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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  28d ago (text post)   491 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for September 15th, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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A few months back I was notified that my employer will no longer need my services in around 90 days from the notice. That 90 days will be up October 19th.

I posted here a few weeks ago about my hardware project which is still going strong! I now have a reproducible process to go from a netlist that describes the connections on a board to doing all of the floorplanning and routing: https://imgur.com/a/3BMLd1I. This is some really dense analog for the lock-in amplifier I was talking about.

Doing this basically more than full time is leading to a bit of burnout. (Being realistic, I'm not doing my day job any more -- it's only training my Indian replacements and I'm not that motivated to do that if you can imagine.)

So, I'm about to release my other side project! A full lifecycle API toolkit: aat! Adaptive API Toolkit.

Presenting: https://gburgyan.github.io/aat/

It handles all sorts of things that get in the way of developing, testing, and integrating with APIs. This addresses the pain points that I've continually run into: local testing of services, testing from a CI/CD perspective, sharing those tests with your colleagues, and even supporting AI-led integrations for people using your APIs.

Here's an example of the usage of this for the travel booking service Duffel: https://github.com/gburgyan/aat-duffel

And it's all open source!

The way I'm figuring, I'm a 53-year-old dude. The AI revolution is coming for my profession: software development. I have no chance to land a job when I'm competing in the traditional way with the tens of thousands of programmers out there. If I do exactly the same thing as everyone else I will be nothing but frustrated and still lack a job. This may be better shot.

Assuming I even want a job of course. The hardware project sounds like it might be more fun anyway.

Being realistic, I'm not doing my day job any more -- it's only training my Indian replacements and I'm not that motivated to do that if you can imagine.

They threaten to withold severance or something? Jokes on them I guess, you'll pretend to train your indian replacement and he'll pretend to work.

Grats on having fun. I can't wait till im paeudo retired and have time for personal projects again.

Hasn't gotten to threats or anything, thankfully. I'm doing what I need to for another month. It's just so disappointing to see the quality of my "replacement."

I'm giving her remedial training on Windows and how to use AI -- despite the selling point from her firm that they are an AI first shop. I told her to install Copilot CLI (because that's what's authorized to be used, not my choice) and she was doing the equivalent of a blank look of "how?" She hadn't even thought to hit up Google and type "install copilot cli," which of course brings back the correct result at the top.

As announced last week I started working on the UI. I added a little panel and managed to hook up some of the debug info I was originally outputting to the window title. The currently selected weapon and ammo status are still in progress.

I was also trying to tweak the explosion animation with so-so results. The easy way out was to cartoonify it with some filters, and it kinda worked, but it's not really what I was hoping for. The AI route was even more frustrating. After several attempts I got it to come up with a static image in a style that might work, but I didn't get far animating it. I guess it looks too comic-booky and primes all the models into a "static animation" - the explosion is scaled up, colors change, but there's none of the turbulent gas dynamics of the original. Yesterday I finally got decent-ish results after torturing the prompt, but it hasn't wowed me either.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Wanted to do models and animations, and at step 1 I realized that my build won't build because I just straight up forgot to finish my last UI bugfix. Which led me down a little rabbit hole of re-architecturing my UI from the ground up, because my solution wasn't perfect in every way and good enough isn't good enough. Ahem. A few days later I pulled the plug, told myself to shut up and stop digging myself in deeper, and just reverted to a simpler solution with fewer features, but the damage was done. Hadn't actually accomplished a single thing all week long.

I added a little panel

Nice UI! That's certainly more appealing than my "programmer graphics" style.

Nice UI! That's certainly more appealing than my "programmer graphics" style.

Thanks!

Embrace the slop. It may not be high art, but for graphically challenged people like us it's a godsend. Though I admit tweaking the AI output was a bit of work, so it all depends on how much you want to bother with it right now.

What's your workflow for generating slop, anyways? I have not so far made it beyond just using Github Copilot in my IDE.

Chaotic and unstructured...

I have a few accounts on prepaid AI gateways. Pay as you go, and lots of models to choose from for all sorts of purposes including audio and video generation, they're pretty convenient. I'm mostly using https://gptproto.com/ and https://www.requesty.ai/. The issue with them is that they tend to expose an API and leave the rest to you. They do have sanbox UIs but they're either fairly minimal, sometimes (as in, depending on the model) don't work, and don't store the history of what you made. So I also spun up a LibreChat instance, it can handle text and image generation, and lets me hook up to any provider / model I want (well, for text, the image gen model has to be hard set in the config, so it's a bit of pain to change).

On top of that I also have an account on https://gab.ai/. Same principle, except they actually have a user-friendly frontend that even lets you send the same prompt to several models at once, and specialized tools for things like image editing. Originally when I subscribed they were giving a pretty good deal, but the amount of their "credits" you have to spend per prompt has been jacked up, so the jury is out on whether it's worth the price.

Then there's video generation. It's pretty expensive, so with the markup charged by the gateways, I figured I'd go directly to the source and open a seedance https://seevio.ai/ (or rather "going to the source" was the plan, but it turned out they were just squatting on the "seedance" domain, lol). The nice thing about them is again the frontend specialized for video generation.

My workflow is frantically jumping between each of them as needed, depending on how satisfied I am with the results. I described the process of generating high-def sprites for the monsters in an old Tinker Tuesday thread. For the UI, I just gave my LibreChat instance a screenshot, told it to make me an UI with a retro-futuristic CRT panel containing the debug info on top and stuff like health, and got the result. Afterwards I gave it a few more spins on Gab to fix up and extract the health panel, generate the content for the ammo one, and to clean up the original image so it's easier to work with in GIMP.

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