The problems I've been working on are at a much higher level than the nuts and bolts.

I'm currently exploring domain-specific languages aimed at writing web applications. I've been particularly interested in, much like bash, data flowing through pipelines. I have spent quite a bit of time and I'm definitely not vibe coding but I've probably only writen 1-2% of the code in these projects.

It is so much work to build out a new language with a surrounding ecosystem of tooling. Not even five years ago this would have necessarily been a full time multi-year endeavor or at least required a team of researchers. Now I can tinker away in my off hours.

This is what I am exploring:

https://williamcotton.com/articles/the-evolution-of-a-dsl

Did I not craft the syntax and semantics of these languages?

No need to go that far. I bounced off weekend projects many times because I lost interest the moment I had to relive fighting the "modern" frontend ecosystem set up (or whatever else unrelated to the actual building), which is what I was already doing at the day job. In the end I just gave up because I'd rather get some rest and fun out of my time off. Now I can just skip that part entirely instead of tanning in front of <insert_webpack_or_equivalent> errors for hours on Saturday afternoon.