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Comment by easyThrowaway | Hacker News Reader

The type of problem also makes a massive difference.

- Writing my tiny hobby gameboy emulator? Heck, Why I'd let Claude take away the fun part of implementing new features and then see Super Mario Land start and run step by step?

- Debugging why a legacy Wordpress store with more than 50 active plugins is returning an error 500 just to some random customers? Claude can 100% take the wheel, I'm good.

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Here's where the important difference is: unless you actually finished the wordpress thing, or ever had active users etc, it would never have become a maintenance burden. If it's not fun to maintain, I burn it.

For me, the reason I don't have that is because I never ship anything. I never want to maintain that. I never cared about solving an _actual_ business problem, making a dollar, or pleasing a user. As a tinkerer I must be extremely careful not to end up completing or delivering anything. Only pain lies down that path...

It's your vision and you are completely free to have it, obviously, but you should not project it on every tinkerer out there - like you did in your initial message. Yours is actually an extreme position that's probably exacerbated by the digital and immaterial world, where you can accumulate cruft and unfinished projects easily. But many tinkerers, especially in the physical world, do projects to use them personally and not only for the sake of tinkering.

Many tinkerer projects in the physical world are actually maintenance work of physical appliances that are not working anymore as expected or can be extended to do more or better things.

Lots of physical world tinkerers also have a garage or workshop full of uncompleted projects that went from being fun and interesting to boring and abandoned.

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