How to keep loving tech

I turned 30 this year…

thinking back, I’ve been coding for almost half of my life. I try to remember what got me in there in the first place. I’m not so proud of it but it was actually writing cheats and bots for my favorite MMO at that time lol. Nah writing this I’m proud and I regret nothing. The choices I made at that time, they got me there. Thanks to this path, I married my wife, I’m able to provide for my family, and I can just live a peaceful life.

One of the key aspects of who I am is pretty much tied to the fact that I’m a tech guy. I fucking love tech, I wake up tech, I live tech, I breathe tech. I fell in love with coding because it allows me to stay close to the tech; solving weird problems by doing tech stuff. The truth is that most of the time, I was more interested in fixing the problem than in understanding the problem itself. Not sure if this makes sense but, I was excited by the idea of waking up in the morning and doing some weird hard shit with code to make managers and stakeholders happy.

I’m a people person, and I was lowkey getting off when explaining the hard shit that I was doing to other people. My goal was to enable them to do the same shit without me having to help them the next time. And I was pretty good at it. I was not one of those mfs on StackOverflow telling folks how much they were stupid for asking about things. I was encouraging people to ask questions, first because I genuinely wanted to help, and second because it made me feel good about myself. I don’t think it’s necessarily like a bad thing tho. Everybody wants to be known for something and this was my thing.

This is why I started streaming by the way. Talking about code, sharing my code, debating about code, learning about code, everything code. Writing this, I really feel like a fucking nerd (derogatory), but you have to understand that this shit is like MUSIC to my ears.

I’m so lucky to be who I am. HUGE nerd but also a big people person. This is why I was given all the opportunities I had. Not only because of my skills, but also because of luck and because I’m damn nice (and funny). Thanks to this, I met so many people, worked for some of the smartest folks on earth (shoutout to my man Bhaskar) and was able to make a shitton of money. So much money that I can’t tell it to my dad (I’m Congolese, you wouldn’t understand).

And yet, here I am, writing about being bored now.

AI is a wonderful tool,

because they (frontier labs) took all of our content, the good, the bad, the weird stuff, added the maths to it, and now you can get EVERYTHING from a chatbox (you obviously have to pay for it, you don’t own shit little peasant). We initially tried to cope so hard with some of the dumbest shit you’ve ever seen, like:

UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

MORE TIME FOR CREATIVE WORK

NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR EVERYONE

WE’RE ABOUT TO SPEND LESS TIME AT WORK

but deep down we knew, or I knew, that AI was first coming for the joy I was getting from my day-to-day work. When you’re a slave to the capital, the goal is efficiency. If you get happiness from it, that’s an unexpected (happy) side effect but your job is primarily to get the job done as fast, as sound, and as secure as possible. And, even if nobody wants to admit it, AI is about that. It is about getting to the point as fast as you can fucking possibly go. This, at scale, will do irreversible damage to the world as we know it but hey, I’m not talking about that today. I’m talking about the fact that all the parts I was REALLY enjoying about my job are gone and this is pretty bad for me because I don’t want to do shit, if I don’t enjoy it. I’m speaking from privilege here folks, I was able to tell people that I REALLY love my job and I meant it. Not anymore!

So what now? What am I doing? What’s the solution?

Well, I seriously started questioning myself like a year ago, mid 2025, when I got really negative about the future. Not a doomer but almost. Talked to my wife, talked to my friends, even some coworkers I trust the most and kept asking the same question. What now? What am I? What’s left for me?

The first thing was that, I have to accept that things are not going backward with AI. It’s here to stay whether I like it or not. The best I can do is find ways to have fun with it and the thing that clicked for me is this thing kids are calling harness engineering. It’s basically the same thinking process I had when I started coding: how can I automate some bullshit that I don’t want to do manually. This is a whole set of new problems and abstractions. It’s less fulfilling in a way because there is no determinism in here. You throw random bullshit and see what sticks to the wall BUT, the deeper you go, the more you start seeing some patterns and ways to bend the Machine God to your will. This has been really interesting to work on, from a tech perspective and I’ve found myself enjoying sharing my journey while working on this new class of problems.

The next thing is that technically, outside of my work, NOTHING is preventing me from coding. So whenever I have some spare time, I just code. I’ve been building some shit recently, with more or less AI assistance and it has been fun. This is my little secret, like I’m still doing handmade coding. Crazy to talk about this like this is some kind of ancient arcane art lol.

The last thing is that tech is much more than coding. I’ve been stuck in this rabbit hole because my career was tied to it but I can do so much more. 3D printing, electronics, hardware… You’d say yeah, AI’s coming for that as well and you’re right but hey, this is kind of new to me and it’s broadening my perspective. A project I can do isn’t just code now, it’s a system. I’m basically saying that AI made me go out and touch grass in a way lol.

---

This one is for my nerds. There’s hope out there. We can still build, thrive, try stuff, break stuff. You just have to accept that professionally, the goalpost has moved. But what you fell in love with, is still there. We still have communities, we still have people who want to learn, ask questions, and people who still care. It’s not over.