> It leaves the more psychological aspects as challenges which are not easy to face all the time.

Great point. Coding used to be a natural forcing function for prioritization of features. When coding is basically “free” you have to do the harder job of saying no to things, deciding exactly what to build, etc…

> who built their own operating systems even though their OS professors are claiming publicly their design sucks, who built a local database from scratch in C because his use case did not need the client/server stuff but just all the other relational goodies, or who built video streaming/transcoding software from scratch just because they have ideas and then the world changes around their ambitions

> perseverance in the face of social adversity

Sometimes you're Fabrice Bellard, sometimes you're Terry Davis. That is, for almost any idea you'll find random detractors, but some ideas really are generally useful and some are completely nuts. One of the negative externalities of AI is that bystanders are confronted with a lot more cases where they have to work out which one this thing is.

What about the kind of person who invented a new operating system because they couldn't have Unix for their personal machine? Maybe even named it after themselves?