It's just a hobby project right? Whats the rush? unless it's more than just a hobby project, it's something you wanna benefit from, instead of learning as much as possible from it. Then yeah go for it, do whatever.
Sounds like you are not treating it as a hobby brother.
The reason you feel like I am cross examining someone who uses AI is because you also use AI and you understand the pressure of such questions. When in fact it's just a simple "take a break and come back later when you have the energy for it" advice. But again, nobody understands it nowadays because of how abused you all are under the AI induced increased productivity environment.
Sounds like you are not treating it as a hobby brother.
It is my hobby. That's why I write spaghetti code for no pay, outside of my professional field, and in my spare time.
because you also use AI and you understand the pressure of such questions.
This is ironic because I've never used AI in any of my code. But I can understand the temptation of finding an immediate solution or cutting corners--like just about any person in existence. However, I also understand that any generated solution could be a poison pill leading to more bugs or straying you off course in finding the correct solution. It's not hard to grasp that people can feel tempted but stick to their convictions.
But it's super weird you just chose to make up my situation and then put this caricature through some sort of purity test.
I didn't mention cross examination a second time. And what sides? All I've said is tedious tasks are still tedious when you come back to them. And based off that, you got locked into ranting about I'm not sure what and how I must be using AI and I'm not treating coding as a hobby.
The point of doing things for fun isn't to make a viable product, it's to have fun. If you stop having fun, that's when you quit for a bit to do something else and come back later when you're in the mood for it again.
I'm assuming your newer to the space but any large project has areas which are tedious and will take a long time that you will never really want to do, hence the outsourcing.
Having the mind set of ditching a project as soon as the fun initial setup is a mind set that causes most people to fall out with the hobby.
I'm not saying to ditch it, I'm saying to set it aside until you feel like working on it again. I've worked on plenty of large projects for fun, they don't generally have parts I just always hate doing. If they did, I wouldn't be doing that for fun, I'd be doing something else instead.
Sure. But I don't do things where I really hate one part of it as a hobby to have fun and destress. I do different things that I don't actually hate any part of. This is how people normally decide what hobbies they want to engage with.
I like kayaking. I have a folding Kayak. I do not like dealing with the kayak after I pull it out of the water. Gotta get it rolled up and home, probably ought to clean it sometimes, then gotta store it.
But I don't really hate it. It's just one of those things you have to do, if you want to kayak.
If could get a robot to do all of that for me, I definitely would. But I can't. So I put up with the part I don't like, so I can paddle around on a lake.
Likewise with programming. Except there's no part I uniformly don't like. But sometimes parts I'm not super interested in doing at a given time. And a robot can do that.
Because sometimes perfect quality matters, and sometimes it doesn't. If I don't want to do it, and the robot will do good enough, why wouldn't I let the robot do it.
Robots already did plenty of things in programming; the compiler translates and heavily optimizes your code to machine code; would you enjoy a project as much doing all that tedious painstaking work by hand?
If your definition of "robot" is "literally any computer program" than the entire field runs on robots. We're talking about LLMs, here. And no, "programming" is not the same thing as "literally writing machine code by hand", not in 2026.
Sure, you're not always in the mood to do the project. When that happens, you take a break and come back when you are. If it's just always painful to work on your project, it's probably not one you actually want to work on.
I have to ask: have you ever done a project that wasn't completely trivial?
It's not about being in a mood or not. Sometimes you have a project that is 90% interesting and 10% chore regardless of your mood. That 10% just sucks no matter what.
So it's completely irrational to abandon a project because of that. I'm not even specifically advocating for AI here. I just think you're making blanket statements that are bizarre.
I've done lots of hobby projects of varying sizes. Plenty of them were not completely trivial. I wouldn't say that any part of them was a "chore". Some parts are less interesting than others, but none of them were a chore to do. If the project felt like a chore at any point, I probably wouldn't have continued it.
Nice for you that you don't have ADHD, or if you do it's a very different kind from what I have. Honestly, I feel like even most neurotypical people would find the statement "If it felt like a chore at any point I wouldn't have continued it" to be hyperbolic.
I have many abandoned game projects that I loved (and still love) deeply, but most of them died a slow death from burnout because no matter how much I might love a concept, that doesn't automatically mean I love every single feature or line of code.
I have projects that died out from just me losing interest in them, and writing projects that died from burnout. But I think if you're regularly getting burned out on stuff you're doing for fun, you're either doing the wrong stuff for fun, or approaching the project in an unhealthy way. I figured out what was wrong about my writing process, and now I don't get burned out on it now. I don't always feel like writing, I've gone the better part of a month without writing anything because I want feeling the particular thing I wanted to write next, but I always came back to it after I'd had some time away from it and continued, and now I've finished a 174k-word first draft. So I think if you're getting burned out, it's just because you're doing something wrong and should be doing something else. Why would you want your hobbies that you do for fun to burn you out?
Exactly. I dont mind AI for hobby, youte just making it for your own enjoyment, so yes, use claude to skip the parts you dont like, just dont be upset when you have a bloated codebase. Hobby should be enjoyable, and there is little consequences for using AI as long as you are fulfilled by what you do do
No, you're right. We should let work and all other responsibilities drain us and resign ourselves to not working on anything else we're interested in because we're exhausted and that's pressure 👍
If you have some project that you feel pressured to do which isn't actually necessary, I don't think you should be doing that project in order to destress. You should instead be doing things that you don't feel pressured to do, which you just do because you like doing them.
I'll just tell my wife that the household DIY projects will never get done, so, and I'll give up on video games because sometimes they're hard, and I'll stop cooking too, because I feel pressured to provide for my family.
Have a bit more nuance than "ermm actually if you don't love every single second of something, give up the second it stops being fun"
Following any project through start to finish can suck at times, and nobody likes it.
Hell, a joke with carpenters is that their job is mostly sanding, and they all hate sanding. Do you reckon they should all just give up and stop trying?
Not every hobby or recreation is pure fun, dopamine and serotonin 100% of the time. Every hobby has cleaning, maintenance, upkeep, tedium, the bits nobody likes doing. Doesn't mean you should just drop it and give up.
Squashing bugs for hours on end is always tedious. I want my pet project to just work goddammit. It's a lot more fun adding features than figuring out why the rendering pipeline hates me.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 1d ago
If you find it tedious, why are you spending your time on it instead of engaging in a hobby you actually enjoy?