* https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/ - A voice note recorder.
* https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot - My secure AI personal assistant that's made my life admin massively easier.
* https://github.com/skorokithakis/macropad - A macropad.
* https://github.com/skorokithakis/sleight-of-hand - A clock that ticks seconds irregularly but is accurate for minutes.
* https://pine.town - A whimsical little massively multiplayer drawing town.
* https://encyclopedai.stavros.io - A fictional encyclopedia.
* https://justone.stavros.io - A web implementation of the board game Just One.
* https://www.themakery.cc - The website and newsletter for my maker community.
* https://theboard.stavros.io - A feature board that implements itself.
* https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula - A blood test viewer.
* https://github.com/skorokithakis/support-email-bot - An email bot to answer common support queries for my users.
Maybe some of these will beat the rap.
And even for the ones that might "beat the rap", I don't understand from your descriptions why they are interesting or unique. A voice note recorder? Cool. There are already hundreds if not thousands of those, why did you need to make your own in the first place? I'm not saying that yours isn't special, I'm just saying that it doesn't help to post the blandest description possible if you're trying to impress people with the utility of your utility.
Seems like the bar is now it has to be a mass market product. On another post someone else commented a SaaS doesn't count if it doesn't earn sustainable revenue.
I guess OpenClaw also doesn't count because we don't know how much Peter got from OpenAI.
This is an ideological flame war, not a rational discussion. There's no convincing anyone.
For example, I checked out their "Fictional Encyclopedia". It's an absolutely terrible project, much worse than useless, because it claims to be an "encyclopedia" right in the name (the tagline is "Everything about everything"), yet it's engineered to just completely make things up, and nowhere on the page does it indicate this! I looked up my own niche open-source project, and was prepared to be at least somewhat impressed that it pulled together facts on the fly into an encyclopedic form. For the first couple of paragraphs that seemed like it might be the case, then it veered into complete fantasy and just kept going.
Like what is the point of this? I can already ask a chatbot the same question and at least then I have explicit indicators that it might be hallucinating. But this page deliberately confuses truth and reality for absolutely zero purpose. It's a waste of brain cells, for both the creator and the consumer, with no redeeming value. It's neither interesting, nor different, nor valuable. AND it's burning tokens to boot!
I mean, come on, the bar is not that high. Some of stavros' projects may even be over it. But the first projects I checked were sub-basement, and I am not interested in searching through mounds of trash for what might be a quarter dollar. I'm actually kind of disappointed that stavros didn't have (or apply) the sense or taste to whittle down that list of 11 (!) projects to some 3 that show off the value of their work. Which I'm starting to understand is everyone's issue with AI brain rot; it seems to just encourage "here's everything, I dunno, you figure it out" which is maddening and deserves the pushback it gets.
Moreover though, I'm not even saying you shouldn't do those things. I'm actually playing around with AI quite a bit, and certainly have created my share of useless/productivity tools. But it's not a flex to show off your own Flappy Birds or OpenNanoClaw clone, even if they are written in COBOL or MUMPS.
And they definitely do not have to be "extremely useful". But they should answer the question: what problem does it solve?
And it’s exactly what I expected - lines of code. Cute. But… so what? This is not good for the AI hype and nor any continued support for future investment.
On the other hand all this stuff is going to drive continual innovation. The more tokens generated the more model producers invest. And we might eventually get to a place of local models.
Thanks for the support!
And with AI the result of 99.9% is abandonware. Just piles of code no one will ever touch again.
Which proves the point of no productivity gains. Its just cheap dopamine hits.
That’s not even mentioning that this tools doesn’t do much beyond wrap a call to Claude. And it’s using Claude to display blood test data to the end user. This is not something I’d trust an LLM to not mess up. You’d really want to double check every single result.
We hate having to feel like we have to double check everything. We have an asymmetric relationship with gains and losses etc.
Is it me or is this stuff flying over peoples heads?
Steve Jobs once said a thing about the belief that an idea is 90% of the work is a disease. He is and was absolutely right.
Constant enshittification and UI redesigns are driven by the provider to justify monthly extortion.
Sounds like something that could be tried as a fix for a kind of OCD (obsessive seconds counting).
Something like this would be anxiety inducing for most people, I bet. That'd be an excellent experiment, track heart rate, EEG, and performance on a range of cognitive tasks with 2 minute long breaks between each tasks, one group exposed to the irregular ticking, another exposed to regular ticking, another with silence, and one last one with pleasant white noise.
It's just the right amount of "did that clock just skip a beat? Nah must just be my imagination".
At work, I would say I've done plenty of "useful" things with AI, but that's hard to show off given that I work on an internal application.
Quite simply, I don't think that they are asking or arguing in good faith.
I get the sentiment, but this is natural with a groundbraking new technology. We are still in the process of figuring out how to best apply generative LLM's in a productive way. Lots of people tinker and share their results. Most is surely hype and will get thrown away and forgotten soon, but some is solid. And I am glad for it as I did not take part in that but now enjoy the results as the agents have become really good now.
This is exactly the same reason why the appropriate question to ask about Haskell is "where are the open source projects that are useful for something that is not programming?"
The answer for Haskell after 3 decades is very, very little. Pandoc, Git Annexe, Xmonad. Might be something else since I last did the exercise but for Haskell the answer is not much. Then we examine why the kids (us kids of all ages) can't or don't write Haskell programs.
The answer for LLM coding may be very different. But the question "where is the software that does something that solves a problem outside its own orbit" is crucial. (You have a problem. You want to use foo to solve it, now you have two problems but you can use foo to solve a part of the second one!!)
The price of getting code written just went down. Where are the site/business launches? Apps? New ideas being built? Specifically. With links. Not general, hand-wavy "these are the sorts of things that ..." because even if it's superb analysis, without some data that can be checked it's indistinguishable from hype.
Whatever data we get will be very informative.
I looked into doing it manually, but gave up. Way too much dirty work and me no energy for that.
Then I discovered that claude CLI got good - and told it to do it (with some handholding).
And it did it. Build process modernized. No more outdated dependencies. Then I added some features I missed in the original wick editor. Again, it did it and it works.
A working editor that was abandoned and missed features - now working again with the missing features. With minimal work done from my side (but I did put in work before to understand the source).
I call this a very useful result. There are lots of abandoned half working projects out there. Lots of value to be recovered. Unlike Haskell, Agents are not just busy with building agents, but real tools. Currently I have the agents refactor a old codebase of mine. Lot's of tech dept. Lot's of hacks. Bad documentation. There are features I wanted to implement for ages but never did as I did not wanted to touch that ugly code again. But claude did it. It is almost scary of what they are already capable of.
I chuckle when I see some of them because you could achieve the same (or often faster) result by jotting a note onto a notecard and sticking it in your pocket.
Most of the other automations running don't really seem to serve any real purpose at all.
But hey, if it's fun, have at it.