Not enough time, too many projects. Useful projects I did over the weekend with Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 (just casually chatting with it).
2025 Taxes
Dumped all pdfs of all my tax forms into a single folder, asked Claude the rename them nicely. Ask it to use Gemini 2.5 Flash to extract out all tax-relevant details from all statements / tax forms. Had it put together a webui showing all income, deductions, etc, for the year. Had it estimate my 2025 tax refund / underpay.
Result was amazing. I now actually fully understand the tax position. It broke down all the progressive tax brackets, added notes for all the extra federal and state taxes (i.e. Medicare, CA Mental Health tax, etc).
Finally had Claude prepare all of my docs for upload to my accountant: FinCEN reporting, summary of all docs, etc.
Desk Fabrication
Planning on having a furniture maker fabricate a custom walnut solid desk for a custom office standing desk. Want to create a STEP of the exact cuts / bevels / countersinks / etc to help with fabrication.
Worked with Codex to plan out and then build an interactive in-browser 3D CAD experience. I can ask Codex to add some component (i.e. a grommet) and it will generate a parameterized B-rep geometry for that feature and then allow me to control the parameters live in the web UI.
Codex found Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) B-rep modeling library, which has a web assembly compiled version, and integrated it.
Now have a WebGL view of the desk, can add various components, change their parameters, and see the impact live in 3D.
thijsvandien 6 minutes ago [-]
I don't know, but I would never upload such sensitive information to a service like that. Local modals FTW, although they might not be there yet for this use case (no experience).
semiquaver 29 minutes ago [-]
I feel pretty productive myself with AI but this list isn’t beating the rap that AI boosters mostly use AI to do useless stuff focused on pretending to improve productivity or projects that make it easier to use AI.
shepherdjerred 12 minutes ago [-]
That's a fair criticism of my personal projects. Maybe 3-4 of those could potentially see usefulness outside of myself.
At work, I would say I've done plenty of "useful" things with AI, but that's hard to show off given that I work on an internal application.
> "A clock that ticks seconds irregularly but is accurate for minutes."
Sounds like something that could be tried as a fix for a kind of OCD (obsessive seconds counting).
stavros 11 minutes ago [-]
Maybe, although it's actually giving me OCD, I think. It's really hard to tune out because of the irregular ticking. I implemented a regular mode to combat this, defeating the purpose somewhat.
saulpw 12 minutes ago [-]
Some of them definitely do not. Like a fictional encyclopedia? What is the point of that? That's like "an alphabetical novel".
And even for the ones that might "beat the rap", I don't understand from your descriptions why they are interesting or unique. A voice note recorder? Cool. There are already hundreds if not thousands of those, why did you need to make your own in the first place? I'm not saying that yours isn't special, I'm just saying that it doesn't help to post the blandest description possible if you're trying to impress people with the utility of your utility.
stavros 10 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like the goalposts are moving from "not useless stuff focused on pretending to improve productivity or projects that make it easier to use AI" to "extremely useful stuff".
jjee 4 minutes ago [-]
Fair. But finally we are seeing what LLM proponents are putting forward.
And it’s exactly what I expected - lines of code. Cute. But… so what? This is not good for the AI hype and nor any continued support for future investment.
SunshineTheCat 18 minutes ago [-]
I've actually felt the same way about some (not all) but some "productivity" hacks I've seen people post online with their OpenClaw setups.
I chuckle when I see some of them because you could achieve the same (or often faster) result by jotting a note onto a notecard and sticking it in your pocket.
Most of the other automations running don't really seem to serve any real purpose at all.
But hey, if it's fun, have at it.
piker 26 minutes ago [-]
> I’ll continue use these tools with the hope that they don’t make me obsolete too quickly.
I'm starting to believe using them is more likely to make you obsolete than not.
shepherdjerred 9 minutes ago [-]
I completely agree. Most programmers work on rather boring and not particularly novel things. If they don't adapt, then they'll be replaced.
I do think it'll be a while before LLMs make significant contributions to complex projects, though. For example I can't imagine many maintainers of the Linux kernel use LLMs much.
vermilingua 9 minutes ago [-]
It baffles me that so many people are so willing to pay for the privilege of training their own replacement.
jjee 33 seconds ago [-]
But are you though?
From where I stand this thing is going to provide great leverage to those who don’t simply just write code. I personally doubt the thing will ever get to a place where it can be trusted to operate alone - it needs a team of people and to go super fast you need more people.
Moreover, the price won’t be high due to competition.
I’ve changed my view on LLMs as being good, as long as competition is fierce.
keybored 5 minutes ago [-]
That’s the most craven AI user line I’ve read. Well at least from this week.
JeanMarcS 22 minutes ago [-]
And like everyone else you trained the AI how to replace you by giving it more insight on how to prompt stuff.
shepherdjerred 2 minutes ago [-]
Yes. I also release almost all of the code I've ever written for free, aside from what I've done at work.
stavros 28 minutes ago [-]
What did you think of Dagger? I used Earthly a while ago but the one thing I didn't like was that it couldn't parallelize runs, since it only ran on one CI instance. Other than that, I liked that I could run my entire CI pipeline locally, but didn't like it so much that I ended up using it for much else.
shepherdjerred 17 minutes ago [-]
I really like Dagger. I had a _lot_ of weird issues with Earthly, like edge cases. Dagger has been mostly solid.
It still has gaps. I don't think they've landed on the right model for CI. Like Earthly, their model is a CI runner + local cache. I believe a distributed cache (like Bazel) makes more sense.
If I were choosing between the two I'd personally always pick Dagger, but I think there is a strong argument for Earthly for simpler projects. If you're using multiple Earthfiles or a few hundred lines of Earthly, I think you've outgrown it.
Rendered at 21:33:12 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
2025 Taxes
Dumped all pdfs of all my tax forms into a single folder, asked Claude the rename them nicely. Ask it to use Gemini 2.5 Flash to extract out all tax-relevant details from all statements / tax forms. Had it put together a webui showing all income, deductions, etc, for the year. Had it estimate my 2025 tax refund / underpay.
Result was amazing. I now actually fully understand the tax position. It broke down all the progressive tax brackets, added notes for all the extra federal and state taxes (i.e. Medicare, CA Mental Health tax, etc).
Finally had Claude prepare all of my docs for upload to my accountant: FinCEN reporting, summary of all docs, etc.
Desk Fabrication
Planning on having a furniture maker fabricate a custom walnut solid desk for a custom office standing desk. Want to create a STEP of the exact cuts / bevels / countersinks / etc to help with fabrication.
Worked with Codex to plan out and then build an interactive in-browser 3D CAD experience. I can ask Codex to add some component (i.e. a grommet) and it will generate a parameterized B-rep geometry for that feature and then allow me to control the parameters live in the web UI.
Codex found Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) B-rep modeling library, which has a web assembly compiled version, and integrated it.
Now have a WebGL view of the desk, can add various components, change their parameters, and see the impact live in 3D.
At work, I would say I've done plenty of "useful" things with AI, but that's hard to show off given that I work on an internal application.
* https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/ - A voice note recorder.
* https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot - My secure AI personal assistant that's made my life admin massively easier.
* https://github.com/skorokithakis/macropad - A macropad.
* https://github.com/skorokithakis/sleight-of-hand - A clock that ticks seconds irregularly but is accurate for minutes.
* https://pine.town - A whimsical little massively multiplayer drawing town.
* https://encyclopedai.stavros.io - A fictional encyclopedia.
* https://justone.stavros.io - A web implementation of the board game Just One.
* https://www.themakery.cc - The website and newsletter for my maker community.
* https://theboard.stavros.io - A feature board that implements itself.
* https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula - A blood test viewer.
* https://github.com/skorokithakis/support-email-bot - An email bot to answer common support queries for my users.
Maybe some of these will beat the rap.
Sounds like something that could be tried as a fix for a kind of OCD (obsessive seconds counting).
And even for the ones that might "beat the rap", I don't understand from your descriptions why they are interesting or unique. A voice note recorder? Cool. There are already hundreds if not thousands of those, why did you need to make your own in the first place? I'm not saying that yours isn't special, I'm just saying that it doesn't help to post the blandest description possible if you're trying to impress people with the utility of your utility.
And it’s exactly what I expected - lines of code. Cute. But… so what? This is not good for the AI hype and nor any continued support for future investment.
I chuckle when I see some of them because you could achieve the same (or often faster) result by jotting a note onto a notecard and sticking it in your pocket.
Most of the other automations running don't really seem to serve any real purpose at all.
But hey, if it's fun, have at it.
I'm starting to believe using them is more likely to make you obsolete than not.
I do think it'll be a while before LLMs make significant contributions to complex projects, though. For example I can't imagine many maintainers of the Linux kernel use LLMs much.
From where I stand this thing is going to provide great leverage to those who don’t simply just write code. I personally doubt the thing will ever get to a place where it can be trusted to operate alone - it needs a team of people and to go super fast you need more people.
Moreover, the price won’t be high due to competition.
I’ve changed my view on LLMs as being good, as long as competition is fierce.
It still has gaps. I don't think they've landed on the right model for CI. Like Earthly, their model is a CI runner + local cache. I believe a distributed cache (like Bazel) makes more sense.
If I were choosing between the two I'd personally always pick Dagger, but I think there is a strong argument for Earthly for simpler projects. If you're using multiple Earthfiles or a few hundred lines of Earthly, I think you've outgrown it.