Thanks for your reply.

I did work as an Engineering Manager for a bit but honestly hated it with my guts. Promised myself I would never do that again. I have two young children so they're a bigger priority right now.

Not to sound pretentious but I was top 10 in my country (for example, I read a 500-page book on Assembly language the night before and aced a test that 90% of people failed) so it's really hard for me to work with people who don't get things as fast as I do.

Nothing to brag as it really isn't all hard work, I'm just quite neurodivergent compared to the average. It comes with A LOT of downsides (some nights I only sleep 2 hours because I came up with the solution to a hard problem while I was asleep and wake up to code it and it works)

Now, all this is because I am now at a crossroad where I have enough money and life experience in other jobs (I stopped programming for 10 years in fact because I had a pretty successful business).

The sad part is that I rekindled my love with programming in the last decade (I'm past 40), but it might be time to let it go and go back to doing business.

EDIT: I did work as a consultant (reluctantly) and was charging $500/hr because I really didn't like it but the demand was there. With the economy not being what it was and all the "AI prompt vibe coders" etc blah blah out there I don't really know what's a good rate now.

I don't know about "coding from scratch". Everything seems to have gone up one notch, and I don't really know what that implies.

I'm a real old-timer and really wanted that kind of leap for a long time, and delved into scripting languages and even dataflow as in the old Prograph [0], but did mostly sysadmin kinds of chores, with some very fun scientific simulations (so that upper management, even older than I was) could use them, in Hypercard, and that dead-ended.

If the next step is to build upon "building blocks" I'd like to see THOSE blocks thoroughly tested, as math libraries are to a great degree, and not ad-hoc. The most annoying thing I find about LLM's is their propensity to reinvent wheels every time. This may be inherent in the design, I don't know. But a serious business or other project should insist on reliable reusable blocks.

Perhaps the current situation is more like rounding up animals after they broke out of the zoo than caring for them, before it stabilizes if it ever does.

I nag people here to meet some real unmet needs, particularly for seniors, not just because I am one, but because I have had a lot of ideas on what to do, especially about building community and services. The internet is just too savage a place for most. I'll bet that the people approaching senior status will bitch about the lack of real self-driving cars, exoskeletons, and fraud-proof networks of trust, compared to the chainsaw internet of scams --- that THEY could have solved.

Create a "programmable internet" to get around all the annoyances, traps and dark patterns? I do it all the time, working around annoyances, popups, scams, paywalls. The average person isn't going to be able to do these things, not even with the leveling up of programming, but perhaps via proxy. Just as everyone seems to be putting up a shield, with endless CAPTCHAS (and I have browser extentions to solve these relentless eye exams) maybe users need a shield themselves.

But I ramble.

Good luck in whatever you decide to do.

Tally your strengths and strongest interests. Enjoy your family. I was posting elsewhere about some of the insane managers I've endured but memories and photos (some scanned from the film days) of being a parent are the real heart and soul of life. I have read some really insightful articles on what skills will be needed in the next few years and I'll summarize as I make sense of them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph