I've been recently trying out FPGA programming in a niche HDL, and made a tiny promise to myself, that I would NEVER let an AI ingest any of my or others code doing it.

It's been exhilarating.

I've done things I couldn't imagine I could on my own, met some amazing people in the Discord, and felt immense satisfaction seeing the result and sharing it with friends. All things I thought AI permanently stripped from me.

If you keep training your brain to reach for the quick dopamine of asking Claude for a fix, you won't feel the long-lasting fulfillment from applying yourself to a hard problem. You have to quit that voice in your head, saying an LLM could do it in seconds, or it'd be too much work to study the problem yourself, and sit with some pen and paper. Your brain is so much more capable than you realize.

Now with a long laundry list of projects to try make, all I can ask for is more people giving it a go.