Sometimes the small “why not?” features turn out to be more useful than the stuff you spent days designing.

Curious if anyone here has had that happen with their project.

I mean those projects that start with something like: “surely there’s already an app for this,” then you try a few options, none of them fit what you need, and eventually you just build your own.

Doesn’t have to be impressive or finished.
Game, app, website, script, weird weekend experiment — drop it below.

curious what people actually use for day to day development

Codex, Claude Code, Gemini, Cursor, LLM? Or something else?

I’ve been jumping between a few of them and they all seem to be good at different things
what are you using and why?

I wanted to share my blog on video on my way of approaching AI-coding and solving the issue with generation and code reviews.

https://www.jamesluterek.com/blog/the-scaffold/

if you’re still working on the same project months later and actually maintaining it, doing releases etc, is it even a side project anymore?

or is everything a side project until it starts making money lol

Could be an editor, framework, language, AI tool, game engine — anything.

Something everyone seems to love, but every time you try it you just think “nah, this isn’t for me.”

Not necessarily because it’s bad. It just never clicked for you.

Mine would probably be VS Code.

could be clean code, languages, frameworks, performance, architecture, whatever

something you see devs argue about constantly but in actual development it barely matters

curious what people here think

AI is becoming a pretty normal part of development, so I’m curious how much of your actual codebase is written with tools like Codex, Claude, Copilot, etc.
Is it 10%? 50%? Almost everything?

And more importantly — how much of that code do you actually understand and review yourself?

Don’t be shy about sharing your experience, whether you barely use AI or your entire project is heavily AI-assisted.

r/DevGround is brand new, and this is one of our first open discussions, so feel free to jump in and help get the community started :)

A few weeks ago I decided to take one of my projects seriously and started building Lilo, a small desktop Markdown notes app in Rust.

At first it was basically just a simple always-on-top notes widget.

Then it slowly turned into an actual app: Markdown editing, wiki links, backlinks, search, folders, a knowledge graph and a bunch of smaller stuff.

The surprising part wasn’t building it though.

It was seeing actual people find the project, download it, clone the repo and leave stars.

It’s still actively being developed and there’s a lot I want to change, but this is probably the first project I’ve made where I can say:
yeah, someone other than me actually uses this thing.

Pretty cool feeling.

What are you building right now?