The Loop is Back

When I was young, a computer was a box of infinite possibility. I came to it through games, the way most kids did. But at some point the games stopped being the interesting part. What was behind them was.

Playing turned into building and things broke constantly, but along with the frustration there was a pull — figure it out, get it working, move on to the next hurdle. The reward wasn’t the answer — it was the momentum. Fix one thing, hit the next wall, fix that too.

That feeling faded, as it does. You learn the patterns. You learn that most problems have known solutions. The work becomes less about discovery and more about execution. Not worse — just different. The craft matures, and with it a quieter satisfaction replaces the early electricity.

Then something shifts.

Over the past year or so, I fell deeper into all of this — LLMs, agents, the whole wave. Nobody knows where it’s going. Not the people building it, not the people using it. But I came to it with years behind me, and that changes how you see it.

I sketch an idea. It takes shape fast — faster than it used to. It breaks. I fix it. I sketch again. The loop is back — the same one from when I was a kid, except now I know what I’m looking at.

I’m not sure what to call this. It’s not nostalgia. I’m not trying to go back. It’s more like the rhythm of the work has changed and my hands remember what to do with it.