- 24 January 2026
- tech
I am an addict. No joke.
After a full workday of writing code, I come home and hack on side projects. It’s not healthy and I’m the first to acknowledge it. This is a real addiction, but is not taken seriously since its seen as “one of the good ones”.
What’s changed recently isn’t how much I build, but how I build.
For builders, there is that dopamine hit when many hours of effort turns into something that works. But now those hours can be compressed into minutes with almost no effort. All the dopamine you could ever want.
But I’m not here to talk about addiction.
Waiting used to be optional
Discovering Linux and open source was a revelation to me when I was younger. The idea that most of the world’s software was freely available, constantly improving, and instantly accessible felt almost unreal.
My father was an architect. He would spend months — sometimes years — designing buildings, and only much later see the result. I couldn’t imagine waiting that long to experience the payoff of my work.
I see a similar dynamic with my kids. They build and rebuild the same LEGO sets, but the desire for the next thing is always there. Once you’ve assembled everything you own, you have to wait — or save — before you can build something new.
Software removed waiting. The internet was an endless playground of toys to try. That immediacy shaped how I learned, how I worked, and what I found satisfying.
New builders, new entry points
One of the great things LLMs have done is empower non-developers. People can now build tools for their own needs without years of training, and you don’t need to be a super nerd like me.
I love seeing what this new community has come up with, even if that accessibility may not last for ever.
The journey is shrinking
For me, programming used to be mostly about the journey. I would make incremental changes, hit dead ends, rethink abstractions, and slowly converge on something solid. We love to solve puzzles.
Lately, I spend more time iterating on design documents with an LLM than writing code directly. The destination is cheap, so the journey matters less. That’s especially tempting for things I’ve built so many times before (auth flows, CRUD APIs, server caching).
I get more done, but I spend less time thinking in code.
Making beautiful code or an elegant abstraction
I have tried being very descriptive to the LLMs about how I want my code to be written, but it can only get you so far. And why bother? The better these tools get, the less time I spend actually looking at the code itself.