7/19/2026 at 1:44:47 PM
It sometimes feels to me that cloud AI providers have convinced people that cloud AI is worth it because of all the ways people have been able to use cloud AI to write blog posts about using cloud AI to make cloud AI more efficient for something that they haven't shipped yet and aren't really ready to talk about.by dofm
7/19/2026 at 2:01:29 PM
Trust me there are plenty of us using cloud AI to actually ship stuff. We just aren't writing blog posts about it.by resonious
7/20/2026 at 10:28:53 AM
... replying to internet comments to reassure the fact that cloud AI is worth it because we're 'this close' to shipping a product that allows more efficient usage of cloud AI ...But seriously, a friend of mine has been both amazed and frustrated in equal measure by cloud AI, and I think the frustration part is resultant from the new precedent set by the amazing parts.
... his project is as-yet unshipped.
by BLKNSLVR
7/19/2026 at 2:18:42 PM
what did you ship?by dominotw
7/20/2026 at 10:34:34 AM
I’ve used it for several improvements to our wysiwyg. I was able to refactor to a much more cohesive architecture that is making future work much easier/safer. We got a fzf like search algorithm for an autocomplete that includes marking which characters matched. It fixed some jank performance issues I was struggling to track down.Fixed small several bugs last week without even open the editor. It wrote tests that confirmed the bugs, then fixed them. Then I manually confirmed as well.
It built a double entry event log. A single application event produces two logs, one for the person doing the action, one for the person being acted upon.
For a nasty problem we have, we had AI prototype 2 different solutions. Then we reveiewed them as a team. We threw those out but it was very helpful input into our decision making.
by ncphillips
7/20/2026 at 1:29:04 PM
> I’ve used it for several improvements to our wysiwyg. I was able to refactor to a much more cohesive architecture that is making future work much easier/safer. We got a fzf like search algorithm for an autocomplete that includes marking which characters matched. It fixed some jank performance issues I was struggling to track down.so, basically did some vague, almost incomprehensible stuff. seems par for the course.
by zabzonk
7/20/2026 at 2:05:34 PM
How was any of that incomprehensible? They gave a list of some actual things they shipped. The hand wavy dismissal where you pretend they didn’t say anything just exposes your bias. You don’t want to hear a success story so you don’t.by dpark
7/20/2026 at 4:17:08 PM
how do you ship a "wysiwyg"?and my point is he is doing the hand-waving. i'm quite happy to hear success stories - we get so few concrete ones here.
by zabzonk
7/20/2026 at 4:24:26 PM
It’s obvious from context that his team owns some sort of WYSIWYG editor.by dpark
7/19/2026 at 10:16:21 PM
Just features for the client. The same stuff I was shipping before but much faster and more stable.by resonious
7/19/2026 at 5:55:09 PM
Most of "What are you working on?" is AI assisted; not much is shipped.https://hn.algolia.com/?query=working%20author%3Adavid927&so...
by password4321
7/20/2026 at 10:25:15 AM
Checking all the past "what are you working on?" threads just to realize that, somewhere in August 2024 stuff just exploded and the average thread goes reached ~1000 messages, from ~50 pre-August.by Thanemate
7/20/2026 at 12:39:39 PM
Tons of ppl got into CS in last few years worldwide.by dominotw
7/20/2026 at 6:46:01 PM
I don't think that explains it. CS has been an extremely popular degree for at least the past 20 years. Not to mention coding bootcamps and the like.The obvious notable event circa 2024 was LLMs becoming reasonably useful for code assistance (IMO and IIRC OFC).
by fc417fc802
7/20/2026 at 8:37:37 AM
https://whistle-enterprise.comby properbrew
7/20/2026 at 4:20:59 AM
I shipped this shader based video compositor as part of a bigger project ive been working on since before LLMs but the compositor was 100% ai and it works fantastically. It's not a huge project but I and a number of my users use it. https://lowkeyviewer.com/studio/by tracerbulletx
7/20/2026 at 11:34:14 AM
I did ship a quite efficient quantum simulator as a toy out of other work (and a block truncation certificate as a side-product). https://github.com/cgiogkarakis/qutby cgio
7/20/2026 at 4:50:35 AM
I've shipped (to TestFlight) a fairly fun video game that's tricking my friends into working out: https://reverdure.yourstrategy.coby Schiendelman
7/19/2026 at 7:35:51 PM
Thinking about it a better question [for me] would be what might have but didn't ship because of LLMs.by 6510
7/20/2026 at 5:17:23 PM
I have been thinking about this for a while, because I personally need a career pivot but I was going to move into personalised training, and I think AI likely really messes with the viability of that.by dofm
7/20/2026 at 10:36:35 AM
That’s an interesting question, in particular because I don’t think I have a single exampleby ncphillips
7/19/2026 at 2:25:57 PM
Whenever I've answered this question, the reply was always "this is shit", so I don't bother now. Bad faith questions just shouldn't be answered.by stavros
7/19/2026 at 2:34:23 PM
If you characterise questions as bad faith so you don’t have to answer, sure.Since this is my thread, and since I am an exasperated freelancer who has made most of his post-dot-com career from writing exactly the kind of quite small, simple, unambitious, often internal things for smaller customers that nobody would confuse with anything cool, who is trying to understand how AI is going to make his life any better when it’s so opaque, fast moving, poorly documented and full of unverifiable claims battling unverifiable claims, let me assure you that the following question is not being asked in bad faith:
What did you ship?
by dofm
7/19/2026 at 2:57:10 PM
I've shipped small, simple, unambitious internal things for our company that saved people lots of time, and I've shipped them in minutes rather than the a day or two they used to take.I've just shipped a migration from our old auth service to the new one in a week, a migration that we've put off for three years because it would take the team months to finish.
I've shipped small side-projects that I'm the primary (and usually only) user of, but they now take me two days rather than weeks of effort and learning (e.g. https://www.writelucid.cc, https://pine.town, https://stavrobot.stavros.io, https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula).
I've made changes in OSS apps that I just wouldn't have made otherwise (https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/pulls/skorokith...), and even some closed-source ones (https://www.stavros.io/posts/adding-a-feature-to-a-closed-so...).
I've shipped hardware projects that would have taken me months of learning in a few days (https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/).
How's that?
by stavros
7/19/2026 at 3:17:25 PM
Thank you for the details! These are precisely the kind of things I want to hear about because they are self-contained and I can judge against the kind of stuff I do.I am quite interested in experimenting with it for migrations, because for example I have a set of sites written in older Nuxt and Vue and Buefy that need refreshing (and the frontend ported to that UI-agnostic Buefy replacement whose name escapes me at the moment but begins with “ou” I think). These migrations won’t happen any other way (small customers won’t pay for that) so I am open to whether tooling can reduce the cost I have to swallow. LLMs I have tested (including local models) seem to support the idea that this will be doable but I am a little out of the loop with the projects so I haven’t got back to this yet.
The hardware thing looks great; I am a sort of distracted maker and FreeCAD nerd but I often need a nudge to get started and I have found an LLM chat to help there a little bit (though it cannot answer some questions if I don’t have the specific vocabulary).
Writelucid is definitely cute.
I think you should not be put off talking about these things because whether people agree with you or not about whether they are important, they can at least measure against them.
by dofm
7/19/2026 at 3:24:45 PM
You're welcome! LLMs definitely help with the migrations, there were definitely a few iterations because the surface area was massive, but overall it took the project from "will never be prioritised" to "I can work on it on and off when in boring meetings", which was a massive win.I haven't found that LLMs help with CAD at all, but YMMV.
As for sharing here, the last time I shared something with "here's something I made with LLMs", the reply was "it shows", and that's just the latest instance. It just puts me off the whole thing.
by stavros
7/19/2026 at 3:40:39 PM
Oh I definitely don't expect them to help with CAD and nor would I want them to — I really enjoy knowing FreeCAD.It's more the microcontroller choice, broad components, all that.
The main areas I find LLMs struggle with research, I struggle with research too. I am a pretty solid researcher and I find it validating, in fact, to find that a more brute-force-trained thing is not better than me.
I see your point about the snarky reply; I must admit I have probably in the more distant past been somewhat snarky but I stopped commenting like that whenever I spot myself doing it because I know it is dispiriting.
(The other reply, re: early and late stages, is the kind of substantive question that lingers in my mind).
Anyway I just want to reiterate my thanks: I am sort of cynical about this, in that I believe the technologies may have their uses, but I have no time for the cult and the hype train, so it is nice to see anyone talking about actual things.
by dofm
7/19/2026 at 7:45:47 PM
By the way, I've written up my workflow if that interests you: https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/by stavros
7/20/2026 at 9:47:17 AM
> I can work on it on and off when in boring meetingsThat’s not a sign of a healthy org. If you’re in a meeting it’s disrespectful not to be present. If you think a meeting is not useful you should reject it.
by jurgenburgen
7/20/2026 at 10:23:18 AM
Sometimes I'm in a meeting where the item being discussed doesn't relate to me, and that's a good chance to put another turn in the LLM.by stavros
7/19/2026 at 3:13:20 PM
This is exactly why people shouold share what they are doing with ai, so we know whwn it works, the scope, tech...etc. Thank you for sharing.by taosx
7/19/2026 at 3:53:21 PM
I concur. I really want to see this from the "small stuff" upwards, which is probably why my own interest starts with local models and grows outwards, but all of these things are worth hearing.by dofm
7/19/2026 at 3:14:52 PM
I don't use it to ship whole products. I have it do some tasks.I have it code dsp techniques in journal articles I hand it. I have it create the unit tests, pipelines documentation. Then I manually verify the test cases aren't wrong and run the tests. If they pass it does what I wanted and I start looking at the code quality. It varies from being better than I could have done it to being objectively bad. I fix it if it needs fixing, then I'm done.
I have also pointed it at issues in our backlog and it usually finds the subtle logic errors underlying the behavior in the issue.
I haven't started and entire product from zero and shipped it. Mostly because I haven't started a new product since it was capable of that. But also because it has a scale beyond which I don't find it as useful. I have used it for an entire repo, but in the crates.io or npm scale of repo, not boost scale.
by galangalalgol
7/20/2026 at 10:41:48 AM
I work at a 6 year old startup. Essentially every feature and bug fix we’ve shipped in the last year has had LLMs involved. Every project plan involved AI, either for writing or for codebase research. For code review we get AI to do the first pass.by ncphillips
7/19/2026 at 2:34:52 PM
Why assume bad faith? I've witnessed a barrage of "proof of concepts" at my dayjob by folks who have zero intention of ever hooking up their dashboard to our actual messy data. Shipping is still a major barrier. Is your experience meaningfully different?by itishappy
7/19/2026 at 2:29:37 PM
This just feels like a bad faith comment designed to spike the conversation entirely.by Forgeties79
7/19/2026 at 2:32:24 PM
Agreed. AI has been "just trust me bro" for so long. People need to show receipts instead of spreading vague hypeby speedster217
7/20/2026 at 1:48:17 AM
Especially given the wildly unsustainable rate of investment.by Forgeties79
7/19/2026 at 2:34:01 PM
shipped = paying real users ( or a non profit with users)doesnt matter what subjective opinions are.
shipped is not pushing something on github.
by dominotw
7/19/2026 at 3:48:43 PM
My definition would be "users waiting for it who received it"; that's the one that fits the broadest real world definition of the word. Not everything is an organisation, not everyone is paying.by dofm
7/20/2026 at 3:01:23 AM
If the only user is the author, then I don’t see a meaningful distinction between shipped and not shipped. It’s like a blacksmith who said they invented a new tool with great value but they built it themselves and no one else is willing to use it because it’s so customized to their workflow.Edit: I’ll add a caveat that I’d agree it was shipped if it’s making the author money even if they are the only user, but otherwise it all smells like dotcom era Pets.com level of selling a dollar for 99 cents and claiming it’s the future.
by lovich
7/20/2026 at 4:32:44 AM
Many very well made software written without any AI was never "shipped" because there were no people who wanted to pay for it, many very poorly made software was shipped because demand and marketing did the job.So evaluating software by "shipped or not" is just useless.
by aytigra
7/20/2026 at 3:24:14 AM
I have used AI to ship software that users pay for.by apparent
7/20/2026 at 4:22:14 PM
What a weird thing to downvote without comment. You doubt this? I am literally using AI right now to update software that generates tens of thousands of dollars of revenue annually.by apparent
7/19/2026 at 3:35:00 PM
My team redid a bunch of our ETL. I personally built a programming language that you can download and use, and I’m about to release an iOS app(in a few weeks).by ch4s3
7/20/2026 at 6:16:48 AM
operatorsval.ggWhich is basically a fancy calendar and team management system for my Valorant Premier team haha
It’s on my GitHub as operators-premier-manager but note it is not great: it serves its purpose which is to wrangle my team to show up for practice and scrims
by girvo
7/19/2026 at 5:00:41 PM
I'm hesitant to respond, because I haven't shipped yet and I haven't shown any evidence. But I am close enough to completion that I am certain Claude's work will be sufficient to ship.I'm making a fairly simple game, a single player 2D roguelite strategy game. More context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886151
From an implementation perspective, it is about 80% complete, where by "complete", I mean "adequately polished such that I could ship it." (I'm not interested in providing evidence of my claim at this time, and you are welcome to not believe me.) Most of the remaining 20% are optional game modes I could choose to cut (and may, for gameplay reasons).
I do not contend that the code is excellent. But to whatever extent the code is "slop", that has not meaningfully inhibited the ongoing development or caused noticeable issues with the player experience.
The game is not especially ambitious, but it's something I would have been unable to create without genAI. The version of me that could have made it without genAI would have taken > 10x as long to get as far as I've gotten.
by ksaun
7/19/2026 at 2:31:56 PM
https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck/blob/main/src/Puck.World..."Shipped" is a bit strong in my case, but I think this counts as something that isn't mere slop.
by kittoes
7/19/2026 at 2:40:13 PM
One sentence into that readme I can tell you that yes, it most definitely counts as slop.by dandellion
7/19/2026 at 2:52:47 PM
That's fair critique, the README itself is indeed slop explicitly written by bots for bots. What it actually does and how it works is actually pretty neat if you care to look.by kittoes
7/19/2026 at 3:13:26 PM
Then.. why would you link to the readme if you know it's slop? What's the point of a slop README?by Chris2048
7/19/2026 at 3:18:56 PM
'Cause I don't have any quality user-facing documentation yet; that README is for bots. None of the interfaces have had a chance to settle, so any time spent accurately and humanely documenting what the project is capable of right now is an investment I cannot afford. I figured most people would just give it over to their favorite LLM with whatever instructions they prefer for translation because that's what I would've done...by kittoes
7/19/2026 at 3:46:35 PM
I don’t mean to pick on you in particular here, but this approach has been bothering me a lot lately, and it seems like it’s super common.I get that it’s an early prototype and not all the design choices are made yet, but I struggle with “I can’t afford human-readable documentation yet”. Isn’t human readable documentation important for efficiently planning and deciding what you want to build? I feel like I can’t afford not to have human readable docs and plans while the project is taking shape
Related, if a user can prompt an agent to translate to a human-readable summary, wouldn’t it be better to just do this in place? Sure, models can deal with noisy LLM outputs but shouldn’t a document that’s easier for humans also be easier for bots?
by rsfern
7/19/2026 at 3:52:51 PM
No worries, I don't feel picked on at all.Yes, it would probably be better to have something like that if you're struggling to plan and decide. In my particular case this has been a project that I have dreamt about and tinkered with for at least 15 years now. Most of the work I'm doing is just refinement of existing ideas what were already codified in other projects I've built.
Why don't I do this in place? The amount of churn is utterly incredible as ideas are refined and taken to the limit. These agents are getting quite good, but they regularly make the silliest of mistakes. You actually have to be extremely cautious about what you document because it often has a way of becoming "doctrine" to the agents. In fact, one of the most difficult parts of working on this project has been that the foundational properties cause the agents to lock down behavior WAY too early.
by kittoes
7/19/2026 at 3:27:06 PM
What does "that README is for bots" mean? Are you implying it is some kind of special language written by and correctly understood by bots/LLMs, but otherwise semantically coherent?by Chris2048
7/19/2026 at 3:46:43 PM
Sort of? The bots almost insist on making sure one exists because that's one of the many patterns they trained on and they do their best to be human-like, but we all know that just doesn't pan out. They're also a side-effect of your long-term interactions with the agents, very much like being in a tight clique where most of your conversations sound like gibberish to outsiders because of all the jargon.by kittoes
7/19/2026 at 3:49:14 PM
Wait so someone asked for something you made with AI that wasn't slop, and then you linked to something you knew was slop, and you said "I think this counts as something that isn't mere slop" and then when called out on it you admit you knew it was slop the whole time?This is a frequent pattern among AI users. What causes it?
by inigyou
7/19/2026 at 3:58:22 PM
The README is, the project absolutely isn't and you don't have to take my word for it. I figure I'm speaking to a technically advanced audience who is perfectly capable of pulling down the repository if they're at all curious. I also provided a non-slop link elsewhere in the thread if that's more your bag. If not, oh well...by kittoes
7/19/2026 at 4:46:08 PM
The project appears to also be slop.by inigyou
7/19/2026 at 11:57:33 PM
Why would anyone pull it? When I want slop I just ask the AI to generate some exactly the way I like it.by dandellion
7/20/2026 at 12:48:54 AM
I get the skepticism, I really do, but my hope is that your own AI(s) confirm exactly what I'm claiming within these comments. Like I've told others, there's no need to take my word for it... the entire point of the project is that anyone can execute/prove the same things I claim using their own hardware via a Doom-replay type format. If I was one of those influencer types, then I would've simply led with "it's an agentic first engine!!! how amazeballz is this?!" or some other nonsense. On the extremely off chance that I'm actually working on some sort of ridiculous ARG, consider this post a canonical part of it.by kittoes
7/20/2026 at 3:06:56 AM
> I get the skepticism, I really do, but my hope is that your own AI(s) confirm exactly what I'm claiming within these commentsGiven that you stated your readme is for bots, given that you expect our own AI to interpret it based on your evidence, how do I, as a human, go about evaluating this project without just writing it off as slop from the linked evidence?
What is the starting off point for a human, not an AI agent, to evaluate this?
And to be clear if the answer is to just download arbitrary code onto my machine and run it, that’s not good enough given the increase in attacks from AI projects and fake recruiters telling you to just run it bro. I’ve already had to pass on multiple interviews despite being unemployed because the human/ai on the other side demanded root access or for me to run arbitrary code onto my machine as part of their process.
by lovich
7/20/2026 at 6:01:32 AM
Frankly, there's no "good" starting off point for a human right now, and that's why I'm not at all comfortable claiming this has actually shipped. It's very much a WIP where only a select few namespaces have actually had a chance to settle.That said, the maths library might just be the best thing to start with because it's mostly stable, relatively simple, and virtually every other part of the project depends on it in some way. If graphics are more your jam then maybe check out the SDF VM project and associated documents. All rendering goes through a single instruction set that is implemented via a shader pipeline that allows arbitrary scenes to be defined without shader recompilation. The project is essentially multiple compilers wearing a trench coat so there's a little bit of something for everyone... like two fully implemented emulators of the brick variety, including peripherals.
If you're adventurous and want to have your favorite LLM give the project a review in a sandbox then I think that'd be neat! Especially considering that they would have absolutely no problem driving everything themselves through STDIN. Though I totally understand if that's not something you're keen on doing considering the state of things today. Either way, cheers!
by kittoes
7/20/2026 at 1:48:53 PM
I noticed this as well. A few days ago I was linked a game engine here when I similarly asked for proof and when I went to the repo and started reading it, the best way to describe it was keyword jargon soup and it seems to be the same for a lot of projects in this thread.I think it's because it makes them seem...smarter? More technical? But they can't describe who it's for or what the actual design is without consulting an AI.
by fzeroracer
7/19/2026 at 5:37:46 PM
Jesus Wept. Software engineering is dying at the moment and everyone has AI Glitz in their eyes.by lenkite
7/19/2026 at 5:54:46 PM
Dying? Really?https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck/blob/main/src/Puck.Maths...
Some of us aren't just slopping it up like @theo and all the other AI influencers are, as I developed nearly every single line of this by hand over the span of the past decade. Agents recently became capable of factchecking it and helped find bugs that my other unit testing never caught. Software engineering has never been more alive!
https://gist.github.com/Kittoes0124/6827d08e457c1c8b790422af...
This is a snippet I wrote years ago to help me study different formulations of the equation ((1 + √5) / 2). There was this thing I could "see" in there that would allow me index into these sequences, and whole families of others, in O(1) time. The problem is that I still don't know enough maths to derive the exact object that I want from the nonsense that I have.
https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck/blob/main/src/Puck.Maths...
This is the reformulation of that snippet into a proper object, distilled using Fable and Sol. Unlike BinaryIntegerFunctions, I didn't write a line of this and I'm quite happy with that. It's been a slog for so long... being able to let these agents toil away at all the off-by-one type noise is just nice. I get to focus on an actual product for once instead of manufacturing every single nut and bolt myself.
by kittoes
7/20/2026 at 7:17:48 AM
I am just confused on how you know that all of what has been generated is valid. When you write the code generator yourself, you have that level of confidence.by lenkite
7/20/2026 at 11:00:12 AM
It's mathematically provable in most cases because the engine is deterministic from the ground up and I refused to ever compromise on that one detail. For example, nearly all of the VM and maths code functions have been validated for ALL possible 32-bit inputs and extensively fuzz tested in the 64-bit range. Even the more complicated sections of the code like the emulators have batteries of third party tests that ensure a certain level of compliance. The fact that you can play commerical ROMs to completion, including esoteric titles that require third party peripheral/MBC code, is quite solid proof too!A form of recursion is also doing a lot of heavy lifting because the emulators are their own separate deterministic engines that are dynamically plumbed into the primary loop. This not only allows us to embed diegetic devices (as in, you can literally pick up a glowing brick in the world, hold it to your face, and play it), but also validates that the primary loop is coded accurately because the outer loop runs at X Hz while humble bricks must run at ~59.7275 Hz. Pacing inaccuracies in the main loop cause us to fail the brick suites that we test against. This concept of having features reinforce one another is applied as often as possible.
The obsession with determinism goes so far that both the DirectX and Vulkan backends are validated against each other for pixel level differences. If they differ more than the expected maximum then code is refactored until the drift is back within acceptable range.
by kittoes
7/19/2026 at 2:44:13 PM
... What is it? A game, apparently? There are no screenshots. Is the game fun?by inigyou
7/19/2026 at 2:49:27 PM
It's not a full game yet, but the substrate on which I am building one. It implements a completely deterministic SDF VM rendering engine that allows edits in real-time at acceptable performance levels. The engine is essentially folded in on itself as the editor is the game; assuming that an editor mode was actually defined in the world document. It's a lot...https://claude.ai/code/artifact/382aee8a-3a3b-4cf8-801f-3ddb...
by kittoes
7/19/2026 at 3:48:08 PM
[flagged]by inigyou
7/19/2026 at 4:16:43 PM
It has so many words precisely because it isn't a slop game engine. You could indeed build a game out of it, and that's what I'm personally doing, but that isn't what it is. In a nutshell: it's just a really fancy compositor. We can take arbitrary feeds from different input sources and composite them in pretty much whatever way we want to. Obvious basic things like four-player split screen is possible but you could also choose to embed a fifth player screen within the game world itself, sculpted and riding on top of actual geometry. We can do this with a webcam, a program, the entire desktop, or even the built-in emulation engines; all editable and composable in real-time via a data-driven document. That's just scratching the surface...by kittoes
7/19/2026 at 4:48:51 PM
this is definitely slop. It's not slop because it supports 4-player split screen? That's your excuse? I think if I posted this same project to you and you'd never heard of it, you would come to the same conclusion.by inigyou
7/19/2026 at 4:59:55 PM
Did you actually try to read what I wrote, or are you just stopping at the very first thing you can parse? I'm engaging in good faith with you here, it would be nice if you even remotely attempted to do the same. You can literally walk around in a world, pick up an in-world device, turn it on, and watch/hear the device play an actual ROM. Furthermore, you could edit that ROM while you're playing it. Recursion and determinism all the way down. Again, that's just one of the many possible things you could do... call it slop all you want; I'll still believe that it's coolest thing I've ever worked on.by kittoes
7/19/2026 at 7:25:26 PM
A render graph is also nothing new, and neither is screen capture.by inigyou
7/19/2026 at 7:46:46 PM
The most wonderful feature of the project is that there are almost zero new ideas contained within. I'm standing on the shoulders of many giants, proudly.https://github.com/ByteTerrace/WorldOfWarcraft.Addons.GamePa...
This is an addon that I wrote for WoW, well before having access to any sort of AI, that blatantly copies the crossbar layout popularized in FFXIV. Playing an MMO with a controller in that game was a mind-blowing experience for me because I never imagined it could work! So, I spent a winter break reimplementing the entire thing in my own unique way.
https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck/blob/main/src/Puck.Overl...
This is a generalization/simplification of that idea. New? No. Unique? Definitely.
by kittoes
7/19/2026 at 4:08:38 PM
Part of the issue with "shipping" AI-generated code is, what's the value of shipping something that your prospective customers could just make for themselves? Shipping a product used to be the gold standard of value, but I'm not sure it is anymore, the zeitgeist just yet has to catch up.I think it does have pretty good value when you are your own customer, because you can make exactly what you need. For instance, I'm using it to make a web playground in which I can test the board game I'm designing, instead of asking people to pay for, and install Tabletop Simulator. I'm satisfied. I can tell the code sucks without even looking at it. But I wouldn't have had the time to do this myself, the token cost isn't prohibitive, and it works fine.
by breuleux
7/19/2026 at 4:26:36 PM
Most people still prefer products over building their own thing, even if the barrier is lower.As an example consumer 3D printing hasn’t had much impact on manufacturing
by shepherdjerred
7/19/2026 at 5:08:16 PM
This is a bit of a year-of-linux-on-the-desktop question.Desktop 3D printers are tools; I know many people using them to support their making. And they've utterly changed manufacturing on another level (simply because of their ability to surface a prototype).
It will get better and better and better and still never replace mass production, but mass production will be changed by it.
Not least because of the fundamental shift in availability of the tools to make tools. The productised desktop CNC market is wild and it owes almost its entire existence to the change in the market driven by 3D printing.
by dofm
7/19/2026 at 8:44:14 PM
Sorry I am not saying that X technology is not important, transformative, etc.I am saying that the average person is going to want to just have things that work. They are not going to want to have a hobby of using X technology.
It doesn't matter how much you lower the barrier to entry on making apps, websites, games, whatever. Most people are just going to want something that is ready and off-the-shelf.
I mean, why do people pick an iPhone over a cheaper Android even if they are functionally similar? Aside from the (valid) green-bubble/social aspect, it's a much more polished product.
by shepherdjerred
7/20/2026 at 10:54:47 AM
My companie spends a few million per month in token.For me personally, the only reason why i don't use it 24/7 is cost.
Token costs, energy cost, usage limit due to token/subscription cost.
by Xalutiono
7/19/2026 at 1:53:53 PM
The reality however is that unless you're spending tens of thousands on hardware or setting up cloud instances you can't run anything near close to state of the art.In almost all cases right now, a subscription with a cloud AI wins.
by oggreen
7/19/2026 at 2:37:11 PM
> In almost all cases right now,What sort of benchmark or test would convince you that "almost all" is more like "your weird set of cases" and nowhere near "almost all"?
by fragmede
7/19/2026 at 2:44:57 PM
Or "not even your cases but you got psychosed to think it does"by inigyou
7/20/2026 at 5:21:50 AM
People busy building shippable things are generally too busy to blog about it. It is selection bias in its most classical meaning.by seanmcdirmid
7/20/2026 at 8:27:09 AM
Yes, it's the Youtube phenomenon - often when looking for domain-specific videos on Youtube I tend to find videos by professional Youtubers not videos by professional domain specialists (overlap is very rare but occasionally you can find a domain specialist Youtuber who applies their domain knowledge to making Youtube videos).by parasti
7/19/2026 at 2:03:06 PM
I agree there... I hate the posts that rattle on about non-real-world work. Real world now (for me anyway) is maintaining legacy code, fixing issues, and new development. Now, some of the problems others have with AI are super crappy prompts with no real info other than "do this". I look at myself now more as a software designer and an architect, and the AI as a paid consultant. I give detailed specs and designs. The models are getting better at real deep code and legacy, but there are still holes. BUT give the AI a fighting chance with real detail in the prompts.by jscottbee
7/19/2026 at 2:39:25 PM
Cloud AI is 100% worth it. We've been able to do so much more with so much less.by nojito
7/19/2026 at 2:45:06 PM
Examples?by inigyou
7/19/2026 at 3:08:21 PM
a massive number of data engineering agents. We are able to stand up, test, audit, deploy data pipelines much more efficiently with the foundational models.by nojito
7/19/2026 at 3:21:03 PM
Examples of them being useful?by inigyou
7/19/2026 at 3:33:50 PM
Happier engineering teams? Happier end users of the data?What does useful mean to you?
by nojito
7/19/2026 at 3:46:20 PM
So far you've only explained that AI made your coworkers happier. That's fine, but weren't we talking about productivity? Doing more with less?by inigyou
7/19/2026 at 6:29:31 PM
Correct. We were chronically understaffed and now we are able to actually breathe and can argue that we are finally right sized.by nojito
7/19/2026 at 7:24:59 PM
So far you have provided no evidence of achieving more results with less effort. You've only said that you can write more lines of code (effectively) and that your coworkers are happierby inigyou
7/20/2026 at 5:06:01 AM
I have to wonder what sort of evidence you would accept? Because it seems to me that the original question was answered clearly enough and now the goalposts have shifted to demanding evidence that the answer wasn't falsified.by fc417fc802
7/20/2026 at 8:38:56 AM
Well you answered how it is useful by saying it writes more lines of code and that seems to be the only way it's useful. But we all know that lines of code aren't productivity.by inigyou
7/20/2026 at 6:38:10 PM
I don't see where that was said? As far as I can tell you've made that up.The claim was that the same size team is now accomplishing more tasks than they would have without AI.
by fc417fc802
