Those were exactly my thoughts when deciding to write a new JS engine [1] written from scratch.

Having been a product and UX-focused dev for my entire career, I knew only the basics about parsers and compilers, but have enough experience to grasp where each piece of the puzzle fits, and how to evaluate them. At the beginning it was just a fun test, but it got progressively more serious; it now implements 100% of the latest spec, beats QuickJS in performance, and surpasses V8/JSC in test262.

It took me four months, and I imagine it would take me a single month to do it again - I’ve learned a lot. Someone who already knew what they were doing, and with the right orchestration, could achieve this in weeks at minimal cost.

I really think we are in for a cambrian explosion of software, enabling things that were just always a little out of reach before (like why can’t most of your devices really talk to each other, in 2026).

[1] https://github.com/ricardobeat/boomkat

Building a procedural open world at the scale of a flight sim in UE5, in a month wrote 5k prompts, spent 40B tokens and will likely take at least a trillion more over the next year of full time dev work.

Big solo projects exist, they're just not coming out as frequently because of, uh, how time works

In the spirit of the latter, here's mine!

https://blog.stuartspence.ca/introducing-asteria.html

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5482440/Asteria_4X/?beta=...

To be clear, I've made large software and game projects over the years, but no way I'd have found the time to do a remake/enhancement of a game I loved as a kid from 1995 that has zero business case. Not without AI.

It makes me feel actually sick that so many people can't separate their positive feelings about AI from people's misery (it must simply be "complaining"), and vice versa. As if both things can't exist, for some reason. It's a common tribalism problem, but it's been kicked up a hundredfold by AI.

> "I've been coding for decades and recently worked hard for months with AI's help to make something I would have never considered possible before."

I think we'll see a lot less people willing to share if the end result is just to feed the machine no matter how they arrived at it.

Count me in the second camp. I've been writing software for 20+ years, and I recently built a low-cost Google Voice alternative because every business VoIP option I looked at was either overpriced or missing something I wanted. Without AI, that's a project I probably would never have started. With AI, I built it solo in under a month. I even have some paying customers now, though that wasn't the primary goal. So far, the hardest part seems to be opening an Apple Developer account...

I agree.. partly, and my problem is with enjoyment. I did some hand coding today and immediately got in the zone, something I'm still not able to do with LLMs. It most definitely took me probably ~2x longer than it would with an LLM, but it was much more enjoyable owning every decision behind the process, and having a full view of how the system worked.

I think this could be achievable with LLMs if they had a much higher token rate. That way you'd have less downtime and could work on the problem more aggressively. How it's designed to work now, offloading cognitively, doesn't feel very good, even when you 'ship' more.

> worked hard for months with AI's help to make something I would have never considered possible before.

Don't we see this already a lot? I feel like people constantly say this exact same words.

It would be nice if we could get a Show HN category specifically for this. I feel like often times when people share projects (whether on HN or otherwise) they're immediately downvoted and cast aside as "AI".

Can we get a forum for sharing project that were _proudly_ built with AI due how ambitious they are?

I am mostly in agreement. And I suspect there are many folks that’re trying to ship something AI-assisted that’s sufficient to get to income security first, and who would use success there as a stepping stone to greater things.

It's the same thing I feel when I hear Terence Tao speak about AI, to be honest.

Problem is that before I wasn’t paying for tools like postgres, git or linux. I donate, and I know that money goes to good hands.

Now I must pay for codex/claude, and that money goes to billionaires psychopaths. So that sucks as you can imagine

AI is my jet pack.

I was a fantastic IC and built really amazing software. I'm an even better AI-empowered engineer.

The old era is dead. The new one is exciting.