AI coding tools turned my once-a-year hobby project into a daily habit
Benj Edwards spent two months burning through 50 hobby projects with Claude Code and wrote up 10 things he learned from the experience. The whole piece is good, but I keep coming back to three things.
The fun. Edwards compares the feeling to learning BASIC on an Apple II at age nine, and I get it. What used to be a year-long side project now takes minutes or a focused day. You sketch an idea in the morning and by lunch you're testing something that works. Look at what I've shipped on this site in the past couple of weeks: Pagefind search, semantic search with in-browser vector embeddings, an image generation workflow. Any one of those would have been a multi-week project before.
And the busyness. Edwards says AI tools won't make people unemployed — they'll make people busier than ever. I'm living that. I'm more productive at work, but I'm also just doing so much more. Where I'd previously toil on one problem for a day and maybe get halfway, I'm now working through three problems at the same time and usually solving all three. The ADHD nature of it is intoxicating. One idea leads to the next, the next tool makes the next idea easier, and suddenly you're juggling fifteen things.
And the 90% problem. The first 90% of a project arrives fast and amazes you. The last 10% is tedious back-and-forth to fill in the details. That matches my experience exactly — the initial rush is real, but so is the tail of small fixes that still need a human paying attention.
His steam shovel analogy fits: the machine is tireless, but the human operating it still needs to eat and sleep. I haven't figured that part out yet.