Come Look at This

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how lonely development can be, particularly when you’re working on something that feels a little bit on the frontier or is just niche enough that there aren’t many people around who are interested in the same things.

One of the weird parts is that you can discover something genuinely exciting, spend hours pulling on a thread and learning new things, and come away feeling energized by it, but not really have anybody to share that enthusiasm with.

It’s not even that people are unsupportive. Most people have their own stuff going on. They have their own interests, their own projects, and their own problems they’re trying to solve. What I’ve noticed is that sometimes I’ll spend an entire day exploring something and by the end of it I’ll want to tell somebody about it. Part of that is seeking validation if I’m being honest. I think most of us like having someone else say, “That’s interesting,” or “That’s cool,” especially when we’ve invested a lot of time into something.

But it’s also more than that. When I’m excited about something, I want to share that excitement with other people. I want to find the people who are excited by the same things. I’ve gotten so much value, enjoyment, and learning out of these tools that sometimes I feel like I’m waving people over and saying, “Come look at this.” It’s probably one of the reasons I’ve spent so much time teaching people how to use AI coding tools. I’ve shown dozens of people, maybe more than a hundred at this point, because I genuinely think a lot of people are missing out on what these tools make possible.

The hard part is that the people you want to share these things with aren’t always around when you need them. Sometimes your friends don’t care about the same things. Sometimes they’re busy with their own lives. Sometimes you’re just so early to an idea that nobody else sees what you see yet. And sometimes the people who do have their own mishigosh around expertise, status, identity, or what AI means for them.

I think part of what’s making this feel strange is that these tools are changing who gets to participate. A lot of the value for me isn’t just using them to be more productive. It’s being able to explore my own ideas, follow my curiosity, and work in areas that would have been much harder for me to access a few years ago. When you’re moving quickly and crossing into domains that traditionally required a lot more specialization, it can be surprisingly hard to find people who relate to what you’re experiencing.

I’ve also noticed that rapid progress can create strange social dynamics. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re working in someone’s field or not. Sometimes when you’re learning quickly, building a lot, and visibly growing, people start comparing their trajectory to yours. Not because they’re bad people, but because that’s what humans do. Your progress becomes tangled up with how they feel about their own progress. Cue Morrissey’s We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful.

That can make reactions surprisingly difficult to interpret. People aren’t always responding to the work itself. Sometimes they’re responding to what the work represents, or what it makes them feel about themselves. Growth in other people can be motivating, but it can also trigger comparison and insecurity, and I think most of us have probably been on both sides of that equation at different points in our lives.

I think one of the challenges is learning to distinguish between a dead end and an opportunity that simply isn’t obvious to other people yet. Those are very different things, but from the outside they can look surprisingly similar. Just because people aren’t excited about something doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable, and just because people are excited about something doesn’t mean it is.

I’m mostly writing this as a reminder to myself. Development already comes with enough emotional ups and downs on its own. Some days things click. Some days they don’t. Some days you make a week of progress in an afternoon, and other days you spend an entire day walking into walls. Adding all of these new social dynamics on top can make it even harder to stay grounded.

At the end of the day, I can’t really control how other people respond. I can’t control whether they’re excited, skeptical, supportive, threatened, curious, or indifferent. All I can really do is keep learning, keep exploring, put things into the world, and hope people receive them in the spirit they’re intended.

The reason I started exploring these things wasn’t because I expected a reaction from other people. It was because I was curious, wanted to learn, and wanted to build things I wished existed.

The reaction became part of the reward somewhere along the way, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s probably dangerous to depend on it too much. Expectations have a way of turning curiosity into disappointment.

I suspect the answer is to just keep exploring, keep making things, and try not to let the silence or the noise convince me that the journey isn’t worthwhile.