You're posting on a thread that hyperlinks to a list of code and Claude Artifacts for pet-projects that can make thousands a month with some low-effort PPC and an AdWords embed, and some mid-size projects that can be anything from grounds to a promotion at a programming role - to the MVP for a PMF-stage startup.
What, specifically, would pivot your pre-conceived notions?
Are you serious about "thousands a month"? I don't mean to be hostile, I'm just truly surprised -- if the bar were that low (not that these apps aren't impressive, but most engineers write useful apps from time to time) I would expect the market to be rather packed
Nah, most are hundreds a month - a few golden geese can break the thousand barrier, though. But, regardless, have a few of those sites up, and you're making good side income.
> What, specifically, would pivot your pre-conceived notions?
A live or unedited demonstration of how a non-trivial (doesn’t have to be complex, but should be significantly more interesting than the “getting started” tutorials that litter the web) pet-project was implemented using these models.
The point of my post here was to provide 14 of those. Some of them are trivial but I'd argue that a couple of them - the OpenAI Audio one and the LLM pricing calculator - go a bit beyond "getting started".
If you want details of more complex projects I've written using Claude here are a few - in each case I provide the full chat transcript:
Thank you! I have an ugly JS/content filter running that mogrifies some websites such that I miss the formatting completely; I didn’t recognize you had chat session content included on the page.
That said, after looking at a couple of your sessions, I don’t see anything you’re doing that I’m not—at least in terms of prompting. Your prompts are a bit more terse than mine (I can be long-winded so I’ll give brevity a try with my next project) but the structure and design descriptions are still there. That would suggest the differences in our experience boils down to the languages with which we choose or are required to work; maybe there’s a stylistic or cultural difference in how one should prompt a model in order to generate a Python project and how one should prompt for a Haskel or Scala/Java project; surely not though, right?
I’m not giving up and I’ll keep playing with these models but for now, given my use-case at least, they still seem to be far more capable at rubber-ducking with me than they are as a pair programming partner.
Did you even look at the artifacts? Its a bunch of things a beginner would do on their first day programming. How do you make thousands a month from 1 library call to solve a qr code. A promotion for building an input field and calling a json to yaml converter library?
Millions of laypersons a month search "convert (file type) to (file type) online" and just smack an AdWords embed on their site for it. Millions of people want a QR code's embedded link in their camera roll, without access to a camera that's pointing at it.
You'd be surprised how big the "(simple task) online" search query market is, and how much they are usually multi-visit monthly customers, and how much their ad space is worth.
I cannot stress this enough, just because it's simple does not mean it's not lucrative.
Besides all of this is completely besides the point. This isnt useful for a programmer. These examples are barely useful for a layperson. And said layperson is paying money and time for this.
Any way or intention to prove that? Wheres you "convert (filetype) project"?
Not to attack you but from your profile it sounds more like your the typical marketing grifter talking big. Why is none of those projects in the list you mention there?
Looking deeper you got lots of projects with parts of your websites just broken and seem to be peddling what looks like life insurance scams.
Some of my projects are public, most are private. The ones that will typically do me better in people networking and/or will bolster my portfolio, are the ones I share publicly. For most of my projects, private is the default. With a profile like yours, I'm sure you can understand.
Sure, there's probably more projects of mine, over the years, that are more broken than not. I've cast several wide nets for product creations and iterations over the years, and kept maintaining the more "fittest" of the bunch. Billit's probably the only one that's broken AND I have no control over it; I sold it. I don't know what else to tell you here, perhaps you value a lesser repertoire with higher rigidity?
I'm not sure how to address your pre-conceived notions that a single industry I've worked in, at large, is a scam. Also, the one company mentioned in life insurance doesn't have a backlink on Lead EnGen - so I especially don't know what you're talking about when you say "peddling".
> You'd be surprised how big the "(simple task) online" search query market is, and how much they are usually multi-visit monthly customers, and how much their ad space is worth.
Not surprised at all; my inability to find examples of /how/ someone might get an LLM to produce—or even intelligently collaborate on—something useful, well… it says a lot about how much junk is out there contributing to the noise.
> Its a bunch of things a beginner would do on their first day programming.
Is this an exaggeration? Because this is absolutely not true. I'm a beginner in JavaScript and other web stuff and I absolutely can't build it in many days.
You better check the code, mate. The meat of what most of it does is a one liner calling jsQR or some other imported lib to do the real work. I am not exaggerating in the slightest.
Dude. I don't judge my knowledge after the answer is given to me. If I was the junior programmer assigned to the author and they were having this chat with me I am telling you as a beginner I wouldn't be able to do it.
Of course if you show me the answers I will think I can do it easy, because answers in programming are always easy (good answers anyways). It's the process of finding the answer that is hard. And I'm not a bad programmer either, I'm at least mediocre, I'm just unfamiliar with web technology.
I am of the firm believe that you can put "JavaScript scan qr code" in a search engine and arrive at your goal. The answers range from libraries to code snippets basically the same as those created by Claude. Using the same libraries. I feel like googling every step would be faster than trying to get it right with LLMs, but that is a different point.
I've seen a complete no-code person install whisper x with a virtual Python environment and use it for realtime speech to text in their Japanese lessons, in less than 3 hours.
You can do a simple library call in JavaScript.
"I feel like googling every step would be faster than trying to get it right with LLMs"
Why don't you give that a go? See if you can knock out a QR code reading UI in JavaScript in less than 3 minutes, complete with drag-and-drop file opening support.
(I literally built this one in a separate browser tab while I was actively taking notes in a meeting)
That gist is pretty close to what I’ve been looking for; thank you! Examples of a chat session that resulted in a usable project are /very/ helpful. Unfortunately, the gist demonstrates, to me at least, that the models don’t know enough about the languages I wish to use.
Those prompts might be sufficient enough to result in deployable HTML/JS code comprised of a couple hundred lines of code but that’s fairly trivial in my definition. I’m not trying to be rude or disrespectful to you; within my environment, non-trivial projects typically involve an entire microservice doing even mildly interesting business logic and offering some kind of API or integration with another, similarly non-trivial API—usually both. And they’re typically built on languages that are compiled either to libraries/executables or they’re compiled to bytecode for the JVM/CLR.
Again, I’m not trying to be disrespectful. You’ve built some really great stuff and I appreciate you sharing your experiences; I wish I knew some of the things you do—you keep writing about your experiences and I’ll keep reading ‘em, we can learn together. The problem is that I’m beginning to recognize that these models are perhaps not nearly ready for the kinds of work I want or need to do, and I’m feeling a bit bummed that the capabilities the industry currently touts are significantly more overhyped than I’d imagined.
I do a whole lot of API integration work with Claude, generally by pasting in curl examples to illustrate the API. Here's an example from this morning: https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/prompt-gemini
I don't use javascript at all. I'm essentially beginner level with it.
And i've seen people build more complex projects in classes myself.
The project i see people build in Java classes on the other hand is a CLI version of Battleships. And honestly that is more complex than the presented projects solved by Claude.
Your personal experience is one point of many. That these projects seem hard to you doesn't make it so for the average person. When i say "a beginner can do it", there's bound to be some who can't. I'm sorry, if these projects take you weeks that is a problem.
It just feels like you have taken a stance that this is useless and anything anyone says or does is not going to dissuade you from it. There are several people who are pointing out up and down this thread several different projects to you built in short times, but you keep saying nothing is impressive to you. To be very honest, this behavior is irritating.
It's definitely not as trivial as the json converter. But not anywhere even close to complex. Recording audio is very simple, calling a remote API is too. The complex part is encoding the WAV blob. But that is just knowledge about the format with the exact code snippet that claude uses found in the first stack overflow answer.
And it is strange that Claude picked the AudioRecorder when the MediaRecorder exists. I'd wager a beginner would have used the latter(i don't use javascript and am not better than a beginner in any way, but i found that) since it outputs a straight wav file and doesn't need the encoding step. And since the data isn't streamed to OpenAI there's no need for the audio chunks that AudioRecorder provides. So Claude did it in an unnecessarily complex way, that doesn't make the problem complex.
You're posting on a thread that hyperlinks to a list of code and Claude Artifacts for pet-projects that can make thousands a month with some low-effort PPC and an AdWords embed, and some mid-size projects that can be anything from grounds to a promotion at a programming role - to the MVP for a PMF-stage startup.
What, specifically, would pivot your pre-conceived notions?