Plans? But why would I want to do that?
I went down to the hardware store with Silas yesterday to pick up a couple of pipe clamps for one of the projects I'm working on, and ran into an old friend from a previous sysadmin job. We chatted briefly about the hardware store equivalent of the weather ("what are you doing?" "oh, working on a project...") and then he asked me what plans I was using to build the project in question (a bed, in case you're wondering.)
Plans? But where's the sport in that?
He was dumfounded. But surely every carpenter, from the most skilled craftsman to the backyard punter, must use plans?
When I assured him that, no, I don't generally use plans except when the cost of the lumber runs into thousands of dollars (and can cause serious injury or death if they fail), he wandered away in a bit of a daze, shaking his head at the insanity of it all.
I could see the point of using plans if I did carpentry for a living. But I don't. I do operating systems development for a living, and I do carpentry as just another outlet for my artistic impulses, and furthermore when most every project I do uses scrap (and SCRAP material), I couldn't even start to dream about reliably sized components that I could draw a plan against.
And life is to short to follow someone else's assembly instructions. When they find a cure for mortality, then I'll go back and build things from a menu.