The Yak is Back

The danger of yak-shaving isn't new. What's new is the opportunity cost.

There's a certain kind of developer who spent the late nights of their 20s perfecting their Emacs config. Not writing software — configuring the thing they'd write software in. Org-mode, self-documenting literate configs, custom keybindings for keybindings. Beautiful, elaborate, and almost entirely beside the point.

Nobody cared. The users of the software you were supposed to be building certainly didn't. But it felt productive. It had the texture of real work.

That's yak shaving: the recursive pursuit of prerequisites that slowly replaces the original goal. And if you think we've evolved past it, look at what's happening right now in the AI tooling space.

The new yak has better PR

Today's version wears a more respectable disguise. Instead of Emacs configs, it's custom agent orchestration frameworks. Bespoke prompt pipelines. Elaborate multi-agent workflows hand-rolled from scratch. There's a cottage industry of developers building the tools to build the things, and deferring the things indefinitely.

To be fair, this energy isn't worthless. The ecosystem pressure — all those developers hacking on agent tooling over weekends — probably has something to do with why Claude Code and its peers are moving so fast to keep up. A rising tide, and all that. But for any individual builder, the calculus is different.

The seduction is the same as it ever was: powerful, customizable tools that reward tinkering. The Emacs trap worked because Emacs genuinely could do almost anything. The AI trap works for the same reason — and then some. Before, building a custom Emacs setup required real skill and took real time. Now you can prompt your way into a half-working agent framework in an afternoon. The friction that used to slow the yak-shaving is gone.

What's actually changed

AI has raised the ceiling of what a focused developer can ship. A builder who stays in the work — actually building things, using the tools as they come — can now do more than ever. That same leverage applies in reverse: when you get pulled into the rabbit hole, you're not just wasting a Tuesday afternoon. You're wasting a Tuesday afternoon that, with focus, could have shipped something real.

The value of attention has gone up. The cost of losing it has too.

The boring tools are winning

My current workflow is not interesting. Claude Code, openspec, and a reasonably clear idea of what I'm trying to build. Openspec adds just enough rigor over a plain markdown file to tease out design problems before I hand things off to the agent — which means the agent delivers the right thing more often. That's it.

I watch people wrestle with whether tool X or orchestration pattern Y is meaningfully better than this. Honestly, I'm not sure it is. And I've stopped trying to find out, because the people actually best positioned to solve agent orchestration are the teams at the big players with the resources, feedback loops, and incentives to do it right. That problem is going to become a commodity — the way the models themselves have — and when it does, all the custom infrastructure you built will be a liability, not an asset. You'll own the maintenance.

Ride the wave of what the core tooling is doing. Let them eat that cost. Trust that if Claude Code isn't perfect today, it'll be closer tomorrow. Your job is not to fix the tools. Your job is to use them.

What the yak costs you

The insidious part isn't the time you spend shaving. It's what it displaces.

Builders provide value through discernment and taste. Knowing which problem to solve. Knowing when a design is right. Knowing what to cut. That's the thing AI can't do for you, and it's the thing that makes the difference between software people actually use and software that technically works.

You can't exercise discernment when you're distracted by a beautiful, clean yak shave. The work feels productive. It has momentum. But taste requires presence, and presence requires that you're actually there — in the problem, with your full attention.

The yak will always be there, offering you a way to feel busy without being useful. The question is whether you notice it before you've committed to maintaining its enclosure.