Building cool things for myself while the world burns

When I thought about senior engineers 10 years go, I thought of them as superstars that got things done at a miraculous pace, and no matter what challenges they faced, they overcame them with seemingly no fuss at all. They just wrote code, maintained like a hundred popular open source projects, were always online and taking part in discussions and social media, and somehow also had a day job. 10 years later, I am a senior product engineer and nowhere near that level, which has made me quite sad. I have learned that this is not a huge problem, technical skills alone don’t qualify you for that role, but I’ve always wanted to work at that level of productivity. Then LLM-based tools happened. With those tools becoming more useful, I’ve started using them for solving my very specific personal curiosities and problems, and have gone through my ideas list in record time. Now I’ve got to a point where I can confidently phrase a goal to scratch a particular itch, and can get pretty good…