Ask HN: Do personal projects feel less fun with LLMs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do personal projects feel less fun with LLMs?

2 pointsscripper5 comments

I used to spend a lot of time tinkering with personal projects. I don’t think I realized how much of the fun was due to: 1. Solving puzzles, and 2. Feeling that I was helping myself in the future by solving a problem today. LLMs make it a lot quicker to complete a task or project. Does this make anyone else feel less motivated to do projects? Has your approach evolved?

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Interesting observation. There was a thread here recently about LLMs and Art where the OP wh likewise felt unmotivated due to LLMs was accused of creating Art for egotistical reasons. I generally think of my personal projects like I think about Art. Sure the motivation is not 100% this, but it is at least 50% about a sense of accomplishment and bragging rights. LLMs destroy this motivation by making it possible for about anyone to do something. For those just looking for the results one looks stupid for learning it and doing it on their own and a social pressure exists to not do it without using an LLM. The whole thing causes me to vascilate between wanting to not use and fight LLMs and the associated pressure or to just watch TV. It's easy to say that this is transformative financially but I'm finding the motivational impact of these tools to be way out sized personally. As a developer and Artist this feels like the larger society telling me that my passions are worthless and by proxy so am I. Pretty demotivating...

Thanks for replying. Yeah, right, technology is learning to do things that were previously done by humans, which devalues them and the labor that goes into them. A lot of techs did this but recent technologie are much more versatile.

I am a mediocre software person (because I was some combination of unable and unwilling to commit the time needed to become good at it earlier in due to life circumstances), but love to solve problems. I love LLMs because of this; while I can appreciate beautiful and elegant code I couldn’t write myself, I just want to solve problems.

My personal projects are the outcomes (solving problems), not the code. The code is just a sometimes necessary means to an end. If the robot solves my problems, tremendous! It means I can solve more problems that tickle my brain faster. This is why I desire a continuously improving robot: we solve problems together, mostly for fun and rarely for profit.

Pick puzzles that are most fun for you. If the puzzles are not fun, look for novel puzzles to explore.

Thank you for replying. Totally makes sense that it helps people do a lot without having to spend a lot of time learning to code. Similar to Wix allowing you to have a cool website without years of learning web languages. I guess I enjoy coding at least partly to solve problems but I’m not sure what the next type of problem is for me. I don’t necessarily like juggling 20 things at once which is one new problem allowed by it being much easier to do things with code.

I'm having a blast -- but a lot of the contributing factor to that I think is that I had a long over-due journal full of software projects that I just didn't have the time to get at yet. Some of them were so simple, but time allowances have kept them on the list.

LLMs have let me knock out a few of the ones on The Big List that have been there for years and are now usable tools in my repertoire, and I think that's great. They're not human-quality artisinal code, but so what? It's mine and it works and I can now keep using it and polishing as I proceed.. it wouldn't have been available at all without the LLM assistance.

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