Similar sentiment here. I taught myself python a decade ago after college, and used it in side projects, during my masters degree, in a few work projects. So it's been handy, but also required quite a bit of time and effort to learn.

But I've been using Claude to help with all kinds of side projects. One recently was to help create and refine some python code to take the latest Wikipedia zipped XML file and transform/load it locally into a PostgreSQL DB. The initial iteration of the code took ~16 hours to unzip, process, and load into the database. I wanted it to be faster.

I don't know how to use multiple processes/multi-threading, but after some prompting, iterating, and persistent negotiations with Claude to refine the code (and an SSD upgrade) I can go from the 24gb zip file to all cleaned/transformed data in the DB in about 2.5 hours. Feels good man.

Do I need to know exactly what's happening in the code (or at lowers levels, abstracted from me) to make it faster? not really. Could someone who was more skilled, that knew more about multi-threading, or other faster programming languages, etc..., make it even faster? probably. Is the code dog shit? it may not be production ready, but it works for me, and is clean enough. Someone who better knew what they were doing could work with it to make it even better.

I feel like LLMs are great for brainstorming, idea generation, initial iterations. And in general can get you 80%+ the way to your goal, almost no matter what it is, much faster than any other method.

I'm on this boat. I can use LLMs to skip the boring bits like generating API glue classes or simple output functions.

Example:

I'm building a tool to grab my data from different sites like Steam, Imdb, Letterboxd and Goodreads.

I know perfectly well how to write a parser for the Goodreads CSV output, but it doesn't exactly tickle my brain. Cursor or Cline will do it in minutes.

Now I've got some data to work with, which is the fun bit.

Again if I want to format the output to markdown for Obsidian, the LLM can do it in a few minutes and maybe even add stuff I didn't think about at first.

Same for me. The lack of effort to get started is amazing, as well as the ability to farm the parts I don't like out to the AI. (As opposed to me, it's actually passable at graphical design.)

I'm very much in the same camp as you. I'm having the time of my (professional) live right now.

I agree, but only to an extent. For me, the passion changed over time. I used to love getting an O'Reilly tome and learning something new, but now I don't really want to learn the latest UI framework, library/API or figure out how a client configures their DI container. If the AI can do most of that stuff, and I just leverage my knowledge of all the frameworks I've had to use, it's a huge timesaver and means I can work on more things at once. I want to work on the core solution, not the cruft that surrounds it.

I agree though that the Studio Ghibli trend feels off. To me, art like this feels different to code. I know that's probably heresy around these parts of the internet, and I probably would have said something different 15-20 years ago. I know that coding is creative and fulfilling. I think I've just had the fun of coding beat out of me over 25 years :) AI seems to be helping bring the fun back.

Just think what the 19th century craftsmen were thinking! :D (i.e. they were right, but really good stuff is hard to make at scale)

I like the antidote and does remind me that I tried to create a game, which gamedev has always been a challenge for me. I’ve attempted a few times and didn’t get very far with this one either. I think I could do the coding even though scale is large, but I’m not artistic and asset generation/iteration is my block. I tried a handful of ai tools specifically for this and found they were all really far behind. I don’t particularly like working with asset store art, maybe for parts but characters and the vibe of the game usually would excite and motivate me early on and I can’t quite get there to sustain the effort

I’ve actually been considering it. Although I think I’m probably tone deaf or rhythmically challenged and my rotator cuff is kinda messed up from an old injury, I’ve been trying to convince my 6 year old to take it up so I could justify having a kit around the house

I followed a lot of Twitter people who were vibecoding their way to SaaS platforms because I thought it would be interesting to follow.

So far none of them are having a great time after their initial enthusiasm. A lot of it is people discovering that there’s far more to a business than whipping up a SaaS app that does something. I’m also seeing a big increase in venting about how their progress is slowing to a crawl as the codebase gets larger. It’s interesting to see the complaints about losing days or weeks to bugs that the LLM introduced that they didn’t understand.

I still follow because it’s interesting, but I’m starting to think 90% of the benefit is convincing people that it’s going to be easy and therefore luring them into working on ideas they’d normally not want to start.

Yeah, I see that perspective bu I guess my thought process is “what’s the point, if everyone else can now do the same”

I had long ago culled many of those ideas based on my ability to execute the marketing plan or the “do I really even want to run that kind of business?” test. I already knew I could build whatever I wanted to exist so My days of pumping out side projects ended long ago and I became more selective with my time.

> I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week

This reminds me of the famous HN comment when Drew Houston first announced Dropbox here in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

So you can create a serious contender to Salesforce or Zapier in a week?