This is only true if your definition of "hobby project" is limited to "initial prototype with basic functionality and a generic corporate-looking landing page".
Yeah, a lot of tools that would have made fun weekend projects can now be one-shot by Claude and aren't even worth sharing, because someone who needs that functionality can just use Claude too. But you can accomplish so much more now. Someone just did a hobby project to reverse engineer NVidia drivers and make them work on Windows XP. Dream bigger!
If it gets done too fast with LLM you need to think bigger.
But seriously, I have not seen anyone get far with vibecoded hobby projects. The problem is that removing the pain, the frustration, and the triumph also removes any emotional attachment you have to the project to keep it alive. If it's not making you money, if you're not learning anything, and if everyone can vibecode the same thing... well, it still gives you some short-term rush - as if by magic, your words birthed a piece of software - but then what? Why keep going? Why fix bugs, why keep improving it? If you look back at the past several months of "Show HN"-style posts, it's not pretty.
Google Play Store is just an assumption, cause it's not clear, which store you would prefer first.
Is this target describing your goal, what you are truly want to ship?
By Nov 2 your app will be launched in google Play Store, and someone besides your beta-users is going to install it via Google Play Store.
Does this describe your goal, yes or no?
I enjoy cotton candy, nothing wrong with that, but I also know I can’t just eat cotton candy all the time. And it’s probably not worth trillions of investment dollars.
I wonder if there's some blend of software and other interest that might rekindle that novelty for you?
If you want a wooden dresser, buy one.
Nobody does woodworking because it's necessary.
I don’t understand this, can you explain or am I missing something?
And people still do it anyway. Which is great. Because it's still useful, and valuable. Just not necessary.
Imagine if you never had to pick up a guitar, blowing a trumpet, or even opening a tracker ever again.
You could just ask the AI to make music that made your best efforts look like a kindergartener's painting on the fridge. Isn't that a musician's utopia, surrounded by music without lifting a hand to make it?
I think my sarcasm detector is broken. I really hope there’s an implicit /s at the end of that.
Then I got this feeling that there was an odd chance of you being sarcastic.
It's difficult to tell on HN these days. Some replies I read should be sarcasm, but I those bad takes are stone faced.
/me gestures towards literacy rates.
Ok, phew.
> But it's not so different from what other people have posted without sarcasm.
I agree—and that’s why I had trouble being sure.
I don't quite get what you mean by this. Music is a form of expression; it is supposed to be effortless once you are good at it, but software (if we go by a strict definition) is not about expression but about building reliable and efficient systems. Like what do you mean exactly
Try solving a very hard problem or a very good game. Or at least publish some very good polished software, they all sucks! This really is a paradox, all this doomerism and AI that has solved “coding” and it’s “very good now” and we don’t mot only have not good software, but it’s getting worse! Good lord how the heck we get out of this situation?
Watching Bob Ross didn't make anyone into a Rembrandt or van Gogh.
It depends what you're building, and why you're doing it.
For example I've always been interested in compilers and interpreters, and I've spent the past few months writing (by hand) a lisp compiler.
It's nothing special, nobody will use it, and existing solutions already exist. But I've had a lot of fun getting things working.
To highlight two examples, and bearing in mind my output binaries are statically linked with no libc, I wrote a garbage collector in amd64 assembly. Getting that working took a couple of weeks, as I kept finding random segfaults and issues. But now? Now I could write something similar in an afternoon. (And because it was for learning I chose stop© instead of mark&sweep. It seemed simpler and easier.)
Secondly I realized, belatedly, that I could implement the "(syscall N arg1 arg2 ..)" primitive in my lisp. Which meant that I could write wrappers like this:
(defconst SYS_mkdir 83)
(defun mkdir (path)
"Create the given directory."
(if (< (syscall SYS_mkdir path (octal "0o755")) 0)
nil
1))
Nobody will find it too interesting, I'll say again, but writing a compiler (in golang) that has it's own static runtime written in pure assembly? I'm sure some models will eventually one-shot that, but it won't teach anybody anything.
For me hobby projects are either a) to solve a need (which is what led to me writing a toy CP/M emulator), or they're for learning. And for learning the whole point is to type the code yourself, identify the inevitable bugs, and make iterative improvements.
Looking at what I have now? It feels good. Despite the existance of other lisp interpreters, compilers, or the random LLM stuff people do.
It's not a competition, I've not lost anything, and now I think I've internalized the SysV ABI convention, learned about the limits, and implemented trivial things like "print a floating point number in assembly". As well as learning about how to invoke linux syscalls to read the entries in a directory, & etc.
Software dev today is sitting in front of a prompt bar, sometimes checking the IDE, sometimes some DevOps, but nothing about it excites me anymore. Even hobby projects are dull because they're done in mere days. Choosing not to use LLMs has little to no reward imo.
I'm slowly moving away from software dev because the rose tinted glasses I saw the job as are shattering