists on using paper maps because he wants to know where everything is to be helpful. For me, the ease of the algorithm solves incidental friction. For him, it eliminates helpful ambiguous friction by denying him the opportunity to learn.

The wrinkle that needs to be added is that there are no truly universal rules as to what counts for incidental vs ambiguous friction - the definitions are relative to individual/project goals. I am working with some scientific instruments to map out chemical data, and 3d modeling is needed. I don’t particularly care about 3d modeling - it is incidental to me. The chemistry is the focal point. So the STL files are vibe coded so I can keep my focus on chemistry. But if I were working for the latest marvel movie, the reverse would be true. The actual chemistry would need to fit the script and the visual effect intended. To a scientist the visualization just needs to be good enough. To the film director, the world building physics and chemistry instead become the supporting actor. The challenge introduced by AI is that in ruthlessly eliminating incidental friction, you are being deliberate about what you choose not to learn. This is fine at a task level - but how many of us “found” our current expertise through incidental friction in the first place? I never wanted to do chemistry, I went to school for something else. But incidental friction led to discovery. That is my biggest worry, particularly for students and early career folks.

bko• 2 months ago

Strongly agree. I would take it one step further, consider this line:

Slopping out a 10,000 LOC untested Python/JS mess in 5 minutes helps nobody. The thought of this happening in every commercial environment simultaneously is horrifying.

You should def try to commercialize your slop and get feedback. No one cares about your tech stack or whether it's maintainable. Does it add value? You'll get a strong signal as to whether it does or not. And adding value, picking the right problem in the right domain, that's the hard part. You can always re-write or clean it up. Didn't Javascript start out as a weekend project? (maybe not a great example depending on how much you like JS)

0xbadcafebee• 2 months ago

It's pretty much impossible for any positive story about AI to get upvoted here, isn't it? Positivity and normalcy doesn't get clicks

djeastm• 2 months ago

If you can find a positive AI story to submit I'll upvote it

mannanj• 2 months ago

It seems to me with the rise of astroturfing and lies and deceit being more normalized, the benefit of using these AIs goes disproportionately to the AI companies who get experienced senior engineers training data.

And they get to convince people to pay them to give away their most intimate nontraining data and secret ideas to a for profit entity.

miguelallamand• 2 months ago

Love the idea of the ADHD amplifier!! It’s so true, being a profound ADHD person i have made many (more than i’m willing to admit) throw away apps with AI. I must say some are pretty useful and i use on a daily basis, but all could’ve an excel heheheeh Love and hate AI

Lerc• 2 months ago

It puts me in mind of making a jig when woodworking. Make the thing when you need it. You don't need to maintain it, you don't need to sell it. It does it's job and you move on. If it does the job really well maybe you keep it around for next time, maybe you refine it if you use it often.

Never be ashamed of making useless things, the really useful things are hiding amongst them.

If having fun is interfering with your productivity, that isn't necessarily a problem, it is only a problem if it interferes with your livelihood.

If Robots are to take all our jobs, we need to retain our livelihoods. Then we all could perhaps have fun making the things we want to make for the pleasure of making them.

I too have ADHD, perhaps it is different for me because I began medication about the same time the models got good, but I have worked on some individual projects for longer than I could have earlier.

I don't spend all day typing prompts though. It's more of a step in, do a thing, then think about it while doing something else.

rglover• 2 months ago

Wrote about what I think is the root cause of all the mania the other day [1]: we're addicted to speed, "moving fast," and anchor it all to a vague sense of "productivity."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48326501

tover0314• 2 months ago

It's interesting to look at a man without ai in 2026

neonnoodle• 2 months ago

I’m not a professional software person but I’ll offer my two cents as a no-LLMer:

I first came to HN in the “todo.txt” era of “productivity hacking” and note-taking -platforms like Evernote. Like many people I had a zettelkasten phase, tried to make a second brain, tried to optimize everything blah blah blah.

Over the ensuing 15 years and several career shifts later, it’s fascinating to see how AI as supplanted so many of these tools. However in my personal case, greater professional success has coincided with discernment, i.e., knowing which information is important to internalize and commit to memory, which can be filed for reference, and which can be allowed to fade away or be forgotten.

In my current work, there is a huge amount of information that I really, truly need to know “by heart” to do my job well. There’s an equal portion that I maintain in traditional reference files with reliable retrieval systems. I do use machine learning for certain field tasks, but over time I have been able to learn to do these tasks myself when an internet connection is unavailable.

No LLM tool thus far appears useful for me. One big reason is that I work in a compliance/regulatory space where hallucination is simply unacceptable. If I have to check the output for errors, I may as well just look at the primary source to start with.

Another reason is that in regulatory settings, people will say in filings/documents that they are obeying XYZ law, but it isn’t true. I need to find out *in the field* whether the assertions are true. LLMs are not useful for that, either.

But I think the largest gap is between LLMs’ product promise and my personal professional goals. I want _wisdom_ and clinical experience as a professional, the type of things that accrue slowly over a lifetime and distinguish the people who are truly good at their jobs.

skybrian• 2 months ago

It seems like there should be a middle ground where you occasionally write a side project for fun, but not dozens of them just because you can?

Also, if nobody uses them, they don't need to be maintained. You can shut them down with no regrets.

makach• 2 months ago

maybe this is the future now, your list of achievement could be anyone's list of achievements. heck even the salespersons at work can do this with AI now. There is no affinity to it. Future will potentially be like this, marked will be overflooded by artificiel software.

delis-thumbs-7e• 2 months ago

Chatbots are social media of work. In Meta’s platforms you can pretend to be social and chase meaningless dopamines hits that appear similar we get from genuine interaction, whereas with AI agents you get dopamine hits from similar to doing good work and achieving your goals, while actually you just fried your brain doing making money for huge corporations. Similarly both you can use for genuinely good things, but one has to be extremely disciplined to do it and conscious of the trade off.

I think the answer is simply to not use LLM’s to generate much anything at all. When writing code I only use Claude chat (in separate virtual desktop on a browser) only when I can’t grok the documentation or the bug really kicks my ass. I rarely want it to even write the code, just to explain what I am doing wrong.

When I write the initial idea might be just me having a discussion with Claude (“What exactly was Marcia Williams’ hold on British PM Harold Wilson”) about a topic I am interested in and want a quick overview of the literature, but if I end up writing about it none of it is generated.

Claude just helps me to refine my thinking like a rubber duck that has in its palmate tips most all of information saved online. It is simply an extension of my intellect. The thinking and the work remains my own.

4b11b4• 2 months ago

I'm increasingly over it. Don't care how good the model/harness gets, the second I can't hold every bit of the mental model in my head is the second it's all over. And that's a very fine line and very easy to cross

altairprime• 2 months ago

In which a standalone user discovers the Show HN saturation-drawback encountered here in recent months.

rishbz• 2 months ago

Thats very nice.

cmrdporcupine2• 2 months ago

The way I feel about is this:

I've never made more awesome things. And those "things" now matter less to the outside world than they ever would have before.

That sorta sucks. Emotionally as well as financially.

hliyan• 2 months ago

I can provide a data point for what the article calls pseudo productivity: I extensively use LLMs as semantic search engines or expert systems (but not as agents). Recently I asked one how to consume a Google Pub/Sub topic using Python (context: I come from an C++/Java/JS background with some Python knowledge). The LLM gave me a good intro and some code. As it usually happens, I had a few follow up questions/clarifications, and then had to clarify the intent behind the code I requested. After a few relatively effortless rounds of back and forth, I got what I needed. It felt productive. But looking at the clock, about 20 minutes had passed without me even realizing it. Then I went and looked at the official overview page for the Google Pub/Sub Python client. It had everything I needed (including the code), in a more condensed, well-structured form. I could probably have arrived at the same outcome in 5-10 minutes. The only difference was that the latter method required some focus/discipline.

I'm wondering whether this is what they call pseudo-productivity: a lot of low-friction back and forth that feels productive, and perhaps even enjoyable, but in objective terms, takes longer?

LocalExt• 2 months ago

You are good with that 20 mins :) I wrote a maxscript for 3Dmax to speed up some tasks, and i got stuck in coding. Then I asked the AI for debug, then to write a snippet, etc...I lost 3-4 days. At the end I found a developer on Fiverr who fixed my script for $20 :)

akvadrako• 2 months ago

This is a very common effect and I don't want to be defending LLMs here. But I've seen the same study with CLIs - people using them feel more productive but take longer than using GUIs.

What I want to say is that it's very situational and it's likely good to focus on the average. Using LLMs as docs are bad when good docs exist, but if you aren't sure if they do, it's a gamble. A much better approach would be to have somebody pre-create and edit the docs with an LLM for each service with bad docs.

Only when your situation isn't covered would it make sense to create new docs.

anitil• 2 months ago

people using them feel more productive but take longer than using GUIs

I hope that this isn't the case for me poking around in vim, using ctags etc. But sadly it may be true.

tete4• 2 months ago

That's something that is really really common in other contexts as well. For example lower level languages and especially more verbose languages make one feel a lot more productive. Another example is over-engineered infrastructure and especially cloud infrastructure that somehow make me feel very productive, because you have to think about certain details and things can feel puzzly where just running a service with a service file or init script on a random server might get you just as far and provide a lot less surface for things to go wrong.

I think another set of related effects might when people switch programming languages. There two major things tend to happen. Rewrites of something they now understand way better and having a clean slate. As well as - in case of new programming languages - way less historical bagged, 15 ways of doing the same way, deprecated tools, lots of the "new way" code in dependencies and "old ways".

What I mean with that is that there are a lot of overlooked things going on. And humans in general are really good at mistaking moving a problem somewhere else as not having to deal with that problem. Sometimes that is the case, sometimes even moving things to another apartment or being able to move work to a free coworker is a worthwhile investment even if it adds overhead. But it's also really easy to forget about how you didn't make issues disappear but just moved the issue somewhere else.

I think psychology plays a much bigger role in many of these things than technology does.

These are just examples. I don't argue against any of these things, also because whether they are worthwhile depends a lot on context. However, I do think that LLMs aren't the first example of that happening.

mhl47• 2 months ago

What wasn't build with AI is that webpage and it's tiny non-scaling text.

dmw_ng• 2 months ago

Fixed just for you :) I always forget that <meta> tag.

gitaarik4• 2 months ago

I don't really understand; the author first describes a personal planning / management issue, and then blames a particular technology for it. Apparently the author seems to think that the technology is the cause for the personal planning failure. But to be honest, I think the technology just exposes it. The underlying problem was there all along, just because of AI this problem is becoming very clear.

yawnxyz• 2 months ago

Generically, it's about a unit time of life and how it is spent meaningfully

technology has generally flooded us with more speed, more choice, more entertainment - even the introduction of bicycles caused a similar outrage response, that we're moving too fast and should be slowing down to take in the world around us

the paradox is that choice is both great and awful for us

the one skill to hone / develop in the last couple of decades (way before AI) is the ability to focus, filter, discard, and choose a direction to move in (whether its hobbies, career, apps to build, social media to consume, etc etc etc)

dw_arthur• 2 months ago

Sounds like internet addiction with new programs/features being the high you chase instead of new tweets, articles, or videos. It's beyond clear that we all need to be cutting back on our computer/screen usage.

ryanisnan• 2 months ago

I have a different take. I empathize with the author, but my experience is quite different. I have a couple of side projects going, not dozens, like the author mentioned, but my approach with each is heavily focused around verification and testing. The AI is doing all of the development, but I maintain a strict set of documentation defining what properties I want the product to achieve. Everything cyclically is evaluated vs. my view of the world.

Unlike OP, I want to maintain these couple of projects. I am maintaining these projects. They are getting better daily, and my confidence in them is increasing, not decreasing.

selectedambient• 2 months ago

i feel like regardless what you're doing, consistency is key, aside from actually learning right? you mentioned people running three sessions at once on projects they have no hope of maintaining. very fair point, it's just gambling at that point. however, working on the same project or few projects, you DO hope to maintain (even with ai) for 8 months to a year straight is an entirely different experience than trying to powerhouse anything and everything just to have it? or something, i'm not really sure what the point in this would be. it isn't applicable on a resume or impressive to anyone with any real technical experience. at least if you're staying consistent you're learning something about the process, how to improve it, everything it does, etc. i've seen it time and time again, previously nontechnical or barely technical people "getting into coding" (i.e. using ai), creating something that would've taken time 10 years ago and marveling at it like they've done something. meanwhile, without thinking.. "if i had no prior experience and was able to quickly throw something together with AI, how valuable is the thing i threw together really?" to be clear i'm not saying you're doing this, but this is certainly what a LOT of the people you described are doing. this isn't even delving into the bugs and security flaws their programs are most likely full of. never mind they're learning practically nothing. anyway, i generally agree with your sentiment.

dmje• 2 months ago

On that last point, this technology is horrific for attention. It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier.

Wowzers this resonated with me. I’m an ideas person, and a pretty bad coder, at least compared to the normal HN crew. I’ve found Claude to be absolutely astonishing at creating amazing, working apps that I use all the time. But I’ve also been aware for a while that having no bottleneck on ideas isn’t 100% a happy situation.

I’ve spent years and years - 30, maybe - coming up with various (often web related) ideas and having to kick them into the “no time, not enough expertise” long grass. Claude removed this barrier - which is incredible - but also I’ve become aware about how damaging this is mentally, too.

My attention - already scattered - was totally, totally fucked for a while there, 5 windows with different agents all pumping out my latest, greatest idea, no guard rails, no buffer…

I’ve spent the last month being very deliberately not this - and it’s making a huge difference. I’m lucky because I noticed it, and I’m lucky because I’ve somehow got the wherewithal to do something about it, but it’s all been quite sobering.

richardvsu• 2 months ago

276 points by dmw_ng 3 hours ago

And this slipped to 23rd position on the page.

ky-hy• 2 months ago

Except for the SaaS, almost none of this is useful and I don't want to maintain any of it.

No matter how hard I try, I can't put myself in OP position; I think I would go crazy if the most important thing in life was chasing money or ways to monetize my hobbies.

boutell• 2 months ago

I'm not having the same problems, but I completely take your point about this being tricky with ADHD, as all things built to maximize engagement can be.

demorro2• 2 months ago

Does anyone in these comments not have ADHD? Seems like neurodivergence is so common now we might as well think it typical, and be perfectly happy condemning tools and systems that don't work well with it.

vlod• 2 months ago

You assume you can be neurodivergent and have to be ADHD as well.

I don't believe I have ADHD, but I've come to realize my brain is wired 'differently'.

tete4• 2 months ago

I am curious about how many of these cases are self-diagnosis and how many of them are wrong self-diagnosis.

Highly subjective (which is why I am curious), but I know zero people in real life that have an actual ADHD diagnosis, but two that were pretty much convinced to have ADHD and when trying to establish it for real learned that they actually have a different kind of neurodivergency/mental disease.

I think both of those cases were caused by a pretty large set of ADHD and other things are not as specific as they appear to a non-professional and also some conditions can make you more sensitive to noticing specific "symptoms".

For anyone reading this: Please don't read this as "you don't have it", but also if you think please try to confirm it via a trained professional, because the result could make your life quite a bit better, whether you are diagnosed ADHD or anything else.

dubeye• 2 months ago

It doesn’t sound like the author has a real business?

This is a common problem with devs - they don’t understand how code fits into a business model, and generally massively underestimate non technical elements such as focus and sales

dd8601fn• 2 months ago

I love how everyone is repeating conjoined triangles of success shit like it’s “a wake up call”, now.

Mike Judge is a fucking genius. But every person who has every tried knows that selling your tech prototype can be hard.

bentobean• 2 months ago

a tool producing a cheap reward with minimal input and no friction can only be a liability, and achieving that realisation is probably the only real contribution of AI to date.

Bingo.

alexhans• 2 months ago

A good tip for side projects is to build stuff that is actually useful to you and to make them ZeroOps (no maintenance required). If you find yourself waiting to add a feature and it's not easy to change (ETC) [1] then it's a good moment to stop and how did you lose control of the software.

This applies to all software projects except for the "useful to you" part, which turns into valuable to "your/the business"

[1] https://youtu.be/c8AzqMr87gQ

The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

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