I wouldn't use it because one of the reasons that I do side projects is to enjoy myself and learn new things, and these tools tend to do much of the stuff that I enjoy and learn from.

I'm primarily a backend developer. Most of my work has been in serving json or occasionally xml. Spring Shell in Java is something that I'm closer to working with than a GUI. When I've done web work, the most complimentary thing that was said about my design is "spartan".

So, if I was to have a web facing personal project... would black text on a white background with the default font and clunky <form> elements be ok? I know we are ok with it on the HN Settings page. They work... but they don't meet what I perceive other people have as minimum standards for web facing interfaces today.

And so... if I was to have some web facing project that I wanted to show to others, I'd probably work with some AI tooling to help create a gui, and it would very likely have the visual design traits that other AI generated front ends have.

It depends what your goals are. All of my side projects were started because I wanted to learn something. Using a "skip to the end" button wouldn't really make sense for me.

The number of dark‑mode sites I’ve seen where the text (and subtext) are various shades of dark brown or beige is just awful. For reference, you want a contrast ratio between the text and background of at least ~4:1 to be on the safe side.

This isn't even that hard to fix - hell you can add the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to a skill.

https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker

Besides, the idea of paying 200$/month to have the privilege of using ai in my side projects… it’s just stupid for me

AI might (might not, but often does!) also save you from doing original thinking in the domain, which in a show my side project is what people are interested in

What is the urgency in completing side projects? Commercial projects are usually the ones where you have some urgency.

It is also very fun to tackle hard engineering problems.

I enjoy both, and tend to oscillate between wanting to do a lot of one, or a lot of the other. I do recognize that I've been coding for so long that it's much more exciting to be solving "product problems" rather than "engineering problems", I suspect mostly because it's the area I've explored the least (of the two).

And there is a LOT to learn about a domain while you're working on the problem, even without even looking at the code.

I was surprised to realize that some of my friends don't share this sentiment. They take very little pleasure from being product developers, and instead really just enjoy being engineers who work on the code and the architecture. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, I just found it very surprising. To be honest, I guess perhaps what I found the most surprising is that I am not one of those people?

And when you get your product in the hands of users can finally get that direct feedback line to/from them and can start working on the problems they find and thinking of product (not necessarily engineering) solutions for them? Man, that's so satisfying. It's like falling in love with coding all over again.

If it helps compare, you might have a full desire to manage a tricky server and all the various parts of it. It’d be removing the fun to just put a site on GitHub pages rather than hosting it on a pdp11. But if you want to show off your demo scene work you wouldn’t feel like you’d missed out on the fun just putting things up on a regular site.

I anticipate that people with a builder spirit and strong technical background are going to be able to build awesome things in the future. What the Fabrice Bellard or John Carmack of today will be able to build?

(I've not landed on a good solution yet, ollama+opencode kinda works but there are often problems with parsing output and abrupt terminations - I'm sure some of it is the models, some the config, some my pitiful rtx 5090 16gb, and some are just bugs...)

I have a long list of projects that I have thought about but never implemented because of lack of time and energy. LLMs have made that happen.

I like designing programming languages and developing parsers/compilers and virtual machines. But the steps beyond type-checking are so incredibly boring (and I don't like using C or LLVM as targets) that I have done the front end 15-20 times over the last couple of decades and the back end only 3-4 times.

This time, I spent two weeks developing a spec for the VM, including concurrency, exception handling and GC. And I led the AI through each subsystem till I was satisfied with the result. I now have a VM that is within 8x of C in tight loops. Without JIT. It is incredible to be able to allocate arrays of 4B elements and touch each element at random, something that would make python cry.

Working on the compiler now.

I don't think this is overwhelmingly the reason though - I think many are just all AI, but if the project is technically interesting it might be sufficient to get me to grimace through it.

That's basically the entire AI landscape atm.

I keep seeing people do things like spend a weekend building a product then charging ridiculous prices for it with the justification that it's what those products would've cost a few years ago.

For some reason, it doens't click for them that those prices were a reflection of the effort it took to get to that point and that the situation has changed.

Accessibility that can be had on client side should not be a concern on server side.

Before, it was like:

"Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... (loses interest before idea validated)

Now: "Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... with AI, I get to actually validate that it works (ideally), or reformulate the idea if it doesn't.

The trick is to deliberately use it in a way that helps you learn.

I don't think it's just the base rate of rounded corners though, these posts feel like the AI tends to spit out a bullet point list of features, like you'd see on an AI readme where each feature has a tangential emoji, then for a website puts them in a grid of rounded rects

Most of my time has been spent fitting abstractions together, trying to find meaningful relationships in a field that is still somewhat ill-defined. I suppose I could have thrown lots of cash at it and had it 'done' in a weekend, but I hate that idea.

As it stands, I know what works and what doesn't (to the degree I can, I'm still learning, and I'll acknowledge I'm not super knowledgeable in most things) but I'm trying to apply what I know to a domain I don't readily understand well.

There could be many reasons to not use ai in a case like this, eg: retaining more control, breaking some new ground, because it’s fun, because it’s personal, etc.

In other words, I've found people like the above to think of LLMs as fairly static, as if we couldn't change their behavior with a simple sentence, instead of complaining about it. It's strange, to me at least.

A hundred self-thought devs not implementing accessibility standards is a different problem than a school teaching 100 students lacking these standards in its curriculum.

Plus given time constraints, they generally wouldn't try to cram huge amounts of tiny text into every visible inch of the page without some intentional reason to do so (using that somewhat hard to read console-ish font Claude seems to love as a default).

Maybe the dark mode/terminal font/high text density look presents as "cool looking" at first glance for one-shotting evals so they've all converged on it. But to OP's point, this seems like a solvable (or at least mitigable) issue if models or harnesses were concerned about it.

“Don’t have bad vision if you didn’t want to be technical!”

(came across that way)

Those of us who care that technology be accessible to as many people as possible, such as low vision users, find it relevant. You can ignore it if you wish.

See Rawls 'Original Position' on why you should care: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position

This.

Coding assistants handle a great deal of the drudge work involved in refactoring. I find myself doing far more deep refactoring work as quick proofs of concept than before. It's also quite convenient to have coding assistants handle troubleshooting steps for you.

I do think though if I were to delegate the API itself to AI and say something like the code doesn't matter, the high level thinking would suffer from lack of pain working through implementation details.

> Piecing together technology in novel ways to solve highly targeted problems is a skill

The LLM outputs this out of the box? Where's the skill?

I don't believe the comparison to car tuners benefits your thesis here. The spectrum of people I know who tune their cars varies from utter idiots to professional engineers. You cannot state as a fact that anyone who does it has insight or even natural talent. The bar is so low that anyone who has enough money can do it (just like coding with LLMs). In fact one can say that most people are incompetent, and by tuning their cars to varying degrees they endanger themselves and others, enlarge their running/maintenance costs, lower their car's resale value, and harm the environment.

FWIW, there’s also an official frontend-design skill for CC [1]. A while back I incorporated some of the more relevant guidance from WCAG into it [2].

[1] - https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...

[2] - https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag

It also doesn't solve the issue if somebody is browsing your site on a mobile phone where the extension might not even work properly.

WCAG is not difficult - but it does require some modicum of effort.

Stop shoving your wants on others when you can fix it yourself.

Just get some concrete and some lumber, and build that wheelchair ramp.

You can even hire a contractor to follow you around town all day building them as needed.

I hope you remember that well into your adult life.

Your hearing may be lost. Even if you could still read, the website doesn't offer an accurate transcription. You have to rely on someone else (or some other tech) to transcribe. You have to hope their hearing and language skills are good enough for an accurate transcription.

Your vision may be lost. Even if you could still hear, the website doesn't offer an accurate transcription. You have to rely on someone else (or some other tech) to transcribe. You have to hope their reading comprehension and language skills are good enough for an accurate transcription.

Your limbs may be lost. Some apps let you tab around. Some apps make it impossible to find a button until you hover your mouse. Some apps simply don't load unless you press some magic keystrokes. Good luck.

You brought this problem upon yourself, 30 years ago. You brought this problem upon others. People won't care about your problems. Why should they, when you didn't care about theirs?

> I find it bewildering that every thread sharing some project has a comment like this.

Accessibility is legally required and not difficult to add.

Would you deny service to black people? Islamic people? Gay people? Refusing to provide accessibility in your service is no different. You are actively discriminating in a way which could be illegal and certainly is unethical and amoral.

- Exploration: I am "vibe coding" to explore a domain, add many features, refactor the app over and over, as a real time exploration of the domain to see what works and what doesn't

- Specific Execution: I have a full design, a full idea, I've thought about architecture, we're making a plan and we're executing this extremely coherent vision

I've enjoyed using AI for both cases.

https://github.com/airowe/claude-a11y-skill

https://mcpmarket.com/tools/skills/accessibility-checker

the wheelchair is not built into the site, and only requires a few hooks or the odd helping hand to work.

mapping back to software, and especially websites, your user agent is your user agent. it should render websites in the way you want to see them, regardless of what colours the designer chose.

an AI accessibility browser is more like a wheel chair than a ramp

Bad analogy, as none of those traits require any accomodation in a website or app.

Not that I disagree with the premise. Almost everyone will eventually have trouble reading small, low contrast text or details on their phone or screen, if nothing else.

Now if only there were an ADA for website performance...

git worktrees as an example.

It's not even about age.

You can twist an ankle playing basketball and need accessibility features like ramps and grab bars.

You can get hit in the eye by a bit of debris when your toy drone crashes, and need help reading a screen while it heals.

People who don't think they need accessibility only have to wait. Everyone gets their turn.

More thinking isn’t a simple good thing. Given a limit to how much thought I can give any specific task, adding extra work may mean less where it’s most useful.

…right now, today. But they might consider “build a world for ‘old’ you”

https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary

Another possibility (although I’ve never actually tried this myself) is an MCP server that someone built specifically to connect to Lighthouse, which includes accessibility testing as part of its benchmarks.

https://github.com/priyankark/lighthouse-mcp