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Those were exactly my thoughts when deciding to write a new JS engine [1] written from scratch. Having been a product and UX-focused dev for my entire career, I knew only the basics about parsers and compilers, but have enough experience to grasp where each piece of the puzzle fits, and how to evaluate them. At the beginning it was just a fun test, but it got progressively more serious; it now implements 100% of the latest spec, beats QuickJS in performance, and surpasses V8/JSC in test262. It took me four months, and I imagine it would take me a single month to do it again - I’ve learned a lot. Someone who already knew what they were doing, and with the right orchestration, could achieve this in weeks at minimal cost. I really think we are in for a cambrian explosion of software, enabling things that were just always a little out of reach before (like why can’t most of your devices really talk to each other, in 2026). [1] https://github.com/ricardobeat/boomkat

In the spirit of the latter, here's mine! https://blog.stuartspence.ca/introducing-asteria.html https://store.steampowered.com/app/5482440/Asteria_4X/?beta=... To be clear, I've made large software and game projects over the years, but no way I'd have found the time to do a remake/enhancement of a game I loved as a kid from 1995 that has zero business case. Not without AI.

It makes me feel actually sick that so many people can't separate their positive feelings about AI from people's misery (it must simply be "complaining"), and vice versa. As if both things can't exist, for some reason. It's a common tribalism problem, but it's been kicked up a hundredfold by AI.

> "I've been coding for decades and recently worked hard for months with AI's help to make something I would have never considered possible before." I think we'll see a lot less people willing to share if the end result is just to feed the machine no matter how they arrived at it.

I agree.. partly, and my problem is with enjoyment. I did some hand coding today and immediately got in the zone, something I'm still not able to do with LLMs. It most definitely took me probably ~2x longer than it would with an LLM, but it was much more enjoyable owning every decision behind the process, and having a full view of how the system worked. I think this could be achievable with LLMs if they had a much higher token rate. That way you'd have less downtime and could work on the problem more aggressively. How it's designed to work now, offloading cognitively, doesn't feel very good, even when you 'ship' more.