I didn't mention the crucial point which is that I what I signed up for was writing my own software.
I grew up witnessing Carmack going from Keen to Quake in 5 or 6 years.
That standard gets you attached to the idea that you should be able at some level to individually reach a fraction of the depth and breadth. Sadly, I have neither the energy nor the focus.
But what's the point of getting an LLM to, say, write a raycaster if your point is to learn how to do that yourself? If your mission in life is to learn to build things?
You have conflated the joy of learning with the joy of building. I have been writing code since I was 6 years old and was left to my own devices with the vic-20, the manual, and BASIC instructions.
I have worked as a developer, security engineer, program manager and engineering manager through my career. Writing stuff to understand algorithms or hardware requires engaging with the math, science, and engineering of the software and hardware. Optimizing it or developing a novel algorithm requires deep comprehension.
Writing a service that shuffles a few things around between stuff on my home network so that I can build an automation to turn down the lights when I start playing a movie? Yeah, I could spend a day or two writing and testing it. Having done it a few times, the work of it is a bit of a chore, I'm not learning, just doing something. Using an Claude or some other agent to do that makes it go from 'do I want to spend my time off doing a chore?' to 'I can design this and have it built in an hour'.
Making the jump to using the tools in my day job has been a bitore challenging because as a security engineer I have seen some hairy stuff over the last two years as AI generated stuff wends it's way into production, but the tools and capabilities have expanded massively, and heck, my peers from Mozilla just published some awesome successes working with Anthropic to find new vulns :)
Don't let using tools take away the love of learning, use them to solve a problem and take care of the drudgery of building stuff.
OMG that manual. VIC-20 was my first code experience. I look back and cannot understand how 7 year-old me was patient enough to make a jumping jack guy appear on screen. Joy of Coding? Hell, no. I wanted to see if I could make it work. (I did, and I had no clue how to save to tape)
Sounds like you had one at home? If so, I'm a bit jealous. But also, hello, brother/sister!
Yep, my origin story is more fun, I actually got left at my dad's boss' office and was bored so I found a computer book and started reading it and rebooted the computer and followed the instructions. When they came back I had a very simple program going and after getting into a bit of trouble my dad's boss' laughed it off and told my dad to get me a computer. He did (the vic-20). Several days later my parents turned it off and deleted my program and it took me a while to explain that I needed more gear to save my programs. Been stuck on the hardware acquisition loop since :P
Love the color that a real life story adds, and yours definitely is colorful. Thanks for sharing.
I moved recently. My hardware acquisition loop still has me in tangles. Where exactly am I going to put this retired enterprise-grade Dell server? Why am doing this to myself? But, wow, it's a thing of beauty.
Reading you, I was debating on loving kick in the rear. Can't really do that these days and some people react negatively to it. Sounds like you are reasonably self-aware though, so...
Nobody can teach you to own and control you. But you had better. Use tricks, treats, magic, whatever, but get to the damned end or make for damned sure you know why you walked away (and live with that).
Your life matters. Your ideas matter. Birth them. It hurts. Push through. Don't look back at your life and wonder what it would have been like if you had stuck with it. It hurts. But do it.
Or do whatever you want, but this random stranger votes "getting over".
I grew up witnessing Carmack going from Keen to Quake in 5 or 6 years.
That standard gets you attached to the idea that you should be able at some level to individually reach a fraction of the depth and breadth. Sadly, I have neither the energy nor the focus.
But what's the point of getting an LLM to, say, write a raycaster if your point is to learn how to do that yourself? If your mission in life is to learn to build things?
(I hope I'm getting my idea across)