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My most abandoned type of projects are video games. I have a folder with tens of abandoned projects, I re-frame them as experiments at that point. This last week I decided to give Claude a go at one of these, and it's been a blast, it picked up the general path immediately. Since I said to CC they were abandon projects, he explicitly pushed into "lets have V0 game play loop finished, then we can compound and have fun = not giving up". Its been awesome at game dev, I gave him game design ideas, he comes with working code. I gave him papers about procedural algos, and he comes with the implementation, brainstorm items, create graphic assets (he created a set of procedural 2d generators as external tools), he even helped me build the lore. These have been one of the most fun times using a computer in a long time. Claude Code + Godot = fun. Going back to it.

It’s great. I have a stupendous amount of personal software now. Yesterday was a native text editor that was fully integrated into my mediawiki install and would autocomplete links and make syntax easier to use.

No one could have built this software but me because it’s worth nothing to others. And I couldn’t build it because it takes too long. But when I’m using an agent to code the limited resource is my attention which actually does fine so long as every free brain cycle is on a task. So these personal things are great to throw into my tab loop to occupy a free slot.

These have been wonderful times.

I know how to write code, I just don't have time. AI has been an absolute game changer in let me get OS projects out into the world that I just didn't have time to build before. I'm having an absolute blast spinning up local GUI applications for Linux that I wanted to exist, but didn't have enough motivation to build before.

(Shameless plug)

* Sambervise: https://github.com/edward-murrell/sambervise - A Linux GUI application for remotely administering Samba 4 Active Directory Domain Controllers.

* Krbtray: A GTK3 system tray application for Kerberos ticket management on Linux Mint / Cinnamon (and other GTK environments using GtkStatusIcon, such as XFCE and MATE). https://github.com/edward-murrell/krbtray

> I still have fears around deskilling from relying on these tools too much

I'm a millennial who builds furniture with hand tools and wood joinery from a century ago. Nobody taught me, although I did find resources online to learn from. I should not be able to do these things. Everyone should have forgotten this esoteric, obsolete, uncommon knowledge by now. Yet here I am, doing it anyway. It turns out you can just learn what you want, when you want to. I don't fear losing this skill in the future, because I can just remind myself how it works. The tools, books, videos, and wood aren't going anywhere.

You aren't going to "be deskilled" from not writing code by hand regularly. Just because you use AI doesn't mean your brain grows a black hole from which information can never return. It's not giving you Alzheimer's. There might be a small amount of time it takes for you to refresh yourself, but then you're back to work again. Just ask anyone who went from coding to managing. They're a little rusty when they go back after years of absence, but they pick it back up.

Also, especially if it's a personal project, keep in mind you do not need to burn Opus tokens. Buy any of the dirt cheap subscriptions which give you access to MiniMax. Put it in a container on yolo mode. Give it some context, a prompt, web search, and a ticket system like beads. Then let it churn. You aren't in a rush, it's a personal project. As long as you follow the brainstorm -> plan -> implementation -> testing process, and have added methods to do real testing (not mocks or unit tests), it will get done with time and money to spare.

12 years ago I tried to make a simple app for myself. It would display bars that got smaller as the day/week/month got shorter, and would show the weather as a set of bars between max temp and min, cloud cover, etc.

I got it working well enough to display what I wanted in text and ascii, but I could never get the interface good enough to want to use it daily, and certainly couldn't get the graphical interface working. I threw it a Claude Code, told it what I wanted the graphical interface to look like, and let it run.

It got an app exactly what I wanted, and even found a bug in the date parser that I hadn't noticed. I now have it running in the corner of my screen at all times.

The next app I'm going to build is an iPhone app that turns off all my morning alarms when the kids' don't have school. Something I've wanted forever, but never could build because I know nothing about making iPhone apps and don't have time to learn (because of the aforementioned children).

Claude Code is brilliant for personal apps. The code quality doesn't really matter, so you can just take what it gives you and use it.

When it comes to side projects, most of the time, if the spirit isn't willing I find it not worth doing. Process/experience over results, I call leisure. Results over process, I call work. If you have many side projects done mainly for the results, than you are working in your free time, and looking at it like that: is it really free? The modern age already requires of us more results than the spirit is good for. I like to leave side projects for the good of the spirit. An exception could be results for a greater good that one really believes in. This can give purpose and enrich the process and experience of doing.

Three notetaking app attempts sitting in my private repos, all stalled at the gap between idea and free time. With Claude Code I finally got the one I really wanted out in two months. Building it has been the best hobby I've found. Beats games or scrolling. When you've been carrying an idea for years, the app that finally ships has more of you in it, and I'd bet we'll see a lot more of these from solo builders.

I've had several product ideas a week for years, all of them just sitting in Apple Notes. In the last month, I built three of them into a usable beta and I use all of them every day.

I've always had more ideas than I can take on. Some of them are good ideas even. With AI tools, I'm now able to generate fairly decent working things for more of them.

Ironically the value of implementing these ideas is dropping fast. A few weeks ago, I built a little search library that runs in the browser and doesn't need a server. It's styled after Elasticsearch and has most of it's term and matching query support, aggregation support, and I added ANN vector search as well (uses web GPU). Most of that was just me going "let's add feature X" and boom done. I used it in some websites (also built using AI) at this point. It doesn't scale but it's great for blogs, documentation sites (https://querylight.tryformation.com/, this site documents the library), etc. It all works exactly like I imagined it would. I probably could add most of the long tail of features Elasticsearch has to this library with very little effort.

But the flip side is that the library got a rather lukewarm reception on Github. It seems people are too busy coding things themselves with AI to appreciate other people's efforts much. And fair enough, if you need a search library, you could probably generate your own. Or just let the AI pick one for you. It's not like this was hard for me or a lot of work.

The economic value of these projects is dropping rapidly. I still like doing them because I like building stuff. And I think there is as a learning curve with these tools that is important to master. Because there is a lot of work that is going to need doing still and people will pay less for it and still expect decent results that you can only get if you master the tools. The ambition level will just go up to match what is now possible. People thinking that they are going to lean back while the AI works for them are in for a surprise. I work very long days the last months.

In the time I’ve had agents I’ve never abandoned more projects. Vibe coding especially just leads me to feel no attachment. I don’t feel proud to put my name on it.

Despite coding from a young age I always thought that I cared more about the outcome than the code. Turns out that’s not entirely the case.

I have revamped my home networking setup, installed raspberry pi, setup adguard on it for the home network, migrated my jellyfin set-up to it, integrated all these devices on tailscale, dealt with physical LAN point limitations by setting up a switch, repurposed old router to get around ISP imposed limitations, setup a three tier backup solution and so on. In themselves they are not particularly challenging but taken together, these personal projects had been pending for years.

Not any more. Few weekends and everything has been implemented and I have learned a ton in the process. It has been great fun doing this turbo charged tinkering. I think personal projects are where LLMs shine the brightest.

> things I really wish existed.

Just last week I was looking for a way to move all the windows from one screen to another in a go. After evaluating many clumsy or over-complicated existing solutions, I asked copilot to write a C program to do it. It had to be minimal and not depend on any runtime framework. A few loops later I had what I wanted without installing third-party tools!

> In my mind there are different buckets for personal projects. One is things I do to learn and grow and the other is things I really wish existed.

Pretty much 100% of projects I've done with vibe coding/engineering is in the second category. Stuff I need that either doesn't exist or exists, but is either horribly complex to configure or is a mess of 420 features even though I just need one of them.

It's a lot easier for me to implement that one specific feature just for myself than keep vigilant on an existing app's eventual scope creep as it progresses to the eventual ability to read email[0] =).

[0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

With AI coding I was able to build three applications I always wanted but never had time to code them.

Now it is different in a way — I don’t have time to use them.

I once had a project for novice freelancers. The idea was to take your abandoned fumble and put multiple people on it at 3rd world rates. There are lots of people in cheap coutries who can somewhat code. You can aford hiring someone for [say] 3 euro per day. If they describe where they got stuck in the daily progres report you can look at it and help a bit or not and Just let them figure it out.

You can pay more of course, buy them a computer, an internet connecties, books, courses, even an office but it isnt required.

Just pay 60 per project every 4 weeks and ignore it. If interesting progress happens its fun to look at.

I prompted Claude code from my phone to revive Draw!, a pixel art editor I first published 15 years ago as an exploration using Redis as a DB.

The new version is live at http://pixel.drawbang.com after 1 week of prompting Opus 4.6 with a max subscription.

The tooling landscape has changed so much in the last two years that I find myself re-evaluating automation setups that were solid 18 months ago. The time investment to rebuild is real but the efficiency gains on the other side are worth it for anything you're doing more than a few times a week.

Every time I see a story like this I like to play the game "does this person just happen to work for a company that sells AI solutions?". And yes, yes they do. Almost never will see you a story promoting AI solutions from someone that isn't directly involved in selling AI solutions.

it's a top affordance of AI because pause development usually over complexity I can't manage or knowledge gap that I can't close in time to sustain momentum. Not only are those roadblocks a non-issue, my perspective shifts from in-the-weeds hacking to a perch with meta view to take the project to completion or maybe beyond previous goals. win-win to the power of win

We have closed-source and open-source software, I think the next phase is going to be self-source or llm-source software (not sure what the term will ultimately end up being), but basically if you have a need for something that is not filled exactly by any app, you will just give the spec to an LLM and in X amount of minutes/hours you will have bespoke software built just for you to use personally, fully tested and to spec. For example, I still haven't found a workout/weight lifting tracking app that does 100% of what I want and at this point I may just build it myself because I could probably do it in half a day with claude and won't have to pay any annoying subscription fees. Maybe it'll still be called AI slop but if it works it works.

So, what are you planning to do when you finish all your unfinished hobby projects?

>I initially drafted this before my last post on how Claude Code is getting worse. I'm putting it out now so I can reference it in a future post on OpenCode.

IMO, what is getting worse is not Claude Code, the CLI tool, but Anthropic API. That's what most people experience.

I used Claude Code with GLM 5.1, MiniMax M2.7, Kimi K2.6 and had pretty good results.

I prefer Claude Code over OpenCode because most plugins and skills have best compatibility with Claude Code.

Even Terminal Bench showed a bit better results for Claude Code than for OpenCode.

In 2020 I was in the Codemirror forums trying to get help with a project that replaces React in GraphiQL for Svelte. It was too difficult for me to figure out so I shelved it. Yesterday I asked Claude to make this happen and it referenced that very thread I made.

Anyhoo, I'm working on making it pretty (it works!!) before integrating it into my opinionated GraphQL server[1].

There really is no excuse for NOT being the change you wish to see in the world anymore.

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[1]: https://code.webb.page/eol/gq.git/about

I’ve had a similar experience.

Having better tools really makes a difference when revisiting old or half-finished projects.

There certainly is some relaxing value in working on projects to vibe code them; but not enough to pay some random corporation. Get yourself a Mac Studio or AMD395+ and pi or opencode, and a few plugins and they're pretty capable. Since they're not speed demons but reliable compaions who are always there, you don't ever feel compelled to constantly attend to whatever they're doing.

And when you inevitably get bored with it, well, you've not done much anyway. You can always get back up to speed in a month and have the LLM remind you of what it was doing.

Sounds a lot like that disgusti g corporate press propaganda tbh, of the "eat less avocado toast if you cant afford rent" variant. Is the AI mainstream that desperate in their relentlesss push for adoption of their bullshit text generators?

projects you were never going to finish should stay projects that are never finished :)

But why give Anthropic/openai our money? Nonsense. Use open models

What is the point of using AI for a side project? Isn’t the point of a side project to A) have fun writing code or B) challenge yourself or C) learn something new, and usually all 3? Slopping out random stuff you have no attachment to, taught you nothing, and that feels bad to pass off as your own work accomplishes nothing.

Yes, you can revive it into worthless slop. Learning next to nothing for yourself and achieving a hollow sense of satisfaction at best.

Maybe even shamelessly post it as a Show HN along with the other 99% of worthless slop submissions there.

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[we've hopefully deprovokified the title now]

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This hits home. I have ~10 abandoned side projects.

I just shipped one this week (ToolRelay - toolrelay.online) by forcing myself to focus on a single vertical slice end-to-end and stop opening new repos.

The pattern that broke for me: stop building, start distributing. The build phase gives a dopamine hit; distribution feels painful, so we keep building instead.

Curious — was the AI assistance helping you build new features, or helping you re-understand your own old code months later?