Yvan Boily
Yep, my origin story is more fun, I actually got left at my dad's boss' office and was bored so I found a computer book and started reading it and rebooted the computer and followed the instructions. When they came back I had a very simple program going and after getting into a bit of trouble my dad's boss' laughed it off and told my dad to get me a computer. He did (the vic-20). Several days later my parents turned it off and deleted my program and it took me a while to explain that I needed more gear to save my programs. Been stuck on the hardware acquisition loop since :P
You have conflated the joy of learning with the joy of building. I have been writing code since I was 6 years old and was left to my own devices with the vic-20, the manual, and BASIC instructions.
I have worked as a developer, security engineer, program manager and engineering manager through my career. Writing stuff to understand algorithms or hardware requires engaging with the math, science, and engineering of the software and hardware. Optimizing it or developing a novel algorithm requires deep comprehension.
Writing a service that shuffles a few things around between stuff on my home network so that I can build an automation to turn down the lights when I start playing a movie? Yeah, I could spend a day or two writing and testing it. Having done it a few times, the work of it is a bit of a chore, I'm not learning, just doing something. Using an Claude or some other agent to do that makes it go from 'do I want to spend my time off doing a chore?' to 'I can design this and have it built in an hour'.
Making the jump to using the tools in my day job has been a bitore challenging because as a security engineer I have seen some hairy stuff over the last two years as AI generated stuff wends it's way into production, but the tools and capabilities have expanded massively, and heck, my peers from Mozilla just published some awesome successes working with Anthropic to find new vulns :)
Don't let using tools take away the love of learning, use them to solve a problem and take care of the drudgery of building stuff.
The Internet created the backbone that allowed for rapid experimentation in communications technologies, and created the ability for anyone to create and share technologies and reach a huge audience very quickly.
Without the Internet, most consumer electronics would have been far more expensive to build, and would have been strictly controlled walled gardens, but the Internet in general and the Web in particular allowed so many inventors to flourish. Ever since that Genie was let out of the bottle, corporate and government interests have been trying to put it back in, and most companies are trying to build and reinforce walled gardens under the banner of unified app stores that extract insane rents.
This project is an enhanced reader for Ycombinator Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/.
The interface also allow to comment, post and interact with the original HN platform. Credentials are stored locally and are never sent to any server, you can check the source code here: https://github.com/GabrielePicco/hacker-news-rich.
For suggestions and features requests you can write me here: gabrielepicco.github.io