I resonate with some of this. Personally, I am motivated and driven by understanding “why/how” things work. The actual implementations are rarely more valuable

I resonate with some of this. Personally, I am motivated and driven by understanding “why/how” things work. The actual implementations are rarely more valuable to me than an exercise I know is “good for me” - and one that will help me gain insight into “the next thing” more quickly and efficiently. One major drawback to this that I have a bad habit of explaining how/why something works to the people in my life… even if they didn’t ask. Definitely something I am learning to filter. Additionally, one of the most unsettling things I find about LLMs is the (now well-observed) phenomenon of hallucinations. As someone who is terrible at memorization and has gotten by life thus far in large part to mental models - I didn’t realize until their popularization that I may or may not have regularly “hallucinated” things my entire life - especially when forming opinions about things. … makes you think … Great article! edit: I also find that the type of abstract thinking reinforced by writing software regularly, is addictive. Once you learn how to abstract a thing in order to improve or increase efficiency of the thing, it starts a cycle of continually abstracting, then abstracting your abstractions ad infinitum. It’s also a common bug I see in young CS students - they are fantastic problem solvers, but don’t realize that most (all?) of CS isn’t a thing - it’s the thing that gets you to the thing. Which is (I believe) why we have a generation of software engineers who all want to build platforms and marketplaces with very few applications that ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING. They haven’t taken enough humanities courses, or gained the life experience or something - to find the “REAL” problem they want to solve.