Hello, world. I have been thinking a lot recently about the state of the web and programming as a craft. It seems that simplicity is hard to come by now-a-days, and with the fervour surrounding LLMs, I find myself longing to rewind the clock and unplug from the noise.
Computers are fascinating, and learning to make them do tricks even more so. Learning takes time and patience, and the discipline to sit with a problem and think it through. I’m finding that the more of this thinking I hand off to the machine, the harder it is for me to think the problem through. I would really like to change that.
I’m starting this blog as a means of keeping accountable. I’ll use it as a place to document my work and share some opinions, whilst trying to keep my skills sharp in the world of convenience and LLMs. My first stop is the software that inspired me to write this first post.
I use Neovim, the text editor, pretty much every time I sit down at my laptop, and it’s a tool that I really enjoy using. I recently got stuck trying to troubleshoot a configuration issue, and confess that without an LLM I would have struggled to resolve it. I couldn’t think through the problem for more than a few minutes before retreating to Gemini. I didn’t know how to trace the issue, or why the solution given to me would work. The problem is, I really want to know why, but convenience got the better of me at the time.
So, I’m going to commit to reading through the documentation and really get-to-grips with the Neovim API. My plan is to rewrite my configuration and take the time to understand what each line is doing. I’ll report back on my progress.
Wish me luck!