flâneur

On Making

beej.us · 3,112 words · saved by 1 readers

TLDR: I gain a lot of fulfillment by making things. I don't consider things built by others at my request to be made by me, and are therefore much less fulfilling. And then I feel sad. This article starts strong and then heads off into the weeds. There have been a lot of pieces written about what I'll call "the AI dev schism" And I think there's a lot of truth to those: We'll just grant those as being correct for various developers. But there's something else that troubles me. Backstory before we get going, so you can get a better idea of my perspective: I'm going to use "AI" to mean "Generative AI and LLMs" in this essay. Sorry, veterans of so many AI winters. Before we begin, I'd like to share with you a bit of my latest sci-fi novel. Some of you might unaware that, in addition to Beej's Guides, I also write science fiction. Kael pressed his back against the shattered bulkhead, plasma scoring the air centimeters from his face. The Vorrkai assault drones had anticipated their route th

2026-03-12 I made this! TLDR: I gain a lot of fulfillment by making things. I don't consider things built by others at my request to be made by me, and are therefore much less fulfilling. And then I feel sad. This article starts strong and then heads off into the weeds. There have been a lot of pieces written about what I'll call "the AI dev schism" And I think there's a lot of truth to those: Loss of the craft, coding things by hand Loss of low-level problem-solving Loss of fun Gain of high-level problem-solving Getting through back-burnered projects Gain of fun We'll just grant…

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