| I did this too. But honestly, I was getting a little tired of it. Now I use AI to build things I genuinely like and actually use. Nothing particularly fancy. I built a weather website that I use all the time when planning hikes. I also built a generative hiking-route tool: give it a starting point and a distance, and it tries to find interesting paths for you. I’ve made plenty of small helper tools for work and health, and now I’m wrestling with Open WebUI, trying to make it work exactly the way I want while repurposing an old Android device as the server. Do I miss nerding out over implementing a B-tree, or learning async programming in F#, Go, Crystal, Nim, C++, C#, JavaScript workers, or Java green threads? I don’t know, man. Maybe a little. But it has also never been easier to say: “Hey AI, teach me this concept using five examples. Give me one task, then evaluate my solution. And teach it in this particular style.” We lost something. I genuinely think we did. But I also think we gained much more. It’s okay to mourn what was lost, as long as you can still look forward. |