Everything is free now, so why not a floating orb in my IDE

The orb is free yet comes at a cost. When I wrote the equivalent of the orb 25 years ago I had to go through the book “Real-Time Rendering” by Tomas Akenine-Möller and Eric Haines, the first edition with the chameleon. I remember the smell of the book. I learned that 3D projection was not mostly trigonometry (as I believed) but instead “just” multiplications and an occasional division, mind blown! I learned while skimming through the various chapters in the book how little I knew and how much there was to explore, creating a sense of excitement and craving to understand and implement algorithms from shadow volumes to spherical harmonics, and acquire first all the mathematical prerequisites. And I had the rewarding feeling of accomplishment when my orb was rendering.

Now all of that is gone, if you choose so, and what’s left is brainrot and the equivalent of doom scrolling.

I noticed during my own automatic programming [1] that although code is free (or more free, at least compared to before coding agents) understanding is not. Instead of investing time to understand and master someone else's software tools, I now still need to understand and master what I build for myself, which can be a lot of fun if you build up your understanding from scratch while building out the tools.

[1] https://antirez.com/news/159

Everything is free, except HTTP requests apparently.

Not exactly everything is free. I'd prefer to live in a world where stuff like this was expensive and RAM was still cheap.

I worry about the accumulating debt of maintaining all this "free" code if (once?) the subscription honeymoon ends.

Meanwhile I'm shipping tons of new features, upgrading outdated systems and delivering real value. But I do worry.

Emacs "zone" mode is much cooler than this and has existed for decades.

Wow, it's amazing that an individual built an IDE