I definitely see the appeal of an electronic version. I think it really depends on what you care about tracking. Food? Maybe use the same barcodes already on the product. Clothes? maybe RFID patches that are unobtrusive.

Things that are subject to a lot of wear and tear and handled a lot will not work well with dots as they will come off, but I don't find that to be a problem for the front of storage boxes so it works for me.

While I don't have an electronic system for tracking parts bins, the one exception is parts I place on PBCs. This is a small subset of my total parts and to track them I have an electronic database that's much more rigorous, tracking part numbers, data sheets, footprints, symbols, and it is much closer to the kind of part database that a site like digikey would use than the dot system.

I don't need dots to track parts I put on PCBs because I can do that all programmatically to scan the files and see what parts I place the most often.

I don't quite know what you mean with your question about whether it would be useful if I didn't have dot totals but still tracked them. I do find the dot totals to be useful, and comparing across years also helps me identify things that were used a lot, but maybe only two years ago. Stuff like glue and magnets seem timeless and are used constantly every year though.

The thesis that in the past it was safe to share ideas and projects because the execution was hard, and that now things have changed because of AI is an interesting AI, but I wonder if it is really true.

It certainly seems true that for small projects and relatively narrow scoped things that AI can replicate them easily. I'm thinking specifically about blog posts where people share their first steps and simple programs as they learn something new, like "here is how I set up a flask website", "here is how I trained a neural network on MNIST".

But if AI is empowering people to take on more complex projects, perhaps it takes the same amount of time to replicate the execution of a more advanced project?

In other words, maybe in the past, it would take me 10 hours to do a "small" project, which today I could do in 1 hour with the assistance of AI.

And now, with the assistance of AI, I can go much farther in 10 hours and deliver a more complex project. But that means that someone else trying to replicate this execution is still going to need around 10 hours to replicate it.

Basically, I'm agreeing that AI can reduce barrier to replicating the execution of another person's project, but at the same time, that we can make more complex projects that are harder to replicate. So a basic SASS crud app is trivial now but a multi-disciplinary domain specific app that integrates multiple systems is still going to be hard to replicate.