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But Yak Shaving Is Fun

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.