I'm the opposite. Between work and family, I don't get a lot of time to hole up in a cave with an IDE for fun. Prior to LLMs, it was a struggle to get much of anything done. So, I rarely tried. But, now I can get ideas fleshed out and even get code down in the small breaks I get to myself. Now I'm making progress where I wasn't before.

Sometimes I'm not interested in the inner workings of a technology, I just want a one-off tool. Ex: No interest in web tech. But, vibe-coded a tool to scrape and cross-reference a couple of online reports. Now I have the info I need for other projects.

Sometimes I know exactly what I want and it's quicker to hand-hold the AI through making it for me. Ex: Put together yet another SIMD math lib recently. SIMD intrisics are an obnoxious API. But, a non-SIMD implementation is easy to verify and many SIMD implementations are easy to validate vs. the non-SIMD reference. It's just a huge amount of obtuse code.

Sometimes I don't know exactly what I want and it's great to have a always-online partner to bounce questions off of, do rapid-prototyping for me, do code reviews for me. AIs aren't perfect. But, being instant, patient and often right makes them a huge improvement over online forums.

Complete opposite for me, and it is important you hear this. I spend $200 a month Anthropic on Claude Code uplift more free time while no boilerplate yet success and is much more fulfilling now than in the pre-agentic era of hobby coding.

It's the complete opposite for me, my interest in side projects has exploded.

It was never about writing every line by hand, it was about solving a problem and making my life better. LLMs let me do that at a speed never seen before.

I was and am and avid Home Assistant fan but the number of automations/scripts I now have is higher by a magnitude than ever before. Few things would reach the level where it made sense to spend my time writing and debugging a workflow but now I can speak my automations into existence.

Yesterday I got a candle warmer, I wanted to set it up so when I turned it on it started a timer to turn off and I wanted a push notification to see if I wanted to extend the timer when it was close to finishing. All things I knew were possible but HA YAML is miserable (all YAML is) and the UI is not much better (it's a hard problem, I get it). I prompted Claude and had a working implementation in <10min. Additionally it asked if I wanted to auto-turn off if I left the house (yes!) and if it should auto-start the timer if ever detected the candle warmer was on without a timer set (power loss, HA restart, manual interaction with warmer).

My HA automations have never been more bulletproof and if they do something wrong it's as simple as telling Claude Code and having it fix the problem. For example, my motion activated lights (motion sensor -> HA -> smart switch) were working great but I realize that while in the shower my main bathroom lights would sometimes turn off. 1 prompt later and Claude grouped up my motion sensor in the shower to the one in the bathroom so if motion on either was detected the lights would stay on but the shower light would only turn on if its motion detector detected motion.

HA is only one small part of my LLM usage but it's representative of my overall point.

I found _many_ of my side projects just evaporated. Total disinterest. But some were now front and center. I think the distinction was some of them were for learning or technically complex accomplishments, and some were genuinely things I wanted to have/use. That second category is getting ground down by LLMs now, and I enjoy that. The first category has only a few very slow/analog learning projects left.

Exactly the opposite for me. I've gotten into a whirlwind of productivity, working through my lifetime backlog of "somebody out to do thing X" — now I'm doing ALL of them (all open source naturally), plus parametric 3d printing, hardware projects and more.

Interesting - I'm just the opposite. I had 100 side projects rattling around in my skull for years but had no desire to spend even more time on the computer after all the time at work on one, even though all of them from a technical perspective were well within my skillset. So now I can actually get them out of my head and basically for free with almost no effort. Maybe the way we view side projects is different - if you were doing a side project just for the love of the game, then yes I can see LLM outputs not scratching that itch. But if you are doing the side project because of some tangible benefit of it, then LLMs are great.