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Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by Aurornis on Sunday November 08, 2026 @08:08PM (#50419683)
I have several personal tools I’ve built and maintained.

It’s always more work than it looks. You can get to mostly usable tools quickly if your request isn’t too difficult, but every time I use them I run into another thing that needs to be fixed, changed, clarified, or cleaned up.

It’s fun at first, but over time you realize you’re spending more time building the tools than using the tools to build the thing you originally wanted to work on.

I think personal software is best for highly specific tools or for things you need to use repeatedly for a very long time.

For something like a SketchUp competitor, I wouldn’t want to try to maintain my own. The number of edge cases and features is bigger than you imagine up front, and the vibecoded version that might appear a few hours after your prompt is going to be very far from the version you want to use.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by altmanaltman on Sunday November 08, 2026 @08:24PM (#50419780)
Isn't the whole argument that ai-driven code will reduce the time spent building because AI can do it now? And a SketchUp competitor by defintion will not be personal software just like SketchUp is not.
Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by vips7L on Sunday November 08, 2026 @08:26PM (#50419795)
AI can’t do it. You still have to hold its hand. You still have to sit there and ask it to do things. There is no fire and forget.
Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by altmanaltman on Sunday November 08, 2026 @08:31PM (#50419837)
For personal projects that don't matter? Sorry but that's your opinion at this point. I respect it but also fully disagree. Also even in that case, isn't it still reducing time and problems we have with pre-AI personal projects like maintainability and feature creep like you mentioned.
Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by vips7L on Sunday November 08, 2026 @08:46PM (#50419944)
It’s just my opinion that you have to ask the LLM to do things? Seems like reality to me tbh.
Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by 80fj0348i on Sunday November 08, 2026 @09:15PM (#50420142)
> For personal projects that don't matter?

My personal projects matter a lot. For some of them I am trusting my private data in the code, so I need to hold it to a high security and privacy standard. For others, I have hundreds or thousands of users (game mods, helper tools for hobbies, etc.), and I don't want to ship low quality to them.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by altmanaltman on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @07:21AM (#50439294)
If you have 1000s of users, how is it a "personal project" anymore? I meant things that you only use yourself. Also why would your private data leak just because you used AI to reduce time to code? Any gain is good, even if it doesn't fully replace everything you good, no?
Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by 80fj0348i on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @07:59PM (#50448490)
> If you have 1000s of users, how is it a "personal project" anymore?

Because I offer no warranty and work on it on my personal time. What use is code nobody uses?

> Also why would your private data leak just because you used AI to reduce time to code?

Because if I don't exercise rigor and review oops you let the security holes in (I had to do like 4-7 separate pentest passes on AI generated code to catch and close the vulnerabilities)

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by altmanaltman on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @04:24AM (#50451285)
> Because I offer no warranty and work on it on my personal time.

As I said, that is not what I meant by "personal projects that don't matter". And who said about code that nobody uses? 1 person is using that code in my definition, in case it wasn't clear.

So we are just talking semantics here at this point.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by Aurornis on Sunday November 08, 2026 @10:14PM (#50420588)
> For personal projects that don't matter?

If it doesn’t matter then do what you want. By definition, it doesn’t matter.

Some of us actually use these tools, so it does matter. You do have to consider things when it matters.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by altmanaltman on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @07:24AM (#50439331)
Yes fair enough, but they will be personal projects that matter. I am not sure why you're reading this as if I said your personal projects don't matter. I spoke of "personal projects that don't matter" as a category.

The second sentence I agree, of course you need to consider things when it matters. Thats the basic definition of importance.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by arlcode on Monday November 09, 2026 @01:54AM (#50421987)
For my personal projects I think it does matter even more. I've got some perculiar and weird quirks that may even go against best practices (that's what makes them personal projects).

AI can get these done implementation wise but in my experience it needs guidance because it can't guess what features and details I want /don't want.

The difference is that it's now possible at all for me but still requires a few hours every now and then supervising.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by Aurornis on Sunday November 08, 2026 @09:01PM (#50420054)
I was talking about AI developed tooling.

It’s amazing that you can get something usable quickly, but then every time you use the software you’re back in the AI working on your tool.

Using AI to build the tool becomes the project, replacing the project that led you to think about vibecoding a tool.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by Teever on Monday November 09, 2026 @02:48AM (#50422400)
I'm coming to think that a hybrid of vibe-coding but with an existing substrate is the right way to go.

For instance in the context of this SketchUp clone that might mean using AI to generate an addon for Blender.

For some of my recent projects I'm using the community edition of Odoo to serve as that substrate because it already has an established community of modules to draw from, ten years or so of real world use, and I don't have to burn tokens generating a user account system with permissions or the data models / ORM to interface with them.

This seems to be serving me well, but we'll see. It could be that I end up in the same the tool becoming the project scenario that you describe, just a little bit later than if I had started from a blank slate.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by herewulf on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @12:44AM (#50450081)
It's like using Emacs but less fun!
Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by Gigachad on Sunday November 08, 2026 @09:45PM (#50420374)
I’ve been using the vibecoded Lightroom clone and it’s 5000 commits and around 20 releases in yet still has countless issues and missing features. I feel like it will get there eventually but the idea that you should just vibe up your own Lightroom rather than using an existing one is absurd with today’s tech. It’s still a massive amount of work even if it is way faster than ever before.

The vibecoded apps all rely on an army of users exploring the program and reporting all the bugs and edge cases. You don’t want to be doing that on your own.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by 4ggr0 on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:37AM (#50423273)
this is something which is starting to annoy me, and the effects can be seen on HN. someone posting a post or comment talking about their new vibecoded project, then a couple other people chime in, all with their own, separate, vibecoded projects, trying to reach the same goal.

it seems like the open-source space is losing some aspects of collaboration. people used to search for already existing projects on some git-hosters, maybe fork them or put effort into the existing thing. now half a dozen people each run their own race using AI, each solution misses 30% of the features and has x-amounts of bugs.

work together ffs :( i mean, 20 people can use AI to vibecode the same project, why does everyone now feel the need to do everything solo. (because they want to be the prolific founder and cool dude who did the most in the project* instead of being one of many contributors, i assume...)

*or rather, their AI.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by Gigachad on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:42AM (#50423311)
I've observed the same, so many forks of forks of forks happening right now rather than group efforts. But I think this is coming from the fact that PR review is incredibly costly to the maintainer while generating code is fast. I've submitted PRs to open source projects which claim to welcome contributions but the PRs just never get reviewed (this was an issue pre AI too). If you wanted to build something, constantly fighting an uphill battle to get PRs merged is less appealing than just creating your own project where you can work full speed on whatever you want.

I'm not too sure what the future here looks like and if this is even a problem, but things certainly are changing. These days submitting a well written bug report or feature suggestion, or validating existing reports is more useful than sending a PR.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by 4ggr0 on Monday November 09, 2026 @05:47AM (#50423829)
maybe the focus should shift a bit to using AI for PR reviews. adversarial reviews, summarizing it for a human. we'll see where time takes us...
Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by Gigachad on Monday November 09, 2026 @07:22AM (#50424615)
What is the point though. The maintainer can generate the same code you can. And they can iterate on it quickly without having to go through a review process.
Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by forestry on Monday November 09, 2026 @08:46AM (#50425532)
Day jobs and lives away from the PC.
Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by Rapzid on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:54AM (#50423412)
I believe the goal of most of these people is to make money.
Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by andybak on Monday November 09, 2026 @05:04AM (#50423495)
Weird that they are all giving the source code away for free and failing on the whole to even ask for donations.
Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by Rapzid on Monday November 09, 2026 @03:04PM (#50431128)
All?

ArtCraft is definitely a play at selling subscriptions.

The slew of "oh yeah, blah blah blah blah blah, that's why I built [X]." comments on every AI post now?

Click through and many you'll find "Pricing".

It's a gold rush.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by andybak on Monday November 09, 2026 @06:03PM (#50433592)
1. Go to any ArtCraft repo on GitHub

2. Click "Fork"

3. Profit

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by Rapzid on Monday November 09, 2026 @06:59PM (#50434174)
Classic besides the point.
Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by utopiah on Monday November 09, 2026 @08:59AM (#50425710)
> work together ffs

Right, and that's something I already argued for since the very beginning of GenAI, namely that suddenly being very costly, economically and ecologically, is not that bad if you build upon what exists and collaborate on progress.

... except that's exactly WHY vibecoded project exist : they do NOT have to give a shit with existing codebase and agree on weird rules. They just start from "scratch". In fact I'm convinced there is the Ikea effect at play, namely that the PM of the vibe coded project is emotionally attached, even proud, of the result they think they provided somehow, despite them not actually doing it. Obviously for-profit GenAI companies have a big incentive to maximize token use and will never promote workflows and tool that minimize the one thing they monetize.

So even though I agree in theory, in practice I think there is little to no overlap.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by IshKebab on Monday November 09, 2026 @02:51AM (#50422424)
My experience has been the opposite. I have two vibe coded tools that I use frequently and I spent a few weeks of occasional prompting and now they are basically done. I haven't touched the code for one of them for a month and I use it most days.

To be fair neither is quite as complex as a whole 3D modeller.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by kristophph on Monday November 09, 2026 @03:40AM (#50422798)
I think this is the key:

> To be fair neither is quite as complex as a whole 3D modeller.

Once you cross a certain complexity in your project, it becomes quite work intensive even using AI to do the coding. All the back and forth and cleaning up, exploring ideas and starting from scratch again takes time and effort and maybe most importantly, extensive human thinking. Just to clarify, I am not against AI and use it extensively myself. But vieb-coding all your tools is just not really a feasable idea for most (time/token-cost constraint) if you tools are of a certain complexity.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by IshKebab on Monday November 09, 2026 @05:18AM (#50423630)
Actually I think "complexity" is probably not quite the right measure. You can vibe code very complex things, as long as they are in the "easy for AI" zone - clear goals, ideally non-graphically, ideally there's a specification or even better a reference implementation, best an automated way of checking correctness. CAD is about the worst case (and very complicated).

But you could easily vibe code, e.g. an H.265 decoder, even though it is super complex.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by egeozcan on Monday November 09, 2026 @03:05AM (#50422535)
Why do you even maintain it if it's for you?

I have lot of tools that work for me.

When externalities break them, it's usually one prompt to fix them.

Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by maitrungduc on Monday November 09, 2026 @09:39AM (#50426279)
and when it works on your machine, but fail when exporting on an old macos 14, you only realize when someone tell you...
Re:KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rus... by herewulf on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @12:42AM (#50450069)
You might find Aussie YouTuber, Not an Engineer's quest to build his own machine tools a relevant comparison in meatspace.

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3NwjxPeybkLhFjSfFg1iL4...