In last ~10 years I have started 20+ projects and for each project spent anywhere between 2 weeks to 6 months. I have completed just 2 projects which were fairly short(~4 week). So recently when started some big side project, There was almost no chance of me completing it. I was just doing it for fun.
All this changed with AI code assistants. I picked a fairly big project which involved writing crawlers for multiple sites. There was no chance of me completing it, until I started using AI code assistant. It sped up the development by 5-10x(can I call myself 10x developer now?). Completed the project in ~3 weeks.
Curious if others were able to do the same.
(This is not an Advertisement for AI code assistants. These has their own problems. I have less confidence in my product, Code reviews are difficult and I have go and make sure all security best practices are handled.)
I need to ask myself what the goal of these projects are. Am I just looking for the end result so I can use the thing that I need, but doesn’t yet exist? Or am I trying to occupy my time with something I enjoy, learn some things along the way, and have something I feel good about using at the end because I made it?
There is a lot of talk of the digital garden. A project you can work on and cultivate over time and putter around with. A hand built project feels like a garden, while AI feels more like factory farming.
A fun side effects I got from this: Now I can see my ideas fully fleshed out, and realised that, a), most of these ideas are stupid and better solved by existing solutions , or b), that the code was never the problem but tweaking the UI or user facing part to really hone in the problem I am trying to solve!