Antidote

If you love building things, and the process of building is just as important to you as the result itself, it’s not unreasonable that you’re in a slump these days.

The world is telling you that your thinking process is extraneous, unnecessary, and must be commoditized and compressed. But you are multidimensional, you need room to touch the code, to explore, to rise above the local minima. In engineering, the journey is the destination. The working system in production is our reward, and we always move towards that.

Unstick yourself. Do stuff that is not the most efficient. Build something from scratch with your bare hands and your brain. Read programming books written on dead trees. Reason through something on the back of an envelope. Scribble and daydream. Join Discords where people are actively building, reviewing pull requests, building community. Write a blog post. Mentor a colleague. Answer an email from a budding engineer. Create a private repo and merge to main without a PR. Take a library or tool and look underneath the hood. Go to an in-person meetup. Pick apart the living, breathing beast that is the transformer model that governs most of our daily conversations these days, down to the attention mechanism, down to the RoPE embeddings. Explain it back to yourself.

Having agency is one of the most important things a creator can have. Give the gift of it to yourself. It’s still there, waiting for you.