It is becoming increasingly difficult to make ends meet. I invested in some AI companies and my investment was doing extremely well but I had to sell all my stocks to pay for car repairs and medical bills. I have decided that I need to put more effort into a side hustle. I intend to leverage my programming skills. I have been experimenting with AI assisted coding. The results have been promising! AI solves the hard technical problems which cause me to abandon projects. I have discovered that AI assisted coding works best with small projects that proceed step by step. It is not practical for large projects when you expect the AI to produce most of the code. This means I will be looking for the tiniest projects that still have some potential. For example, WordPress plugins and puzzle games that rely on drag and drop logic are practical projects. Writing my own compiler is not a sensible project. But it is possible to tackle projects that are above my pay grade.
My first project was the simple Accent Toolbar. All this program does is display a grid of buttons for inserting accented characters into Windows applications like the browser or a text editor. This is a genuinely useful utility program because I often need to enter accented characters as I study Spanish. I was using a text file with all the Spanish special characters which I kept open in my text editor. I would copy and paste characters from that text file. This was not ideal. I also programmed some keys on my ELSRA Smart USB Programmable USB Numeric Keypad to insert accented characters. This worked pretty well except for Ultra-Edit which uses the same modifier keys. I use Ultra-Edit a lot for typing in my Spanish sentences so this was a serious problem. AI helped me to solve some tough technical problems sending the characters to another application. This took several prompts but eventually it came up with a good solution. I am extremely pleased with this project even though I did not figure out how to make it work by myself.
Now the problem became how to distribute this software. I was able to create a proper installer. I am selling Accent Toolbar on Gumroad at https://6026173778503.gumroad.com/l/frvjyt
AI recommended that I use Gumroad and it does seem useful for simple digital products. I was using Google Drive to store my YouTube Data Backup Tool but that was always a bad idea. Nobody is buying my YouTube Data Backup Tool anymore. I only made a little beer money offering that software for sale. I have a few more ideas for software I can create if AI solves the hard technical problems.
