> let myself atrophy, run on a treadmill forever, for something

You're lucky to afford the luxury not to atrophy.

It's been almost 4 years since my last software job interview and I know the drills about preparing for one.

Long before LLMs my skills naturally atrophy in my day job.

I remember the good old days of J2ME of writing everything from scratch. Or writing some graph editor for universiry, or some speculative, huffman coding algorithm.

That kept me sharp.

But today I feel like I'm living in that netflix series about people being in Hell and the Devil tricking them they're in Heaven and tormenting them: how on planet Earth do I keep sharp with java, streams, virtual threads, rxjava, tuning the jvm, react, kafka, kafka streams, aws, k8s, helm, jenkins pipelines, CI-CD, ECR, istio issues, in-house service discovery, hierarchical multi-regions, metrics and monitoring, autoscaling, spot instances and multi-arch images, multi-az, reliable and scalable yet as cheap as possible, yet as cloud native as possible, hazelcast and distributed systems, low level postgresql performance tuning, apache iceberg, trino, various in-house frameworks and idioms over all of this? Oh, and let's not forget the business domain, coding standards, code reviews, mentorships and organazing technical events. Also, it's 2026 so nobody hires QA or scrum masters anymore so take on those hats as well.

So LLMs it is, the new reality.

This is a very good point. Years ago working in a LAMP stack, the term LAMP could fully describe your software engineering, database setup and infrastructure. I shudder to think of the acronyms for today's tech stacks.