YMMV
That often requires marketing it.
The problem I've had is two-fold.
1. I'm making amazing things (from my perspective) but nobody is paying me for it. I have many friends like this. We're older, very senior engineers with decades of experience and a love of computers/computer science. And we're building the platforms and tools we always wanted to exist. Summoning them into existence.
And nobody is going to pay us a single cent for it.
That's fine, until your roof needs replacing or your AC unit dies, like mine did.
"Dismissing the long list of projects" may in fact be a result of this.
What we have now with these tools is the ability to do more projects than ever, and the result is the marginal value of each of the projects is dropping like a rock.
2. Given the choice between attending meat-space issues and making these things, guess what I choose?
That's a me-shaped problem, I know, but I think it reflects the personality of a lot of people on this forum.
I feel like I'm on a roller coaster, and am simultaneously on the leading edge of being able to do more than ever while the value of all that "more" plummets plummet plummets.
You can do more than ever and unless you're independently wealthy (or incredibly well connected) it will go nowhere at all.
Also half the joy of writing code was having other people use it.
When everyone is a conjurer with a staff, nobody is going to care about what you just brought into existence. Build it and they won't come.
At the end of your life, if all you've done are little half baked throwaway projects, you might look back and realize one day you never made anything of any particular significance, just thrashed around building stuff people had already done so many times before that some unthinking, unfeeling LLM can spit it out almost verbatim just so you can say "me too".
This applies to more than just AI, it can be about any type of "side project" really, or any context where you have a wealth of so many possible options that focusing on one intensely forces you to deliberately ignore most of them.
An example for me lately is hackernews. I used to jump around wildy, looking at comments not really even reading articles. I felt like I was learning a lot. But lately I've taken another approach. Instead of clicking a bunch of things, I'm actually determining what is the most interesting article of the day, reading it thoroughly and truly thinking about it, and then after pausing for reflection, forming my own thoughts about it. I have found this to be a far more enriching experience than my previous habit. I think a lot of things in life turn out this way.
The only reason to use AI to build is when you don't really care too much about things, you just want something, anything. An image here, some code there, a ridiculous video. Cheap thrills with no soul required.
There is a difference between learning woodworking as a fun hobby that would allow you to make a chair for yourself vs. doing it in hopes of turning it into a profitable business venture that would make an impact on the world.
By the grandparent comment logic, there is no point in doing anything, unless it can somehow lead you to making an outsized impact on the world. Thus essentially declaring most hobby pursuits (that are done mostly just for the sake of fun and learning) as wasteful.