Same here! I built around 6 side projects this year! One literally in 1h which now serves my little community I living in (<5k people) everyday.

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!

I am not comparing myself to you (or any developer) I know the basics of code and play around, but with AI tools like VSCode and CoPilot subscription I have done some crazy stuff that would have either been impossible or years worth of work for me. I have been working with Python and created a few tools that saved me tons of time every day. I do side computer/networking work and I was able to build my own invoicing application to bill and track everything. My latest project has been an IT helpdesk for our internal IT team. I am sure the code is not good by your standards but these tools are amazing for what I use them for. What scares me is if someone with my level "skill" would create programs that become mission critical and think nothing of it...that is asking for trouble..at least with where we are at with AI right now.

I am pretty proud of my helpdesk: website: https://helpfuldjinn.com/ or via the github: https://github.com/DjinnRutger/HelpDesk-Public

It has been a great adventure seeing what AI has enabled to be done!

Same here. While I'm excited to build quickly, I'm also trying to fathom the implications of it. If the marginal value of app development drops to zero, then what? I will neither take pride in the craftmanship of building using my own skills, nor benefit monetarily.

There were a few things that would have been projects that I was able to knock out quickly with AI. However, it didn’t feel like I made it, so it wasn’t as fulfilling as seeing the results of something I made myself.

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.

Same here. Agents has allowed me to take on more experiments because the cost for testing ideas is now much much lower.

How is your workflow?

I’m practically alt-tabbing between projects at this point the iteration speed is so fast. Multi-tasking like an octopus man.