24-06-2026
Part of the problem...
My ideas are itchy, they don't let go of me until I scratch it enough; until it is well scratched and borderline bleeding. I don't pay attention to my friends, I skip dinner, I forget to brush my teeth, only get another feature out. It feels good to develop something fast, and LLM have enabled me to do exactly that to a massive degree; churn out features in a nameless, bespoke web application that neither tickles my intellectual fancy, nor my curiousity. I just keep letting the LLM write code for me; it hooks me. It's an endless stream of tiny apparent successes, that pile up over weekends and drain me. By the time I am done with my weekends, I am tired and trying to not sleep, because I can churn out a few more features if I get a few more hours.
This is unhealthy and unstable, and I wanted to change that. It's too easy to do all the straightforward things, because naturally my belief is tha, one I solve all the tiny pesky problems, I will have time for the hard ones, and then finally I will work on the big project I have been meaning to. But tiny, easy problems are easy to make up; there is a virtually endless supply of it. There is always another easy problems which I could solve just by writing one more webapp. So I decided to create a backlog.
I can vaguely imagine what I want to build, but I have no idea how I should build it. It is some sort of a game. When I started working on my cluster, I started trying to figure out if I can build a massive colony simulation that scales virtually indefinitely; and six months later, I am trying to emulate a dreamy surreal sequence. I am not sure where I will add the fireflies here, or if there is enough here to call it a game. But I want to see how it might feel like to craft something of this nature.
But the pleasure of craft is missing with LLMs. Building a imaginary worlds inside my computer is probably the next most pleasurable thing to building a world in a TTRPG for players to walk around in & interact with. Using an LLM is not only robbing me of that pleasure, also keeping me blind from ideas and thought that I would otherwise not gain or experience. This is not to say I don't recognise the usefulness of LLMs, but I need to learn where I should leave the craft and bask in convenience.
Good night.