alt Hacker NewsThey get abandoned because they get generated on a whim.
Sunk cost fallacy can be a feature: if you have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on a project, you are more likely to push it through adversity and the doldrums that inevitably one will encounter. If all it took was one of those momentarily brilliant ideas and a prompt on Claude to produce something, there is no attachment whatsoever to it.
Speaking as the ‘average programmer’, I have dozens of brilliant ideas per day that don’t stand the test of time or scrutiny, and the very few that pass the filter don’t seem that interesting days later, or worth the effort at all.
Ideas have always been cheap. Now, proof of concepts have become as cheap. I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.
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> I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.
100%, you actually stated it correctly. It's not "I don't care unless you've written/reviewed everything by hand". If someone writes something by hand in an hour, including ideation, and puts it on Show HN, realistically it's almost certainly not going to be worth even looking at.
I've been running an app in prod for more than a year now, mostly vibecoded long before HN believed it was possible - HN only started believing this around Jan this year at the earliest. But nobody who uses it cares, or even notices, because it took a month to build. That's what matters, the amount of time and thought put into it. Of course it's true that vibecoded projects have a much lower median amount of time and thought put into it. But that's like Louisiana having a much lower median income than California, it's just a median, not an inherent characteristic of being a Louisianan vs a Californian, there are plenty of poorer Californians and richer Louisianans.
It’s the same reason why everyone doesn’t wanna read LLM generated blog posts. The agreement used to be generally that you would spend more time writing than I would have to spend reading and when the agreement changes the quality changes as well.
>Ideas have always been cheap. Now, proof of concepts have become as cheap. I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.
Yes. I'm as pro-AI coding as people come, but this is the part that bugs me too. If you whip something useful up in a weekend, great!
But you don't have to present it like you are building an actual product. It's fine if no one else knows about it. Because the fact is, most people don't care, even before AI. Building for yourself is fine.
I wonder how much they spend on this rewrite, in tokens and $ using commercial pricing
Maybe those ideas aren’t so brilliant.
> They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim.
I think it's more than that. These greenfield projects are actually things that, up until the inception of LLMs, they were not worth creating.
With AI code assistants, the cost of developing them is lower, but in the end you still end up with a project that no one bothered to create.
>Ideas have always been cheap. Now, proof of concepts have become as cheap. I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.
I dunno, this idea guy seems to have some really great ideas, what's wrong with you skeptical programmers who aren't on board implementing his ideas for equity?
Keep in mind logic bug that ai makes are extremely hard and expensive to fix as the clanker needs to parse thousand and thousands of lines of text every prompt while a human tries to explain what it's obviously doing wrong.
I hate ai so much because its so easy to generate quick slop that "appears" functional.
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A drum I've been banging increasingly often recently is that having friction and time to work ideas over in your mind adds huge amounts of value. Vibe coded projects have this very specific, well, vibe to them where you can clearly see that the lack of time to digest has allowed the person to not challenge their own worst impulses. You can see it in the feature bloat, the lack of depth and polish in core features and the wild asides you tend to talk yourself out of still on display.