Product Managing your Side Projects¶

If you're like me and you couldn't find the time anymore to do programming side projects, perhaps AI can be the solution... but the experience is for sure different.

At the time of writing this, I've been programming for a little more than 17 years, since my first Hello World! written in C.

This has been a long journey of various learnings, tools, languages, frameworks, libraries, technologies, and so much more.

Fairly quickly, once I graduated, I started (like many of my peers) doing some small side-projects.

Whether it was building a CMS for this very blog, or trying to make a small shoot'em up in Gosu, or writing a Kodi remote interface via Angular.js (version 1! the horrible one that we don't talk about), it's been part of my journey in exploring & learning, while having fun.

Lacking time¶

But as time passed by, life got in the way: getting married, moving countries, having kids, doing other hobbies... All this meant either reducing hobby-programming, or stopping it altogether for long periods.

The AI elephant in the room¶

Now obviously, in the last few years, everything changed in our programming world: you can ask Claude to generate everything for you!

In some ways, I miss the old days, and I miss solving programming problems all by myself.

In other ways, this is a very powerful tool that cannot be ignored, especially in a professional setting where productivity is so important.

Coding by hand on side projects?¶

Some people have found their middle-ground to be LLMs at work, hand-coding at home. That's fine, and I'm glad it works for them.

Unfortunately, this won't do for me. I simply don't have the time.

Or rather, I have other activities I want to focus my limited free time on: spending time with the family, reading books, playing guitar, playing badminton...

There isn't time anymore for me to code a new framework / CMS / JS library by hand.

But I can still do side-projects... sort of!¶

Hand-coding is fun, but it's a very slow process that I can't achieve. So why not use AI there too?

In a way, I found this is akin to me being a product manager now: I know what I want from the product, I define the requirements, tell Claude Code to build it, review the outcome, iterate, brainstorm ideas with him...

This isn't the same as before, but it's something! I can still build things, with my limited free time. Just a few 10-20 minutes here and there during my evenings. That's all I need, and that's all I can give anyway.