But Yak Shaving Is Fun
Original: But yak shaving is fun
A developer blogger argues the recursive rabbit holes of yak shaving are not just tolerable but genuinely enjoyable.
A developer blogger argues that yak shaving — the recursive chain of side tasks that emerges when pursuing any goal — is not a productivity failure to avoid, but a source of genuine satisfaction. The essay pushes back against conventional advice to prune exploratory detours, contending these tangents are where deep learning actually happens. As AI coding assistants increasingly automate such rabbit holes, the piece implicitly raises the question of what developers lose when exploration is delegated to machines.
"But Yak Shaving Is Fun" is a personal essay from a developer blog that takes a cheerful, contrarian stance on one of programming's most beloved frustrations. The term "yak shaving" — popularized in developer culture, most notably through Seth Godin's writing — describes the recursive chain of prerequisite tasks that accumulates before you can accomplish your original goal. The canonical example: you want to fix a bug, but first you need to set up a local environment, which requires a specific dependency version, which requires a build tool update, which requires a system upgrade — until you find yourself, metaphorically, shaving a yak in order to get wool, to weave a blanket, to accomplish what you actually set out to do.
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