[mordymoop]

Personally, I find it difficult to competently reason about a system unless I've built my own version of that system. So if you make a practice of building your own versions of things, you end up with a more robust mental library of how stuff works. For this reason, I've never seen yak shaving as a waste of time. The yak shaving was at least 50% about loading the abstractions into my brain fully.

[mrandish]

> I find it difficult to competently reason about a system unless I've built my own version of that system.

You're in excellent company from Feynman onward.

> The yak shaving was at least 50% about loading the abstractions into my brain fully.

I haven't always made a version of new kind of system I'm trying to understand but I always try to at least find a toy model that I can play with to confirm understanding.

[godelski]

Same with me. Made me also learn a lot of bash and Linux. I'm not expert (better than average but I'm not fucking around with kernels or deep stuff) and have found that very beneficial to my career, even (especially!) with agents.

Even if I ended up moving to something not hand written the learning helped me find which tools are actually the tools I want to use. Helps me reason about what's necessary.

I fully believe you can't reason about things unless you have some understanding beyond the minimum needed to reason about them. Otherwise you just have unknown unknowns.