FRESH

Hacker News

Home

Things I've Done with AI

64 points by shepherdjerred

by brotchie

6 subcomments

Not enough time, too many projects. Useful projects I did over the weekend with Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 (just casually chatting with it).
2025 Taxes
Dumped all pdfs of all my tax forms into a single folder, asked Claude the rename them nicely. Ask it to use Gemini 2.5 Flash to extract out all tax-relevant details from all statements / tax forms. Had it put together a webui showing all income, deductions, etc, for the year. Had it estimate my 2025 tax refund / underpay.
Result was amazing. I now actually fully understand the tax position. It broke down all the progressive tax brackets, added notes for all the extra federal and state taxes (i.e. Medicare, CA Mental Health tax, etc).
Finally had Claude prepare all of my docs for upload to my accountant: FinCEN reporting, summary of all docs, etc.
Desk Fabrication
Planning on having a furniture maker fabricate a custom walnut solid desk for a custom office standing desk. Want to create a STEP of the exact cuts / bevels / countersinks / etc to help with fabrication.
Worked with Codex to plan out and then build an interactive in-browser 3D CAD experience. I can ask Codex to add some component (i.e. a grommet) and it will generate a parameterized B-rep geometry for that feature and then allow me to control the parameters live in the web UI.
Codex found Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) B-rep modeling library, which has a web assembly compiled version, and integrated it.
Now have a WebGL view of the desk, can add various components, change their parameters, and see the impact live in 3D.

by semiquaver

5 subcomments

I feel pretty productive myself with AI but this list isn’t beating the rap that AI boosters mostly use AI to do useless stuff focused on pretending to improve productivity or projects that make it easier to use AI.

by bronlund

1 subcomments

If you are a parent, you know that feeling when your child is struggling with something and gets frustrated, but you keep silent and don't help because you know that the child has to figure this out by themselves. That's the same feeling I get when I hear all those doom and gloom perspectives on how AI is ruining coding :D

by smokel

2 subcomments

I've written an Obsidian clone for myself, which has proper Emacs keybindings. Took me a few hours too many to get in all the features that I need.
What I find interesting is that I have little motivation to open source it. Making it usable for others requires a substantial amount of time, which would otherwise be just a fraction of the development time.

by piker

3 subcomments

> I’ll continue use these tools with the hope that they don’t make me obsolete too quickly.
I'm starting to believe using them is more likely to make you obsolete than not.

by ipaddr

2 subcomments

I've heard a few people say I haven't written a single line of code since ...
What do people think of it?
I personal don't think that's a badge of honor. Aside from losing your coding skills you miss oppurtunities to generate AI pieces and connect them to existing systems that can't be feed into the AI. Plus making small changes is easier than having the AI make them without messing something else up.

by stavros

1 subcomments

What did you think of Dagger? I used Earthly a while ago but the one thing I didn't like was that it couldn't parallelize runs, since it only ran on one CI instance. Other than that, I liked that I could run my entire CI pipeline locally, but didn't like it so much that I ended up using it for much else.

by JeanMarcS

1 subcomments

And like everyone else you trained the AI how to replace you by giving it more insight on how to prompt stuff.

by vunderba

1 subcomments

I tend to only use LLMs to complete projects that are relatively unique and that haven't been done before. Because if I'm not going to get anything out of the journey, I might as well get something out of the destination.
*Piece Together*
An animated puzzle game that I built with a fairly heavy reliance on agentic coding, especially for scaffolding. I did have to jump in and tweak some things manually (the piece-matching algorithm, responsive design, etc.), but overall I’d estimate that LLMs handled about 80% of the work. It's heavily based on the concept of animated puzzles in the early edutainment game The Island of Dr. Brain.
https://animated-puzzles.specr.net
*Lend Me Your Ears*
Lend Me Your Ears is an interactive web-based game inspired by the classic Simon toy (originally by Milton Bradley). It presents players with a sequence of musical notes and challenges them to reproduce the sequence using either an on-screen piano, MIDI keyboard, or an acoustic instrument such as a guitar.
https://lend-me-your-ears.specr.net
*Shâh Kur - Invisible Chess*
A voice controlled blindfold chess game that uses novel types of approaches (last N pieces moved hidden, fade over time, etc). Already been already playing it daily on my walks.
https://shahkur.specr.net
*Word game to find the common word*
It's based off an old word game where one person tries to come up with three words: sign, watch, bus. The other person has to think of a common word that forms compound-style words with each of them: stop.
I was quite surprised to see that this didn't exist online already.
https://common-thread.specr.net
*A Slide Puzzle*
Slide puzzles for qualified MENSA members. I built it for a friend who's basically a real-life equivalent of Dustin Hoffman's character from Rain Man. So you might have to rearrange a slide puzzle from the periodic table of elements, or the U.S. presidents by portrait, etc.
https://slide-puzzles.specr.net
*Glyphshift*
Transforms random words on web pages into different writing systems like Hiragana, Braille, and Morse Code to help you learn and practice reading these alphabets so you can practice the most functionally pointless task, like being able to read braille visually.
https://github.com/scpedicini/glyph-shift
All of these were built with varying levels of assistance from agentic coding. None of them were purely vibe-coded and there was a great deal of manual and unit testing to verify functionality as it was built.

by lowsong

1 subcomments

> At work, all that matters is that value is delivered to the business. Code needs to be maintainable so that new requirements can be met. Code follows design patterns, when appropriate, because they are known solutions to common problems, and thus are easy to talk about with others. Code has type systems and static analysis so that programmers make fewer mistakes.
This is a narrow view of software engineering. Thinking that your role is "code that works" is hardly better than thinking you're a "(human) resource that produces code". Your job is to provide value. You do that by building knowledge, not only of the system you're developing but of the problem space you're exploring, the customers you're serving, the innovations you can do that your competitors can't.
It's like saying that a soccer player's purpose is "to kick a ball" and therefore a machine that launches balls faster and further than any human will replace all soccer players, and soon all professional teams will be made up of robots.

by slopinthebag

1 subcomments

> Speaking in the context of solving a problem: does AI need to write beautiful code? No. It needs to write code that works. The code doesn’t need to be maintainable in the traditional sense. If you have sufficient tests, you can throw some LLMs at a pile of “bad” code and have them figure it out.
Code doesn't need to be "beautiful", but the beauty of code has nothing to do with maintainability. Linus once said "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships." The actual hard part of software is not the code, it's what isn't in the code - the assumptions, relationships, feedback loops, emergent behaviours, etc. Maintainability in that regard is about system design. Imagine software as a graph, the nodes being pieces of code and the edges being those implicit relationships. LLM's are good at generating the nodes but useless at the edges.
The only thing that seems to work is to have a validation criteria (eg. a test suite) that the LLM can use to do a guided random walk towards a solution where the edges and nodes align to satisfy the criteria. This can be useful if what you are doing doesn't really matter, like in the case of all the pet projects and tools people share. But it does matter if your program assumes responsibility somewhere, like if you're handling user data. This idea of guardrail-style programming has been around for a while, but nobody drives by bouncing off the guardrails to get to their destination, because it's much more efficient to encode what a program should do instead of what it shouldn't, which is the case with this type of mega-test-driven-development. Is it more efficient to tell someone where not to go when giving directions as opposed to telling them how to get there?
Take the Cloudflare Next.js experiment for example - their version passed all the Next.js tests but still had issues because the test suite didn't even come close to encoding how the system works.
So no, you still need to care about maintainability. You don't need to obsess over code aesthetics or design patterns or whatever, but you never needed to do that. In fact, more than ever programmers need to be concerned with the edges of their software and how they can guide the LLM's to generate the nodes (code) while maintaining the invariants of the edges.