Okay a little background first:

I have been coding for a couple years now.
I've made a couple projects but mostly just tinkering around and following tutorials. Then ChatGPT came to the stage. I started using it for everything. For a moment I could not code unless I was using it.

I have since started using it less and less for actual code. I have been taking classes and reading the docs more.

But now to my real question:

Is it frowned upon and generally bad practice to use it for planning?
For example planning out the features of a program, the layout of a website, the game loop of a video game?

I've been using a lot for that sort of thing. I come up with an idea, ask what it thinks, tighten it and repeat until I feel satisfied with the result.

I've been thinking, and I just can't come to a conclusion. I am a single dev, so it's not that much different from brainstorming with someone else? Or is it?

So I thought I would ask. Any advice, opinions, resources or anything else are welcome.

I recently had the idea and wrote it all down. I thought it sounded interesting but I was looking for critique if the idea sounds like something fun, boring, or tedious. It borrows similarity from other recent co-op games such as Lethal Company, PEAK, RV There Yet, and R.E.P.O.

This is the idea:

You and your friends are autonomous robots piloting a barely functioning submarine across a vast, hostile ocean in an attempt to find a safe path from one chunk of land to the other.

The submarine is your home, transport, and lifeline, but it's not always in perfect shape. While it can't fit into caves, wrecks, and abandoned facilities, you can leave it behind to explore for supplies, upgrades, and repair materials while avoiding mutated sea life, violent storms, and dangerous underwater terrain.

If a teammate is destroyed, you can recover their body and repair them aboard the sub, letting them keep all their gear. If you leave them behind, they'll be rebuilt later at the checkpoint building, but everything they were carrying is lost.

The focus is on exploration, navigation, teamwork, and keeping your submarine running rather than simply fighting monsters.

Of course you can't to much from just words alone.

But I just want to know if the idea sounds fun? Any things you would improve. Any parts that sound tedious or unnecessary?

A while back I realized that one feature I really wanted in Lively Wallpaper was the ability to cycle through wallpapers automatically. After digging through some of rocksdanister's GitHub discussions, it seemed like it was not really talked about much. So I decided to build it myself!

The program cycles through your wallpaper directory and changes the wallpaper on each monitor at a user-defined interval. It's finally out of alpha (🥳), which means I've upgraded from "it works on my machine" to "it mostly works on other people's machines too." Now you don't need to know how to code to use it. Well... mostly. You still have to edit a JSON config file, but JSON isn't technically a programming language. It counts right?

The features include:

• Automatic wallpaper playlist cycling
• Multi-monitor support
• System tray icon with:
  • Change wallpapers
  • Open config
  • Open logs
  • Quit
• Single-instance enforcement, so accidentally launching it 500 times won't brick your computer!
• Logging with unique instance IDs, because every bug becomes 10x easier to fix when it leaves behind a trail of evidence.
• Includes an installer, because "download → run" is a lot more fun than "clone → troubleshoot → question your life choices."

I originally built this for myself, but I figured others might find it useful too. Feedback, suggestions, bug reports, and feature requests are welcome!

So, it's essentially Mario Kart with a wider range of characters from Nintendo franchises. Characters could also have a specific vehicle that is relevant to them, like Epona for Link, or an Exotank for Pit. Ideas?