I can definitely relate to wanting to feel accomplished after a coding session and how AI can sort of strip you of that feeling at times. For me personally, I started to find the joy in the AI + coding relationship once I realized I just had to reframe my thinking a bit.
It's less about code generation for me and more about opportunities to learn new things. It could be as simple as having it optimize my code in a way I hadn't even thought of or it could be me wanting to learn a new complex architectural pattern I haven't had the time to deep dive but have wanted to. Now I can spin something up and have a base understanding of it in minutes. That's exciting to me more than anything else. In a way, it takes me back to way earlier in my career when every day felt like I was learning something new and cool on the job from more seniors devs. I think as you get more senior and experienced, those "cool" learning moments start to happen a little less, so having AI be able to reignite that is exciting in a lot of ways.
I still experience what you outline for bootstrapping understanding, or bringing the knowledge horizon closer, so to speak. Part of the learning though is through the vigilance of parsing and correcting.
When I had a small passive circuit in my head that I wanted to one-shot solder on a protoboard and didn't want to get bogged down in KiCAD, talking through it with an AI and repeatedly correcting its understanding really solidified my own. It's like mentoring while being tutored.
So I still see value in use for smaller novel projects, but using LLMs to hit a deadline for production is not something I want to do any longer, for the time being.
It's definitely easy to get caught up in that and I think for a while I was probably in that headspace, but where the excitement started to set in was the realization that it could be leveraged to reduce the less "fun" parts of my day so I could focus on what I enjoy most. It's not purely a "AI writes code for me" kind of hype (although that's a nice benefit). I spend a lot less time debugging tiny issues hidden in legacy code or sifting through poorly written docs for libs that the codebase depends on, for example. That's a huge win and it lets me focus my time on producing quality work.
No need to apologize for the jadedness at all! I think we're in an era of AI fatigue where every piece of content you see feels like it's AI generated (or assisted). Arguably most points in this post can be looked at as common sense to some degree. I think what I was trying to get across was my mental models and view on AI in tech since I still see a shocking amount of devs who look at it simply as a means to generate code for them and nothing more.
I'm planning on writing more that dives a bit deeper into experimentation I've done as far as tooling, MCP servers, etc that may be a bit more intriguing to those who have already dove into the AI side of things.
Hey HN, ChromeExtensionKit is a side project of mine that includes a bunch of different starter templates for basic (HTML/CSS/JS) and React-based Chrome extensions (with setup and publish scripts) as well as some fully functional example extensions for inspiration. I originally built the starter templates as I found myself setting up and configuring every extension project roughly the same way and wanted to speed that process up in the future. The kit also includes an ebook with actionable growth tips and tricks.
If anyone has any questions, I would love to answer them!
Hey HN, ChromeExtensionKit is a side project of mine that includes a bunch of different starter templates for basic (HTML/CSS/JS) and React-based Chrome extensions (with setup and publish scripts) as well as some fully functional example extensions. I originally built the starter templates as I found myself setting up and configuring every extension project roughly the same way and wanted to speed that process up in the future.
I also wrote and included a short ebook outlining how to use the kit as well as a lot of what I learned growing a number of extensions to over 4,000 users each.
If anyone has any questions, I would love to answer them!
Hey HN, ChromeExtensionKit is a side project of mine that includes a bunch of different starter templates for basic (HTML/CSS/JS) and React-based Chrome extensions (with setup and publish scripts) as well as some fully functional example extensions. I originally built the starter templates as I found myself setting up and configuring every extension project roughly the same way and wanted to speed that process up in the future.
I also wrote a short ebook on outlining how to use the kit as well as a lot of what I learned growing a number of extensions to over 3,000 users each.
If anyone has any questions, I would love to answer them!
Nice work - just purchased. I’ve built a couple of simple extensions before and it always takes me an hour or so to remember how it all works. Hopefully this speeds that process up a bit. Good luck!
Awesome, thank you! That's exactly the reason I originally built them, I found myself going back to old projects constantly or looking up how to define the manifest, use the Chrome APIs, or integrate React into an extension again. If you have any suggestions for additional starting points, I'd love to hear them!
GamePressKit is the all-in-one solution for game studios to quickly build, publish, and manage beautiful press kits for all their releases. With PR converting at 10 to 50 times higher than advertising, having a press kit is critical to ensure your game gets the media coverage it deserves. Building a strong press kit isn't an easy task, but the GamePressKit platform makes it effortless with a powerful visual editor and built in press kit best practices recommended in the industry. With no prior press kit knowledge required, you can create your own press kit, add necessary content and assets, and publish it with a unique, shareable URL in a matter of minutes.
At first glance, it seems very condensed and a little heavy on the eyes. Also, try breaking down the experience points to be more concise and less blocky. Generally, the idea is that you want someone to be able to look at your resume in ~15 seconds and be able to get a decent idea of it's contents.
Extremely impressive list, do you mind me asking how you initially get the projects off the ground in terms of users / traffic?
Also as a side note, thank you for daterangepicker! I've integrated it into a couple little things I've built like chrome extensions and absolutely love it.
* W3Counter: I started "Website Goodies" as a content and tools site for webmasters in the 1990s. It had articles about learning HTML, learning JavaScript, and basically whatever else I myself was learning at the time back then. It also had a tools page, with things like guestbooks and surveys and a website hit counter I hosted. They were initially Perl CGI scripts, then later rewritten in PHP when I learned that. The traffic all came from search engines and organic links. The counter was pretty popular, and I wanted better web stats for my own sites without paying for them -- this was before Google bought Urchin and made Google Analytics out of it, when good web stats still cost money. So I made W3Counter, and linked to it heavily from Website Goodies, which got it off the ground. 100% word of mouth since then, I've never advertised it.
* Improvely got its first customers from Google ads. Because Improvely has a high CLV (customer lifetime value), I could spend a lot on advertising to acquire a customer and still make money from it. So that's what I did. Once I had a couple dozen customers, who were all delighted with the product and the support, word of mouth started taking over. These days 90% of new signups are referrals from an existing/past customer, or referrals from some website that's written an article or review mentioning Improvely. I still run some Google ads but with a limited budget.
* The open source projects get their traffic from Stack Overflow, forums, people searching NPM and other repositories, etc. The Date Range Picker widget got its initial traffic from a "Show HN" post I did here.
I've started other SaaS apps that never worked out. The thing that made them different from Improvely and W3Counter is that nobody was super excited about them. Nobody loved those products; they were maybe useful but not the best at anything and not particularly unique. So the word of mouth referrals never came, churn was high, and eventually I shut them down and tried something else.
I'm jelly. Congrats on your achievement. How many saas have you started that did not fizzle out? Also, for the 600K what is your profit on that? Was that just in the last couple of years (getting 600K/year) or already a long time?
Interesting. I was thinking most people from the target audience (tech) would have ad blockers installed. I can't imagine being a more or less tech-savvy and not using an ad blocker.
The most popular ad blockers also block W3Counter's tracking script, so those 110K monthly views it counted are just the people not running a blocker. Who knows how many more people visited but weren't counted.
Valuable and actionable advice, I really appreciate it! I continue to see content marketing pop up, so I'm definitely going to try and explore that much more.
It's less about code generation for me and more about opportunities to learn new things. It could be as simple as having it optimize my code in a way I hadn't even thought of or it could be me wanting to learn a new complex architectural pattern I haven't had the time to deep dive but have wanted to. Now I can spin something up and have a base understanding of it in minutes. That's exciting to me more than anything else. In a way, it takes me back to way earlier in my career when every day felt like I was learning something new and cool on the job from more seniors devs. I think as you get more senior and experienced, those "cool" learning moments start to happen a little less, so having AI be able to reignite that is exciting in a lot of ways.