It’s more like AI provides the development team, and you are the key user and product manager that comes with all the requirements and domain knowledge, the lead architect reviewing the architecture, and the lead UXer reviewing the UX.
Same here. Farmer now, former network engineer and software project lead, but I stopped programming almost 20 years ago.
Now I build all sorts of apps for my farm and organizations I volunteer for. I can pound out an app for tracking sample locations for our forage associations soil sample truck, another for moisture monitoring, a fleet task/calendar/maintenance app in hours and iterate on them when I think of features.
And git was brand new when I left the industry, so I only started using it recently to any extent, and holy hell, is it ever awesome!
I'm finally able to build all the ideas I come up with when I'm sitting in a tractor and the GPS is steering.
Seriously exciting. I have a hard time getting enough sleep because I hammer away on new ideas I can't tear myself away from.
Out of all the apps you've worked on, what's one or two that you think came out really well?
Did you start farming from scratch?
Did you take over a farm?
20 years of ideas finally getting built — I felt that.
For me it was financial tools I'd been sketching in my head for years. Now they actually exist.
The "can't sleep" part is so real. It's like being a kid again when you first discovered you could make things with code.
And I realized something — we just want to solve problems, not spend all our time studying the techniques for solving them.
Same here. I’m an AI professor, but every time I wanted to try out an idea in my very limited time, I’d spend it all setting things up rather than focusing on the research. It has enabled me to do my own research again rather than relying solely on PhD students. I’ve been able to unblock my students and pursue my own projects, whereas before there were not enough hours in the day.
This really resonates. The setup cost was always the killer for me too — by the time you get everything working, the motivation is gone. Now I can actually go from idea to prototype in an afternoon. Cool to hear it's having the same effect on actual research.
Does the "iv" in your name stand for "implied volatility" by chance? : - )
Ha, you got me!
In this sense LLMs are another wave of "end-user programming" like excel formula. This has been the recurring experience of many in these waves.
I don’t like AI for production code, but I love it for ideation and prototyping. I agree. It really allows you to quickly iterate on ideas without being blocked by implementation details.
Genuine congratulations. Ignore the unconstructive comments you’ll get (I already flagged one.)
This is a revolution, welcome back to coding :)
Congrats! I never stopped coding, but AI makes it way more productive and fun for sure.
$100 seems like a lot. I guess if you think about it compared to dev salaries, it's nothing. But for $10 per month copilot you can get some pretty great results too.
$100 did feel steep at first. I tried other models but Opus 4 with extended thinking just hits different — it actually gets what I'm trying to do and the code often works first try. Hard to go back after that.
Wait until you try Codex XHigh for $200 (with 5.2 Pro as oracle)
Nice project! One small suggestion, adding a search or category filter would help simplify navigation given the number of calculators available.
Thanks! Honestly I've been feeling that too — finding stuff is getting annoying even for me. Search is coming soon. Good call.
The "knowledge base" at the bottom is 100% slop. Why? Why inflict this on people?
Yeah, you're right — that part is pretty rough. I wanted to help people actually understand compound interest (it's kind of life-changing once it clicks), but I got lazy and let AI do it without proper editing. Defeats the whole point.
I'll figure out a better way. Thanks for calling it out.
I think the words are "you're absolutely right".
You're absolutely right too.
[flagged]
Please don't be hostile to newcomers. That's a way to destroy this place.
How do we know if newcomers are real? I thing bigDinosaur is reacting to the fact that OP’s entire post and replies appear LLM generated.
Just another AI generated website with 5000 calculators thrown together that looks like every other single one. From a brand new account with a post that looks like it was also written from ChatGPT. Somehow getting enough votes to show up on my homepage.
Things are definitely changing around HN compared to when it first started.
So true. I sometimes wonder how many ai bots there really are. I often see the telltale signs but often miss.
What are you implying?. He would have had to hire a good developer at least for a full month salary to build something like this.
And if you are thinking enterprise, it would take 2-3 developers, 2 analysts, 2 testers, 1 lead and 1 manager 2-3 months to push something like this. (Otherwise why would lead banks spent billions and billions for IT development every year? What tangible difference you see in their website/services?)
5000 calculators may look excessive, but in this case it magnifies the AI capabilities in the future - both in terms of quality and quantity.
> (Otherwise why would lead banks spent billions and billions for IT development every year? What tangible difference you see in their website/services?)
Well, I don't think all those people are spending their time making simple calculators.
Fair call — it did kind of explode from one calculator to 60+ I’m a real person (long-time lurker, finally posting), but I get why it looks sus. Things are changing fast, and I’m just happy to be part of the messy early wave. Thanks for the honesty.
people are hurt because something which defined them as a person can now be done by a machine; don't let them dissuade you
I would add to this: skills mean nothing if you don’t use them.
OP made a site with a bunch of calculators. Their critics didn’t make that!
Twitter/X incentivizes you to get engagements because with a blue checkmark you get paid for it, so people shill aggressively, post idiotic comments on purpose trying to ragebait you. It's like LinkedIn in for entrepreneurs. Reddit or it's power hungry moderators (shadow)bans people often. The amount of popular websites that people can shill their trash is dwindling, so it gets worse here as a result I assume too.
> Stack: Next.js, React, TailwindCSS, shadcn/ui, four languages (EN/DE/FR/JA). The AI picked most of this when I said "modern and clean."
I guess this is what separates some people. But I always explicitly tell it to use only HTML/JS/CSS without any libraries that I've vetted myself. Generating code allows you now not having to deal with it a lot more.
Cool to hear nonetheless. Can we now also stop stigmatizing AI generated music and art? Looking at you Steam disclosures.