How are you avoiding LLM anxiety with your side projects?

> I'm having a really hard time working on new, non-LLM related side projects due to anxiety that everything I'm doing is effectively worthless.

Is there really only joy in programming stuff if you think what you're doing is valuable to others?

I thought it was the opposite: because I don't need to be reliable with a side project, then I can take the time to do things in a slow or impractical way, as tidily as I like, or do it however I want to. -- It's a chance to play with whatever.

I'm finding it quite fun to play around with non-LLM stuff.

I think it's also quite fun to play around with LLM related stuff, and to see what it can do, and what it can't do.

Spend a couple days trying to get an llm to do the project you want to do and you'll see that you have nothing to worry about.

LLMs won’t do many things. But most of all, they can’t take away your enjoyment of building things if you do it for the enjoyment of building things. I think a key to building something is not worrying about whether anyone else cares. Make it because you enjoy making it. If you take pride in it it’ll be usable and enjoyable by yourself at least, and possibly others. But I’ve found in my career that how much “use” something finds is largely unrelated to anything I value - the best things last 6 months, the worst things I made still run 20 years later. But I enjoyed the best things, and thus I value them more than the stuff that found a lot more utility by others.

The other thing is LLMs are not a end but a means to an end. For instance I wanted to help my daughter learn typing. I forked a typing tutor and ripped out the boring backend dictionary based challenge generator and wired it up to a llama and stable diffusion and made it generate Minecraft stories with illustrations based off a LLM and SD lora I created for her to practice with (there’s a lot of Minecraft fan fic and she loves Minecraft books). It was a lot fun, she learned typing, and I learned enough about LLM and image generation to not fear them as tools but realize they’re pieces in a more powerful toolbox to be harnessed towards our end. This, btw, is why open source AI is critical.

I am a mediocre dev as a technologist generalist. LLMs have given me superpowers other people needed to develop or were born with. They’re perfect for my side projects. “Slap it together, ‘good enough’, ship it.”

For me the existence of LLMs means I can avoid the boring parts, so I'm more happy and confident to start side projects :)

Projects with good UX will always be needed, start hacking!

I think a lot of the mega hype around LLMs relies on extrapolating their (very impressive) performance today and assuming that the error rate will decrease significantly over time. I am very skeptical that this will actually happen, since in order to ensure correctness I believe you basically need to build a separate system that can determine correctness, which reduces to what you had to do pre-LLMs to build such a system.

I think they are going to be a really useful tool alongside many other really useful tools which already exist. I think that they will have an impact on many areas where correctness is not very important. I don’t think they will make everything else obsolete, and this line of thinking seems like some kind of weird utopian thought pattern bug in humans.

So if you want to help your anxiety, just become extremely skeptical of LLMs! Practice rolling yours eyes, etc.

I have been working on LLM projects for the past 2 years and I still share a similar anxiety to you. Will what I am building just be a small added feature inside a future ChatGPT or will an AI just be able to do it out of the box in the future?

However, I don't think that is a reason to not build - if anything it is a reason to build faster and just believe that you will be able to adapt to whatever happens in the future. And on a personal note, a part of me envies people who aren't actively working on projects using LLMs -- you guys are the ones who are more likely to stumble across unique problems to solve with AI that most of us just didn't see.

I started to avoid LLM news and I feel much more relaxed. Most of it started to feel like bs hype. It will take a year or so until the hype settles and everyone has a reasonably idea of how it can be used reliably in a product.

Yes. When I build something, I envisage what the end product is. That is my personal goal. It doesn't influence my programming.

LLM's make me question if the goal I am moving 'to' will even be mine by the time I get there.

Nobody likes working on a sandcastle and discovering Steve next door built the exact same sandcastle as you, halfway through your build.

It has nothing to do with money or praise. It remains to be seen if LLM's can build ALL sandcastles before I even finish my one... that is the anxiety.

The upside of LLM's is that they should make software blackboxes much easier to make.

The way I have been dealing with this is brushing up on my calculus, and probability theory, as well as matrix math, and filling in any holes in linear algebra I have, and then learning more about neural networks.

LLMs burst into more people's consciousness last year, but so did Stable Diffusion, so I have been finding neural networks in general more interesting. Once I get a better grasp of backpropagation etc. I'll see if I want to move on to learning about transformers and LLMs, or latent diffusion models, or both, or maybe some other type of neural network.

My side project is a model of computation (the bitgrid[1]) that could possibly make LLMs much faster, as a side effect. I'm interested in real time signal processing as a long term goal. For now, the model is so foreign to even me that its a bit brain breaking to think about.

I just got a binary counter working... it's that basic right now.

[1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid

> I'm having a really hard time working on new, non-LLM related side projects due to anxiety that everything I'm doing is effectively worthless.

Well for me, all of my side projects are "worthless". Fun, but worthless. I guess that makes me worry less, although burnout usually gets to me before AI anxiety gets a chance.

The existence of LLMs has made me feel more alive and better able to live in the moment.

So what if a machine can write a novel? I don't even want to read it.

Human intention is what gives meaning and value to my life.

The things that I want to build need me to make them. Why would I wait for a machine to do it later without my imperfect human perspective?

Why not use the LLM to work more quickly? I do.

> folks will eventually just ask a LLM to do X, why bother creating something to do it

Dive into more exotic languages. Maybe LLMs will make simple Python scripting obsolete, but they will be awful at writing, say, OpenCL/Vulkan kernels, engine specific scripts, SIMD intrinsics, triton code and such for some time.

Prompt engineering is the last great frontier.

I worked on Tanimoto similarity today. It was cool: https://www.featurebase.com/blog/tanimoto-similarity-in-feat...

LLMs routinely give me incorrect answers when I ask it questions related to coding. I was nervous about them for a couple weeks, then I started to use them and realized that they're really not that useful for generating anything other than boilerplate

This is what I am working on

https://tildes.net/~comp/16ab/what_programming_technical_pro...

I'm going to have to do a real write up on it thanks to the increasing interest. Also I am making things like

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110542853660777197

and am thinking now about how to make 3-d worlds around them. To get ready for Apple Vision development I went on Ebay and got myself a Hololens 1! I've also got people trying to get me to start another project I was talking about six months ago. So I'd better quit playing Elden Ring and get to work.

I simply do not understand this entire line of thinking.

LLMs aren't useful. They don't solve problems. They don't substitute for real software. They don't threaten our jobs. They are absolutely irrelevant to my life. Why do you see them as relevant to yours?

my side projects target folks that dont want anything to do with LLMs