A personal reflection on yak shaving — the phenomenon of chasing a chain of prerequisite tasks until you lose sight of the original goal. The author shares how building their own blog led to accidentally creating a static site generator, then explores the origins of the term (coined at MIT AI Lab, inspired by a Ren & Stimpy cartoon), and discusses both the pitfalls and the genuine value of yak shaving. Donald Knuth's creation of TeX — a decade-long detour that produced a programming language, a paradigm, an algorithm, tools, and a typeface just to typeset a book — is held up as the ultimate yak shave. The author argues that while most yak shaving fails in production contexts, it is a remarkably effective learning strategy, because every tangent teaches something worthwhile.
