Working On Things That Suck
Have you ever been working on a project and realise what you're working on sucks? Like it just isn't good enough for anyone to find it useful.
I've recently been building a news Aggregation website called ikka for my home country of Zimbabwe. It uses AI to filter and summaries the 20 most significant news articles of that day. It was inspired by Kagi News and News Minimalist.
For the last couple of weeks, while building, monitoring and testing it, I've been noticing that the product in its current form is just not good enough. Personally, I have some pet peeves like:
- The UI just isn't good enough. I was going for a very minimalist design, but I might have just made it a bit too basic.
- The news it has been generating suck, like the headlines are not the best, content is often lacking in substance. This might be an issue with my Agent prompts or the lack of creative writing ability LLMs have.
The biggest problem, I have is that I actively pour my heart and soul into this thing and for some reason, I can never get it to the point where it's good enough.
An even bigger concern is that I have not actively set out what being good enough even means for this project. I have no set goals and standards on what is acceptable and what is not.
The current version of the website is far better than it was in its first iteration and has improved. The issue is the new and improved version of this thing becomes the sucky current version. I'm constantly finding bugs and errors all over the place. There is always either something big or small that can be improved and made more efficient.
Sometimes I look at it and ask myself why I try, if for some reason I can never hit the nail right. In some way I have become Sisyphus and the boulder, my project. Every day, I strive to get it up the mountain, only for it to rollback down. I have plunged myself in this never ending hell and have no means of escape.
I enjoy working on the project, but I'm just afraid for the day when I no longer have the will to work on it and leave the boulder at the base of the mountain and just decide to walk away.
When am I ever going to be satisfied with something I made, I often wonder how people who maintain open source libraries or run business view the products they create and not think that there horrible.