alt Hacker News> that I would not have written otherwise
I think this is the part I struggle with. The code I write makes me money or is a way of teaching me something, both of which are reasons that I would write the code regardless.
I don’t think I have any projects in mind that I’d be willing to spend half of a car on that I also wouldn’t have written myself.
Obviously just a personal take though. I’m glad you get the usage you want out of it.
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I reached my own productivity limit on several projects (in my case, I'm building a fully automated microscope that uses realtime computer vision to solve a number of longstanding problems with microscopes). As much as I'd want to write the code for it, I hit a wall when it came to debugging some particularly tricky issues- either I couldn't do it, or the time investment was too high.
I use Gemini/ChatGPT/Claude to do that work and it unblocked the enjoyable parts of the project while taking care of the tedium.
I also find LLMs help me learn faster because they can often take a paper and turn it into working code, which I find to be a very slow process.
My "job" is building open source software for data journalism (and anyone else who needs the tools data journalists need, which is pretty much everyone else). I can build more of those tools, and better, in exchange for a fraction of the cost it would take to hire a team to help.