Guy at the Austin meetup showed me his 12 line chatbot and I finally shipped mine after 7 months
I went to a small AI meetup at a coffee shop on South Congress in Austin back in March, mostly just to get out of the house, and I sat next to this older guy named Ray who had a laptop covered in stickers. He pulled up this tiny chatbot he built for his wife's flower shop, nothing fancy, just answers questions about hours and whether they have peonies that week, and he told me it took him two weekends and he just used the free tier of some hosting thing. I had been sitting on my own project since last August, a little helper that reads my town's PDF garbage collection schedule and answers plain questions about it, because I kept telling myself it wasn't ready. Ray asked what mine did, I explained it, and he said something that stuck with me, which was basically that his shop bot got the wrong hours for three days and nobody died, so what was I so scared of. I went home that night, stopped rewriting things, and pushed it live on a Sunday. It has been up for 11 days now and my neighbor has used it 14 times, which is 14 more times than I expected. For people who build stuff on the side, how long do you let a project sit before you just put it out there?