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.

> 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

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.

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?

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.

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?

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

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.

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