Building side projects is an essential part of my life as software developer, even when I know that no one will ever see or use them. I build things for me. Solving a problem or improving something in a way that feels unique to me. I always enjoyed the process of coding. It feels great to create something line by line. To see a progress from a blank page or app to a solution that I want to use is utterly satisfying. The list of new tasks to do always grows faster than the completion of those tasks. Especially the more work I complete.
Lately this feeling faded. Over the past couple of month I’ve been using AI for coding much more since it does not feel like a small child clinging to my leg afraid to let go. It can now run on its own. Do more than just write out a well defined function. It can take on bigger and more complex tasks. Involving several files, components and systems. Most models matured. I don’t need to write out paragraphs of specific instructions, I can give it a more general idea of the problem and it’s able to run with it. I somehow feel proud of all of the models. They’ve come a long way since I started using them.
Now I became a product manager of my own side projects. I still code, but much less. I delegate. To my small army of AI models that get a task and then implement it. They ping me when they are done and I take a look at it. More often than not, I only need to change some minor lines or write a follow up prompt. And this frees me from the labour of coding the solution myself. Mostly the solution is simple, but so boring to do it myself. I still hold the AI to high standards and I’m very nit-picky when it comes to the code in my repos. But it now takes much less time to build features. I used to enjoy the programming and it was a way to meditate or relax. But now I get bored. Bored while building my projects. My mind wanders off or I do other things not related to the current task. I feel like my productivity is down, but actually I ship and commit more than ever. With less time involved by me.
This should make me feel proud, but it doesn’t. I’m bored while being productive. This does not make sense. My previous understanding was that my mind needs to be occupied and working to be productive. But this isn’t true. With my mind being bored, I have so much ideas and inspiration. My to-do lists for the side projects are longer than ever. Even since I tick off tasks in a higher rate than ever. This feels great. It feels like my ideas don’t need to be limited by my time or typing speed. I can explore other projects. Bigger and different projects that until now seemed to be out of reach. Projects I could have pitched to my colleagues.
It’s been years since I had this stream of new ideas come in with such a high velocity and volume. The last time I had such a big list of projects I wanted to do was back in university. Learning about so much new areas and with almost every lecture I got a new idea I wanted to build. My notebook from this time still exists somewhere. Full of naive and crazy ideas. I wrote and sketched them down in class. In class, where I could think. Because I was bored. To be honest, I was never a good student and school and university were really boring for me. I wanted to build and do other, more interesting stuff. This boredom was used to think about projects I wanted to build or features I needed to add to ongoing projects. This state was lost, but for a couple of weeks now, it’s back.
Crazy thought that one can be bored with a full-time job, relationship, sports and training, cooking, shopping, meeting friends, going out and building side projects. For the last couple of years I felt like I used every bit of energy my brain could produce. Boredom was something of the past. On vacation I could get bored from laying at the beach all day. Now this boredom is something I feel weekly. And it’s great. Having to scroll down a long list of ideas in my notepad. A long list of mostly stupid and useless ideas. But with a high volume, good ideas come around way more often. I used to have a good idea once a year of the last decade. Now it feels like I have a good idea every month. This is a nice trajectory. But it needs to be said, a good idea is relative. It can feel like a good idea now, and in two weeks like the dumbest idea I ever had. So I judge my ideas after a certain period of time. I don’t jump right into it. I to let it simmer on low intensity. If after a couple of weeks I got more inspiration on this topic, then it might be a good idea. If not, I can throw it on the long pile of potential projects that never got off the ground.
The thing with ideas is that they don’t stay in the same category. They expand and encompass bigger domains. They are not longer limited to my domain of expertise. Why should they? I now have a powerful AI on my side. It can probably teach me everything I need for the new project. Right until the point, where I start to delegate tasks of the new project. The cycle repeats. Just like this the my possibility horizon expands. And it expands quickly. Some ideas skip over need for some tangent skill or knowledge I have. Why wait until I learn step a, b and c when I can directly jump into step d with the help of AI. I will feel lost. And I hate the time when everything I try and touch is unfamiliar land. Uncharted territory. When I was in university this feeling could persist sometimes for a whole semester. Until one point when the connection was made in my brain. Then this subject was know and familiar. And now, it doesn’t take a whole semester. It takes a couple of days. Some very long threads with Chatgpt until it explained every detail and every aspect of this new territory to me. It is patient and will explain the same concept in 5 different approaches until I finally understand it.
I used to have ridiculous, naive ideas and never had a chance because I was limited by my abilities and time. Now I feel a resurgence of these ideas. I no longer have this limiting feeling that something is out of reach or takes too long. Now I can take these ideas more serious. The liberation of constraints is fuelling a “how hard can it be” mentality in me. In areas and subjects that I have no relevant or only limited experience. AI showed me, that coding itself was never the hardest part. It was the necessary step to implement my ideas. This gives me more time and focus to implement the harder problems. In software projects the architecture is everything, especially if you have an AI that could brute force everything into existence. More time and mental energy can be dedicated to building better things, not just more things.
Now onto harder projects that unlock new experiences and expand my horizon even further.