I've been able to build things that I otherwise would not have been able to build, in the free time that I have: - a VST audio plugin
- a wedding website with RSVP functionality
- a relaxing game for my wife
At work, I've been able to build much more than I would have been capable of in the past. I'm a backend eng, and it allows me to build much much nicer frontends than I've ever been able to do in the past.
And before you tell me that the code is crap - it doesn't matter! It may or may not be good code, but it works and serves it's purpose very well. Anyways, I'm I'm not launching a rocket, or putting software into cars.
I've used agentic tooling at work for almost a year now, to great affect.
Tools are helpful, but in my experience they are not to a point where building things useful software is easy or simple.
Most of the things I have seen or heard described are neat demos that someone might play with a few times before forgetting about.
Of the projects you mentioned above, how long did you spend building them relative to how long they've been regularly used? Are you using them on a regular basis? If so, are they published somewhere for other people to use as well?
I wouldn't count that as evidence that AI tooling makes it easy to build useful software without much effort.
That's why it's so hard to converse with the AI proponents. They don't want to talk about what they've built and why it's awesome (at least for them). They just want you to take it at face value.
If you're sharing something, just give enough details so that others can contrast to their own experience and learn something from it.
My metric is: how much code that I create today do I depend on in 3 months (incl learnings and one off data pulls etc.) and its waaay less than what I generate. A lot of it is frankly noise.