That could actually lead to a profitable business in the longer run: You will have great insights and lots of working code that may end up in a commercial product that someone is seeking?
Esp since you mentioned unmet requirements, thats actually a good indicator
I do this now! It is wonderful. So many unique projects being worked on that you'd never come across in your daily life. It's always fun to experience a world that is so far removed from tech, and see how clever people are at solving problems without SaaS, apps, or spreadsheets. Not every problem has a tech solution.
And it has turned into a decent chunk of business over the long run.
I would suggest looking for local charities whose mission you are care about. Then just finding out what issues they have. I ended up building a simple system based on Airtable for a local charity. Although pretty unsophisticated it was transformative for them.
Oh damn, I love this one. I’ve been vibe coding a ‘public benefit’ app on the side that has a few hundred users but never thought of doing something for an actual non-profit.
Care to elaborate on your process? Curious how you approach them and come up with the best path forward with limited time (assuming you have a full time job as well on the side). Thanks!
I would recommend finding a local non-profit you're interested in helping, and start volunteering. Don't go in guns blazing "I'm here from Hackernews to save you" but get to know the people and what they do, and then how to help will become apparent.
By local I would recommend truly local and not a "division" of a national non-profit; those are an entirely different beast.
Absolutely. If you loaded this into an agentic coding harness with a decent model, I can practically guarantee it would be able to help you figure out what's going on.
> there is no more need for writing high level docs?
Absolutely not. That would be like exploring a cave without a flashlight, knowing that you could just feel your way around in the dark instead.
Code is not always self-documenting, and can often tell you how it was written, but not why.
> If you loaded this into an agentic coding harness with a decent model, I can practically guarantee it would be able to help you figure out what's going on.
My non-coder but technically savvy boss has been doing this lately to great success. It's nice because I spend less time on it since the model has taken my place for the most part.
There are so many blogs and tutorials about this stuff in particular, I wouldn't worry about it being outside the training data distribution for modern LLMs. If you have a scarce topic in some obscure language I'd be more careful when learning from LLMs.
They do. Think of it like a very intelligent but somewhat unreliable engineer you can hire to look at your code. They have no context about the codebase beyond what’s written in the source code, or any docs you give them.
What I meant was the docs might provide explanations about the problems the codebase solves, design decisions, the abstractions chosen, etc that wouldn’t live in a particular source file. Any discussion someone has with an LLM about the codebase will lack this context in the explanations given if docs don’t exist.
one of the apps I built is an app that you give it a website, it scrapes it, then places the google ads.
Over time it tries to improve the ads.
Right now it is showing a 5% click through rate over a few weeks. I have no idea if that is good or not, but it saved me the hassle of having to worry about google ads for another app
If the marketing platform works, then it would drive traffic to itself.
when agile was fairly new I worked with remote developers that had 3 locations.
My specialty is software requirements and my team was brought in to do the product management. The developers had read somewhere if you were using a database to do requirements then you were doing agile wrong.
They wanted me to write post it notes in triplicate, then fedex them to all their offices.
1 pedal braking means evs often dont need new brake pads for 150K miles
One problem they are experiencing is rust and glazing on the pads from disuse.
They are heavier than the equivalent sized ICE so have more tire wear, but dont have to be that large in an absolute sense. Most are large luxury cars.
The software wont be sexy, but will help the non profits and the people they serve