I don't really think it's the effort, to be honest. A short while ago, I made a Custom GPT for my wife[0] that she thoroughly enjoyed and uses all the time. It didn't take me that long. The value in the thing is that I could see what she wanted and make it like she wanted. And on the receiving side, a friend of ours knitted our daughter, Astra, a quilt with her name on it and with this lovely star motif. It must have taken her and her mother, a seamstress, ages. But if she had done it instantaneously, I think I still would have loved it.

As for the other side of things, there is one thing that gives me a mild twinge of envy: I grew up on the command-line and when I write on it, I can knock out a full bash pipeline literally at the command-line super-fast. Many of my friends are far better engineers, but this one thing makes me great at any sort of debugging and all that. Now everyone has that! I'm USELESS.

Well, not really, but it's funny that this unique skill is meaningless. Overall, I've found that AI stuff has let me do more and more things. Instead of thinking, at the end of the week, "Oh man, I wish I'd made progress on my side project" I think "Damn, that wasn't such a good idea after all" which is honestly far more satisfying!

0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-17/Custom_GPTs