For me, the amount of tedium that comes with any new project before I can get to the "good stuff" is a blocker. It's so easy to sit down with excitement, and then 3 hours later, you're still wrestling with basic dependencies, build pipelines, base CSS, etc.

It's kind of click bait tho. "I took 3 months and AI to build a SQLite tool" is not going to stand out. The 8 year wait gives a sense of scale or difficulty but that's actually an illusion and does not reflect the task itself.