Think about how you'd feel about receiving:

- An interesting sweater

- A sweater from a friend who thought you'd like it

- A handmade sweater from your grandma

- A worn-out sweater that belonged to one of your favorite artists

Little of what you’d feel comes from the sweater itself, or how much effort it took to make it.

The value largely comes from the person behind it. What it says about them, how they connect to you or the wider culture.

These kinds of projects used to be that same kind of window into another like minded hacker’s thoughts, personality, taste, and sense of humor.

That sort of thing is still out there, just getting drowned out by these low effort AI generated attention grabs, which really don’t say much of anything besides “here’s a statistically average rendition of a random thought that passed through my head.”

To me yes. The work is the fun part. I became a dev because I enjoyed the coding and the work. If all you care about is an end result then that is fine. It is just my opinion that projects like this had more magic to them before LLMs. LLMs are making things soulless.

There is something nice about knowing a person felt passionate enough about a thing to accomplish it despite the ratio of effort to usefulness(?). You know… all of art.

It’s a human connection. Most of us have spent time working on something we appreciate that others don’t value. We recognize and appreciate that. Digging into and noticing the details gives us an appreciation for the effort of the creator. Did they add a delightfully unexpected bit of polish?

People appreciate “wasted” effort.

I don’t care that an AI did a good job. Maybe the first time it was impressive. The Nth time? Meh. And ideas are the easy part. We could have 1,000 “look! I made my windows look like ham” apps and no one would care. But 1 hand crafted really good “look I put a disco ball in the desktop, see how it lights up the windows from behind!” App Would be amazing.

I'm not a labor theory of value guy, but knowing someone worked hard on something did add a certain charm to these projects.

I'm glad that you articulated that. Tech has been saying that ideas don't matter anymore for so long that it's become a cult of anhedonia.

blood diamonds

>The idea is all that matters anymore

Which is why joy is gone for most. Maybe you don't care about the process, but most people do.

Doing the hard work and seeing the result really meant something. Seeing the result from the click of a few keystrokes is so meaningless.