I feel on the opposite side of a divide when I see these kinds of comments here about people creating bespoke software to address deficiencies they perceive in their daily lives. There's an engineer mindset that tools can solve any and every problem, but do they? Are you quantifiably any fitter than you were before? Better bloodwork, BMI, body fat percentage, anything? Are you creating better wooden goods? More wooden goods? If you track mood in any way, are you at least consistently happier while working because of the auto-generated playlists? Have you gotten any better at math thanks to the pdfs?
When I reflect on my own life and think about why I'm not personally adopting LLMs for anything, it occurs to me that I just don't feel like I have any problems like this to address. I was already eating appropriately, already working out appropriately, already happy with the music I listen to, already happy with the way I learn and practice math. I could make a billion personalized apps, but I was already a two-time state champion in cross-country and track who has never been overweight, got perfect scores on the SAT and GRE, won regional academic olympics in math, all before mobile apps existed and before I ever owned a personal computer of any kind. That's not to say I can't do even better than I did as a teenager in the 90s and I try to maintain some proficiency in these things into middle age, but it never occurs to me that I need or should need software to help me with this. I have no clue what the temperature is right now of any room in my house, but I know they're all in a comfortable range that isn't hurting any machinery or animal and that seems good enough to me.
I see all these enthusiastic booster posts and comments about all the tools you can make, but I don't feel like what is missing from my life is I don't have enough tools. I wasn't sitting around prior to GPT-3 thinking to myself "you know what would improve my life? More software." There are deficiencies and problems to address for sure, but it's mostly issues of prioritization and motivation. I have fallen off the wagon a bit this year and don't exercise nearly as much as I should. I don't talk to my wife enough. I don't talk to other friends at all. I don't go outside enough. But those aren't problems to address with software, either. If anything, if I spent more time making software, even with LLMs, that would be more time not going outside, talking to my wife, or working out. No matter how much raw output I could get computers to output, more time spent fiddling with computers is not going to improve my life. I shouldn't even be here right now, reading and commenting on Hacker News. The sun will be up and it will be 90 degrees fahrenheit within an hour of that. This is my last chance of the day to go run without feeling extremely uncomfortable while doing so.
This isn't a "oh my God look at me I'm so much better than you" comment or at least that's not what I'm trying to get across. But I'd encourage the original poster here and you as well to be outcome-oriented. My weight isn't in a warning zone. This guy is posting stats, so I am leaner than he is and my marathon time is faster, all without the aid of any tracking apps. You're a public figure, so I know you're in the same time zone as me, which means you were posting your own comment at midnight last night, midnight on a Friday night reading Hacker News. My sleep isn't perfect, but I'm not reading Hacker News at midnight on a Friday. Are all these apps actually making your life better?
> There's an engineer mindset that tools can solve any and every problem, but do they?
No. These people just spend more time fiddling with their computers instead of doing the parts of life that it supposedly frees them up to enjoy. It's IoT lightswitch automations all over again. There's no reason anyone would ever need to calculate their smoothie according to their Strava data and the positions of the planets on that day. It makes far more sense to spend more time knowing your body and learning to treat it well than trying to create an app that will do it for you.
My running joke for the past couple years has been "there's nothing a software developer hates more than computer science". But I guess there was one too many words in that sentence!
As someone fiddling with computers trying to solve "every problem," the only actual solution for me is making tools to assist with being aware of the state of your body. Overly simple example, but give someone a heartrate monitor for the first time and they won't be able to guess their current bpm all that accurately. If they pay a little attention to it for a month, you'll get much more closer guesses for instantaneous rate. If it becomes easier to be aware of your current state, you get a more accurate model, and can start to predict basic cycles etc. Eventually, without the tools.
I am wildly, drastically healthier today than I was when I started this in April. This is something I should have been tracking and measuring a long time ago.
i get what you're saying. but i still feel it necessary to say you sound like a twat.
I've had a personal health dashboard tracking my metrics for the past four years. Yes I am quantifiably healthier than I was.
You've climbed a certain mountain, and you're strolling around the summit on flat ground.
You're looking down on the people at the bottom or middle of the mountain, struggling up hill to reach the peak, and wondering "why are they going through all this effort? Why don't they just stroll around on flat ground like I am?".
They're still building the systems that you already have in place. It's far easier to use a system you already have than to build one from scratch. Maybe not with physical or academic health for you, but I'm sure there's some areas of life that you're lacking in that could use improvements. If you can't think of any, I can give you a hint: empathy. If you try to work on it, you might have to do things like set reminders to call friends on their birthdays, or just to check in. You might have to force yourself outside to chat with that neighbor that you don't exactly like and find some common ground. You might have to set a goal of volunteering a certain amount of time at a homeless shelter, and track those hours.
Meanwhile, there are people who already have buffed up their empathy their entire life, and do all these things(and more) naturally.
Should they look at you and wonder why empathy is so hard for you, and tell you your efforts to consciously improve this part of your life is a waste, since they were able to achieve higher levels of empathy without doing any of those things ?
> They're still building the systems that you already have in place.
Bull. They're doing highly sophisticated procrastination. I'll never become a great photographer by vibe coding the perfect tool for my workflow that selects, ranks and edits the 100 photos I took this week, or one that tells me where to stand and when to click the shutter. I have to be out shooting thousands of photos every week and laboring over the editing myself. You get good at what you do, and if you're spending your time making these one-off disposable apps instead of doing the thing they ostensibly support, a few years from now that's what you're going to be better at.
I think the whole point of OPs post is that they didn't spend a bunch of time coding the apps, since a LLM did it for them with a fairly simple prompt.
> I have to be out shooting thousands of photos every week and laboring over the editing
Why? Ansel adams would only shoot 20 photos a week on average. Why are you procrastinating by spending so much time with the camera instead of just having naturally good taste like him?
What if by using custom software I’m not pissed off by my tasks anymore, or no longer surveilled while doing them?
What if I just like making my own stuff?
Surely that’s plenty.