People forget how important good UX can be, sometimes.

We're using Markdown, YAML, and JSON bc they're easy to use; they're "highly memetic" (easy to learn, easy to teach, easy to spread)

They don't require many months to learn like XML, back in the day

You can write for yourself, through thinking, and it can be sloppy, bc you're doing it for yourself.

A homecooked meal does NOT look like a Thanksgiving meal.

Most of these writers think that all writing looks like Thanksgiving meals- they aren't. Homecooked meals can be simple, delicious, and not meant to cater for 20+ guests, from family to friends. Each with their own weird peculiarities and food allergies.

writing for thinking should be more like home cooked meals- really disorganized, really sloppy, with none of the presentation, but with all the nutrition and comfort that comes with home cooked meals.

writing is thinking for me, but writing looks like this post; something shot from the hip, and unpolished, to be consumed for myself. it'll probably be downvoted, and that's absolutely ok

I was always a mediocre engineer, and stopping out on a personal usually happened bc "feature XYZ is way too hard to build and I won't spend another three weeks on it". Nowadays anything can be built in a couple of days, scope creep plus "would be cool if it could also do XYZ" makes it harder to walk away from a project and call it done.

But ofc these are personal projects, and I use them daily (like a personal workout system and tracker which I run w/ Claude Code, which love to call Claude Co-Workout). It doesn't "work" as a standalone app. It's mostly a "display system" for whatever CC outputs to me, so I can take the daily workout to the gym.

I got into software bc I liked to put out fun products and projects; I never really liked the process of writing software itself. But either way I'm still running into the "it's harder to put projects out than ever" dilemma, even though the projects are way easier to make, and higher quality than ever.

I'm wondering if it'd be fun to have a "Ask HN: Show us what you've build with (mostly) AI" thread?

for web stuff, e.g. community/forums/docs/small sites which usually don't even have 1M rows of data, precomputing embeddings and storing them and running on a small vector search like this somewhere is much simpler/cheaper than running external services

it's the operational hassle of not having to deal with a dozen+ external services, logins, apis, even if they're free

(I do like mixed bread for that, but I'd prefer it to be on my own lightweight server or serverless deployment)

(we do this all the time; eg. a new popular saying lands in an episode of a tv show, and then other people start adopting it, even subconsciously)

I "hoard" ideas and articles because it's a good way for me to offload them from my brain

As a designer, I absolutely DO scroll through my swipe files once in a while to get inspiration; sometimes I'll also go through saved github repos to borrow an implementation

E.g. that's how I ended up using a lot of libraries like Immer, Svelte, ended up loving Observable / d3js, etc.

Idk about all y'all, but notes are absolutely useful for me.

On a nice day the render actually looks close to the real thing!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46769969

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

As a PRODUCT person, it writes code 100x faster than I can, and I treat anything it writes as a "throwaway" prototype. I've never been able to treat my own code as throwaway, because I can't just throw away multiple weeks of work.

It doesn't aid in my learning to code, but it does aid in me putting out much better, much more polished work that I'm excited to use.