The story of Max, a real programmer

It’s a fun trip down memory lane, but the real story today, the sadder story, is that there is no longer any use for simple little programs like this that scratch an itch.

They’ve all been solved 100x over by founders who’ve been funded on this site. It used to make sense to have a directory or cgi-bin of helpful scripts. Now it only makes sense as a bit of nostalgia.

I miss the days when we had less, could get less done in a day… but felt more ownership over it. Those days are gone.

It still makes sense to self-host, to have that ownership.

There is still use for small niche programs. I host my own gif repository, a website for collecting vinyls and my own weather dashboard. I don’t expect anyone else to use these sites so they’re tailored to my user experience and it’s great.

> It’s a fun trip down memory lane, but the real story today, the sadder story, is that there is no longer any use for simple little programs like this that scratch an itch.

> They’ve all been solved 100x over by founders who’ve been funded on this site. It used to make sense to have a directory or cgi-bin of helpful scripts. Now it only makes sense as a bit of nostalgia.

Why does it make more sense to learn the syntax for someone else's helper scripts than to roll my own, if the latter is as easy or easier, and afterwards I know how to solve the problem myself?

"Itch-scratching" programming is all I ever do now, as my career pivoted away from being a full time developer a long time ago.

But they're personal itches, not productizable itches. The joy is still there, though.

I have many 1000s of small tools and sites. Some have a few other users, most do not. It makes me productive so he.

I would argue those days are coming back. Thanks to LLMs, I have probably 10x more "utility" scripts/programs than I had 2 years ago. Rather than bang my head against the wall for a couple hours to figure out how to (just barely) do something in Python to scratch an itch, I can get a nice, well documented, reusable and versatile tool in seconds. I'm less inclined than ever to go find some library or product that kinda does what I need it to do, and instead create a simple tool of my own that does exactly what I need it to.

Just please if you ever give that tool to someone else to use, understand, maintain, or fix, mention that it was created using an LLM. Maybe ask your LLM to mention itself in a comment near the top of the file.

The 'as is' nature of open source applies regardless of whether a human or LLM wrote the code.

Because time is finite and you probably set out to achieve something else which is now on hold. Nothing wrong with distractions but let's not glorify them :).

> Because time is finite and you probably set out to achieve something else which is now on hold. Nothing wrong with distractions but let's not glorify them :).

That's true, but it was also true before. To the extent that solving a problem to learn the details of solving it was ever worthwhile, which I think is and was quite a lot, I'd say it's still true now, even though there are lots of almost-but-not-quite solutions out there. That doesn't mean that you should solve all problems on your own, but I think you also shouldn't always use someone else's solution.

Who said it was open source?

> They’ve all been solved 100x over by founders who’ve been funded on this site.

I’m kind of getting tired of software made by “founders,” who are just looking to monetize me and get their exit, as opposed to software written by normal users just wanting to be useful. I know I’m on the wrong website for this, but the world could use fewer “founders” trying to turn my eyeballs and attention into revenue.