My list of fun things to build has always exceeded my available time. I have a day job. I have a kid. I don't have hours to spend tinkering with things just for the sake of learning something new, creating a cool tool, or impressing my tween with my wizardry.
Someone on Reddit asked if we're entering a golden age for indie developers and senior engineers. Their argument was that coding agents let individuals move faster, but companies still struggle with organizational inertia and the pull of the status quo. I don't know how strongly that holds, but on my small personal scale, this sure feels like a golden age of building and learning.
The word "golden" here isn't necessarily commercial success. It means I can build something sophisticated that furthers my own understanding, saves me time, or perhaps helps others in their own pursuits. That's fine, the point is the pure joy of exploration, even without a specific destination.
One example of this is mixlab. I wanted to experiment with ML architectures without writing a training loop for every idea, so it lets me define them in JSON and see how they train. It's MIT licensed and I have no real commercial intent, though who knows where I or others will take it. Without coding agents I would never have the time to build it.
But delegating the code-writing doesn't mean that I'm ignorant. There are real implementation choices and sometimes I have to dig into issues. This is where my deep experience pays dividends: it lets me guide the coding agent through walls that would otherwise be insurmountable.
I like to think of my and others' experience, creating then demonstrating the things we've learned and built, as an echo of the Enlightenment. At that time, science was novel and approachable, and people would do simple but inspiring experiments both in large halls and in small parlors. Parlor room science.
I don't know where I will take mixlab. I may use it to build something else. Someone may take it in a direction that doesn't interest me. And that's the point: we're all building and learning together. Because, as Jack Sparrow says, not all treasure is silver and gold.