[zahlman]

The project I worked on today is an alternative installer and environment manager for Python packages. I spent hours on 25 total lines of code, but the lion's share of that "coding" time was not spent actually editing the code. Rather, I was busy with coming up with alternative designs in my head, weighing their pros and cons, answering questions for myself about Bash that I didn't even know how to ask, testing out other ideas and realizing that they wouldn't work because of requirements I didn't know I had... the list goes on.

The corresponding commit message was 46 neatly wrapped lines, not counting blanks or the commit header, including a bunch of notes that will probably eventually make their way into documentation.

I didn't try to involve AI in this, and I strongly suspect it wouldn't help. Coming up with the ideas and putting them in precise language isn't really any easier for me than actually writing the code. While writing it, lots of things didn't work the first time, but I never felt "stuck".