There is fun in what you use something for and doing the something.

I think there is a big divide between people who just love making different tools from scratch by hand and the rest who love being able to instantly whip up a new tool in minutes AND THEN use it to create something fun.

I literally would never ever in my existence be interested in making a compiler if I had nothing to use it for. If I ever wanted to make a cool program which uses that compiler then whether the compiler came into being thanks to a wizard, my enjoyment wouldn't change a single bit.

I know what will blow your socks off: package managers. They are kind of like magical wizards that can make fully operational software appear on your machine. Want a scheme compiler? Just `nix-shell -p racket`. Want common lisp? `nix-shell -p sbcl`. It works like a charm every time.

Yeah no argument here.

In typical tombert fashion, when making an NES game I ended up getting much more obsessed with the tooling around the project than the core project, so when I got it to generate a Forth compiler, I fell down a rabbit hole of learning how compilers work and then feeling cheated out of the actual work.

That said, I'm not a complete luddite here; I wanted a proper comment system on my blog recently, and I don't care enough about web stuff to actually build it myself. I could have used an off the shelf thing but those usually come with a bunch of bullshit involving accounts and the like, so instead I got Codex to build one for me and deploy it and it works fine.

I agree there’s a big divide. I think I’m also team “let people do things they enjoy.”

I like using computers to solve problems. I’m more interested in the problem being solved than the journey most of the time, though I’ve also been on some lovely journeys. Sometimes that means I write a tool all by myself. Sometimes it means I download an existing open source tool. And sometimes it means I delegate the creation to an AI model.