Making

Summary

2026-03-12 On Making 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 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 a Gen-X hacker; I cut my teeth 80s microcomputer era. I hold a BS and MS in CS. I have 20 years industry experience, (Hewlett-Packard, startups, cofounder, Activision, etc.). CS instructor for the last 9 years, now at Oregon State University-Cascades. I'm 65% Doom on the AI-Utopia/Doom scale. I'm a Claude Code user sometimes. I code by hand sometimes. My father taught philosophy at a community college for 35 years. This might help explain the latter part of this blog entry. I'm going to use "AI" to mean "Generative AI and LLMs" in this essay. Sorry, veterans of so many AI winters. Interlude! 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 through the lower decks and now Rin was bleeding through her jacket sleeve and old Maret couldn't stop coughing from the vented coolant still hazing the corridor. Kael counted the pulse-intervals between shots. Three seconds. Maybe four. That was all the universe was offering him. Then he saw it: the...