But I wonder how much of that putting off was actually a real assessment of how much time and effort a project would take, vs a sort of feeling or assumption that it would be tough, and perhaps avoidant behavior as a result where the task is constantly backburnered?
This is how it is with my personal projects. Hard to decide to sit down and started but once the ball is rolling, I pretty much get the entire thing done in one sitting, learn something and feel satisfied and accomplished. Never takes too much time as I assume. But boy to get started is the real tough part sometimes.
I'm literally building a black-box client + server emulator for one of my favorite old MMOs, remotely, from a coffe shop in SF as I type this, on my laptop at home via Claude remote-control.
Insane.
People who have the technical skills and free time for these hobbies, and aren't having the times of their lives right now, are missing out.
Abstaining from using LLMs isn't doing anything to actually oppose them, it's just denying yourself the stuff you could produce with them.
The game RE stuff is also NUTS right now; the kind of stuff you can do in terms of porting, modding, emulating, etc, is a whole new frontier in personal game ownership.
Like, if you have a copy of a game downloaded, you can prevent it being taken away now. Including by devs turning off remote servers.
That all aside, it's hilarious you apparently don't think managers or architects are actually contributors to sw dev.