Side Projects and AI

Reminiscing about side projects going through my GitHub repositories(a.k.a graveyard for side projects), and how they used to really motivate me to be creative. The joy of buying a domain, even before building something, the joy of just securing the name on every service ever, even before writing a single line of code. How building them shaped me, and made me a better developer.

Today with the onset of AI and one shotting an app is so in fashion, which I feel just takes away the joy of building, but at the same time, saves so much of our time and helps to grasp topics so much more easily and quickly. I wanted to look at building Side Projects with and without AI.

Side Projects and Me

Building, continuously building helped me be a better developer, not only helping me learn new skills, but also practicing already learnt skills. the whole concept of Build X with < insert programming language > was such a cool thing.

Side projects were really something I looked to every weekends, finishing my day job, every time, they were in my mind. The process of building really teaches you a lot, facing real production level bugs, working on real issues which you will be facing in your daily coding. It helps in creating a habit of coding, and honestly speaking code for fun is the best way to code, but I also love getting paid for it 😉

Side Projects and AI

I was very apprehensive diving into building my side projects with AI, learning more about MCPs and the agent flows, really made me intrigued about this whole world which has been opened up by AI. All the new opportunities, really made me excited. Not only I use long debugging sessions building projects with coding ai agents, it in turn also introduces me to doing things differently which really is helpful, and makes building difficult projects really fun.

But I have also seen, since something can be done so easily with some basic prompting, it really takes a lot of effort for me to start something, which is something I am really irked about. Nonetheless, once into the realm of coding it really does make building fun, after the early hiccups.

The process of me learning a new tool or a new language always included me building random side projects using the tool. In that case AI has supported me in learning tough concepts, or explaining syntax, which in turn helps me learn stuff quickly. But I also see sometimes, it teaches me something but I tend to forget it quickly, retaining is something which I am failing to do while learning and building with AI.

Whats Next

I am not so bullish or have negative thoughts on AI in coding, but at the same time I am seeing some really good benefits of it while building my side projects. Hoping I get into building a lot more and churn out good quality projects and not just what do they call it? yeah SLOP 😁