Why should you learn anything? Because it helps you ask better questions, and gives you more and different experience to draw connections between things and situations and ideas. It lets you do more stuff, and doing stuff is fun.

Having recently sat with a bunch of non-coders who decided to play with Claude Code—they learned more in an afternoon than they had in a lifetime, just because it was fun for it to get them to a thing they wanted. Versus months of drudgery and study as the price of entry (and an end result that would probably be super janky compared to the consumer products on offer to them).

I learned some about carpentry by reading, and by watching videos. I learned much more, much faster, by picking up bits of wood and tools and just doing. I did little dumb stuff that was trash but that was mine, and that was satisfying enough that I did more, and before I knew it I’d backed my way into picking up some scraps of proper technique.

And now so many more people with a vague itch can “just do” in relation to software systems.