I setup exactly one personal finance service/dashboard and one Android app for a specific purpose. Then I stopped because my needs were met. I'm sure I will get into it when I need to again.
You can either use it as a PoC testing enabler in which case it will be bunch of unfinished things. Or you can be deliberate and focused about your goals and the results will match that. Of course being a software developer helps.
I've definitely spent too many sprints where LLMs told me that something would be easy and they could definitely do it, and then... 2 days later I'm still debugging their crap before it dawns on me... WTF am I doing with my time?!
Overall, I've built a memory safe programming language that solves a lot of problems I personally have - predominately in my spare time over 8 months - and I've learned A TON in the process.
I'm close to a release stage, and on top of that - I've built a lot of good tooling for Ruby that I think other people will find helpful once I polish it (especially if anyone plans to vibe code something non-trivial in Ruby - which I honestly wouldn't recommend).
But... I'm not really sure this is what I actually wanted to do with my time, and I'm constantly questioning how much time I'm sinking into this and why...
It started off as utter amazement of what LLMs can do, and then incredible frustration at what they can't do, and my unending desire to figure out why they're so bad at things so close to what they are exceptionally good at, and if there's anything I can do to bridge that gap.
That's partially what the language is designed for (before I even started using LLMs).
But after all this time... I'm not even sure I've really figured anything out tbh.
Starting projects has always been easy. But once I figured out the hard stuff and then had everything figured out and only saw the long road ahead of drudgery and pipe laying my motivation fizzles out unless my paycheck depends on it.
Now? I still get to figure out the fun hard part and then go send a cheap fast working dumb minion to do the tedium.
I’ve finished 3 things in the past month that have been on my hobby list for years with no progress. It’s been really freeing.
The real moment of truth will be if it’s still worth the cost for tasks that have human value and users but aren’t profitable, which is where most of my side projects live. At current rates it is for me, but once the VC subsidies evaporate then maybe not.
For me, rather than cling to the notion that these are things I need to complete and should feel guilty about not having done so, I just started accepting that they either will be completed when the time is right if they're worth my focus, or they weren't meant to be completed and there's probably something better that's come along since starting. I usually keep them all in an archive as a timeline of tinkering and a record of how much time I didn't waste on trying to complete them