I’ve always been a maker. As a kid I built scripts, little tools, websites - anything that made life a bit simpler or scratched an itch. None of it was ambitious; I mostly wanted to see if it worked.
Somewhere along the way I took a detour through no-code platforms. They made things easy, and they took the fun out of it. I missed the back-and-forth of actual code, the bit where you’re stuck and then suddenly you aren’t. Meanwhile my homelab and my Python scripts had turned into a mess: half-finished side projects, spaghetti I didn’t want to open, and automations that no longer made sense to anyone (me included).
What got me back in was AI tooling, Cursor and OpenAI’s Codex. They do write a fair bit of the code. What mattered more to me was that getting started stopped feeling like a wall. I could open an old script, ask what on earth I’d been thinking, and actually get somewhere in an evening. I still decide what gets built and what gets merged.
Since then I’ve committed more code than ever, while writing less of it myself. The commits are smaller and they do more. I’ve gone back to a couple of open-source projects, cleaned up some old wrappers and finally put some structure into the homelab. I’m also using n8n and Node-RED more sensibly, as a bit of glue between things instead of the place where everything lives.
None of it is flashy. It’s small fixes, things that work now and didn’t before, and every push feels a bit like getting something of mine back.
I’ve still got a backlog of side projects that spent years waiting for a developer who never came. I’m working through them, slowly, one small commit at a time.
If you’ve got a dusty project of your own, it might be worth opening it again. Keep it small and get it working; it doesn’t have to be perfect. I’ll be over here doing the same.
PASS IT ON.