Tangents

AI has changed how we code. How we learn. How we set-up our environments. I’m exploring the new landscape, and so far I’m liking it a lot.

I’ve noticed I deviate from the original task. Taking on tangents. I do it all the time.

For example, starting this very blog. I want it to be versioned with git, of course. Which hosting provider do I want to use? Ask agent to investigate self-hosting solutions. Setup a promising one in my home-server. Reverse proxy rule for nginx. New DNS rules on CloudFlare. SSL? Lets ask Claude to do it as well. What about a CI/CD pipeline, to deploy the blog? Done in 15 minutes. Overall it took 2h to setup.

Have I written my first blogpost? Not quite. Still in draft. But I have an amazing blogging system, fully automated and simple to use.

I was wondering why I take so many tangents.

Because it’s easy. Agents are particularly good at bootstrapping projects. At making small configurations. At checking their own results. You’re always a few prompts away to setup something new. It takes no time at all.

Because it’s fun. You get the kick of (almost)instant gratification of another task being done. You have a sense of progress. And it’s fun because it’s fast. Before that would have taken 3 afternoons, now it’s done in 20 minutes.

Before I would have setup my hugo blog locally and synch with GitHub Pages. It would have taken less than 2h to setup.

But I didn’t wanted to miss the tangents. They were so much fun. And I love, not only to have a blog, but for it to be self-hosted. That bings me joy. And that’s what is all about.