Everyone's Packing Up
widdershins.verja.net
widdershins.verja.net
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
I wonder if there's some blend of software and other interest that might rekindle that novelty for you?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
So there are some counterexamples.
P.S. The response misses the point, going for personal rudeness instead of reasoning.
Seriously, fuck all this shit. Some people love to say that love of the old web is just nostalgia and they are free to think what they want.
My plan is to sell my laptop so that I only have a desktop and can't just watch willy-nilly wherever I am in my apartment. But it's a tough trigger to pull.
It’s hard though when Google tries to tempt you to do drugs every three seconds.
If you need help with YouTube, like I do, here are some extremely helpful uBlock Origin scripts to hide Shorts: https://github.com/i5heu/ublock-hide-yt-shorts
I think the basic premise under there is still valid. Lots of online sites/communities/etc turn into rugpulls. Success leads to management change, then depersonalization, then monetization.
Whatsapp is harder, because people I actually care to talk to use it. I would rather not give facebook a dime of my money.
People don't loudly announce they're not going anywhere and not changing anything, of course you only perceive the ones who do otherwise.
It doesn't mean they there's a wide spread trend.
Online used to feel like an actual place.
The only growth is in fake bot accounts.
As I said, people are constantly arriving.
Enshittification takes so much from us
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1wubgvt/continuing...
(TL;DR: they're killing old.reddit, RSS, automod, and a lot of other bots.)
I'm quitting. Slowly, but surely. Some days i don't read anything now. Even when i'm bored in the train, i don't necessarily read anymore. Instead i'm in smaller communities, often on discord, sometimes on whatsapp/signal, almost always one where i've met people IRL first, and i must admit, i feel somehow a bit better. Not that i ever felt that bad, i am usually happy, but weirdly it feels like a new benefits of AI.
mastodon has failed to capture the audience numbers of the products it sought to compete against, you can say that without criticizing the product.
I really don't think that was ever the goal.
They sought to carve out a targeted subset of users and did so successfully.
Life is about more than numbers, you know. Would you call your local steakhouse a failure because they're not putting up the numbers McDonalds does?
P.S. The response is non sequitur. I already noted that TFA is ridiculous, but that has nothing to do with the fact that Pangram produces a very high number of false positives.
It would have been better to categorize the reasons/platforms and then analyze if the farewell posts matched the crimes of the platforms.
IP+subnet based throttling on the other hand is a perfectly working solution, optionally with a proof-of-work or login requirement for intensive POST requests only. Why is it a problem if only a few requests per day are made per home IP? Just how bad and inefficient is the web server?
Bots are not a second class client. They were here before AI, and they, like AI, work for humans. For the most part, they're not trolling the web autonomously.
[1] Proposed Amendment to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (2026-05-08) - https://www.karlbunch.com/random/website-protection-act/
Even a $5 VM I have has an included quota of at least 1TB egress data per month, and it can handle 9,540,534 requests in a day if not less. A Rust server can handle a lot more. In practice, my egress quota is larger by virtue of having a couple of more nodes.
If you actually cared, you would use something cheaper then AWS, ideally with zstandard compression, and a CPU efficient service that doesn't buckle under a moderate load.
> Bots are not a second class client. They were here before AI, and they, like AI, work for humans. For the most part, they're not trolling the web autonomously.
While I can agree with this in principle, due to vibeslopping in general there are a LOT more unruly scrapers browsing around, which tilts the scales quite a bit.
Keep in mind that for the average person (and even the average techy), they will not even see the captcha, because they have enough tracking them across the web that it will 'autoresolve' them as a human. I only see captcha's nowadays when I am working on web scraping automation or browsing from my VPS.
When LLMs are done killing the Internet (and they will), I wont lament it, Ill say good riddance. There was a time that search worked, that time is long gone. Most web "technology" is really garbage.
The age of extraction, tracking, training and enshittification of everything has arrived. Why stay? Also once the lights are turned off I dont think the Internet will be reinvented, I think it will just start to look more and more like the dark web and become a fully bad place to connect your computer.
Pack it up, pack it in, let me begin
I came to win, battle me, that's a sin
I won't ever slack up, punk, ya better back up!
I’m confused by that sentence. Giving up on what exactly?
Same with:
> it changed under them
I think the really interesting ones just quietly vanished without needing a dramatic blogpost or similar screed at all.
I found a place on Mastodon, but the critical mass just isn’t there.
It doesn’t help that many cool looking hobby projects are now just AI slop.
Things are bleak.