They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim.

Sunk cost fallacy can be a feature: if you have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on a project, you are more likely to push it through adversity and the doldrums that inevitably one will encounter. If all it took was one of those momentarily brilliant ideas and a prompt on Claude to produce something, there is no attachment whatsoever to it.

Speaking as the ‘average programmer’, I have dozens of brilliant ideas per day that don’t stand the test of time or scrutiny, and the very few that pass the filter don’t seem that interesting days later, or worth the effort at all.

Ideas have always been cheap. Now, proof of concepts have become as cheap. I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.

A drum I've been banging increasingly often recently is that having friction and time to work ideas over in your mind adds huge amounts of value. Vibe coded projects have this very specific, well, vibe to them where you can clearly see that the lack of time to digest has allowed the person to not challenge their own worst impulses. You can see it in the feature bloat, the lack of depth and polish in core features and the wild asides you tend to talk yourself out of still on display.

>Ideas have always been cheap. Now, proof of concepts have become as cheap. I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.

Yes. I'm as pro-AI coding as people come, but this is the part that bugs me too. If you whip something useful up in a weekend, great!

But you don't have to present it like you are building an actual product. It's fine if no one else knows about it. Because the fact is, most people don't care, even before AI. Building for yourself is fine.

It’s the same reason why everyone doesn’t wanna read LLM generated blog posts. The agreement used to be generally that you would spend more time writing than I would have to spend reading and when the agreement changes the quality changes as well.

I wonder how much they spend on this rewrite, in tokens and $ using commercial pricing

Maybe those ideas aren’t so brilliant.

> They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim.

I think it's more than that. These greenfield projects are actually things that, up until the inception of LLMs, they were not worth creating.

With AI code assistants, the cost of developing them is lower, but in the end you still end up with a project that no one bothered to create.

Keep in mind logic bug that ai makes are extremely hard and expensive to fix as the clanker needs to parse thousand and thousands of lines of text every prompt while a human tries to explain what it's obviously doing wrong.

I hate ai so much because its so easy to generate quick slop that "appears" functional.