If it’s a book, you have the manuscript but no research, notes, or prior revisions. If it’s a program, you have the compiled binary but no source code or anything you would’ve learned writing it. Etc.
Depending on the project, absolutely yes. I’ve got a load of maintenance projects that need doing on my house that I’ve been putting off because there’s a huge time investment, or they need to be done in nice weather. I wouldn’t be learning anything that would be particularly useful to me in the future, so getting them done instantly would be a massive help.
As an example, my garden is very overgrown and needs a few days of dry weather to complete. It’s mostly going to be cutting everything back with strimmers and hedge trimmers and then clearing the cuttings away. I already know how to do it, but even if I didn’t, it wouldn’t be difficult to learn so that I can keep on top of it going forward.
Can my project be the dismantling of the imperial machine?
hell no! Im mainly motivated by experience and learning. If you hire me to do some well documented tasks im likely to try little variations and see if something works a bit better. I mean I won’t risk safety or anything of course.
If it’s something I enjoy doing like making art? No.
If it’s something I just want the outcome of, like building furniture? Yes.
Which I realized is basically the difference in whether I would rather make something myself or buy it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Is this “Would I have an LLM do it?” in disguise?
Good question. I was thinking that the final result would magically be equivalent to whatever you’d actually be able to make yourself, as though you went back in time and handed your past self the finished product.
In that case, the finished product would be of pretty mediocre quality, in my case. That’s because most of my projects are things that I actively want to learn, and I tend to be overambitious when setting aims. Despite this though, even when I completely botch it up, I struggle to think of a time where I have regret my endeavour. I like the learning
No. The main reason I do projects is for the learning. Any useful items I produce as part of the process are just happy side effects.
No because then you cant do anything else to it. Its stuck in whatever state it pops into existence in because you don’t understand it.
This was the first thing that came to mind when they mentioned a program. I very rarely create programs that don’t need to be updated later, unless they’re single use throwaways.
I’ve inherited support for programs that we had lost the source code for, though, and that sucks.
So that’s a no from me.
Yes
If the project is rebuilding a roof or something
By the time it needs to be done again, ill be too old, so might as well hire some to do it, at that point
If I want to understand it, of course not. You can only truly understand the result if you understand the process, after all. If it’s something mechanical or otherwise uninteresting to me then nah.
I don’t think the book and program examples are equivalent. You can edit a manuscript easily but it’d be a big headache to edit a binary program either through a hex editor or decompiling it and figuring out what it all does. I think an equivalent would be receiving the finished source code, as though someone else coded it for you.
Anyway, if it’s a personal project I want to do for the sake of it, then no, I like the process and the amount of control. If it’s something I’m only doing because I want the end product then maybe, but would have to decide on a case by case basis.
Yeah, if my finished attic could be fully renovated tomorrow instead of the half-denolished limbo it’s been for most of a decade, that’d be fine.
I believe this is abusable by simply endlessly writing books for niche topics you want to know about, in a way you best understand, but without the grit required of manually researching it and parsing it
Well… then what did I lose in its creation?
Yeah, I’d be willing to do that to write a trillion pieces of ultra-advanced software that fulfils every possible need.
Then I’d monetise enough of it to live comfortably, and then do projects in my own time and actually enjoy them.
If it actually does what I want it to do, sure, it’s not like I’m unfamiliar with alienation and I can still do other stuff with my time.
This sounds slightly like the premise of the movie Paycheck. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0338337/
Personally I mostly prefer the experience of doing things. Writing books, coding software, building things… They are what brings value to me on a personal level. Looking at the kids’ playhouse in the garden brings value because I built it. Writing a book would mean something because I wrote it. If I just magically had it, it would be meaningless, even if it happened to be what I would have written, had I been arsed to do it myself.
