# Am I doomed?

How would a hardcore software engineer look in the present world filled with LLMs and AI coming out of every teapot? How and what should I educate myself in to be relevant, current, and needed 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 years from now? How should I align my studies and personal projects with my usual work, gym, social activities, and non-technical activities like reading and playing games? I lean toward a fundamentalist approach, where I may luck into SOTA tools and skills, e.g., get stuck with vanilla Claude Code without skills and latest features instead of switching to the next "killer" agent. I feel like I should invest in more hardcore, DIY programming, and treat LLMs as more advanced, artificially "clever" (as Penrose said and I like it) tools-similar to Clangd LSP-that can provide information or do statistically "on-average" correct code reviews, but no more. I want to avoid the trap of offloading my mind into LLMs in the name of productivity; that doesn't make me productive. I feel more tired than ever, and I feel I need fundamental learning more than ever in my life. Also, with the current state of affairs, the word "fundamental" has lost its original meaning, I guess. Something that once was normal-sitting with a book, paper, and pen and solving equations like a caveman-by today's standards seems close to impossible. My attention is everywhere: I have three Claude sessions in the web, four tmux splits with Claude Code open, a bunch of Neovim instances with latest configs, minimal VSCode for easier code review; everything is there-zero work gets done. I spend more and more time ruminating and less and less time doing. LLM-assisted coding is a trap I fell into; and my tendency to overthink, overoptimize, over only gets amplified so much that I stop even noticing I'm stuck in my own loop of overdoing, essentially, nothing.

I want to break from this. I want to have a healthy, proper relationship with modern technology. I want to iron out my weak spots, bring them to zero from minus one, and I want to amplify my strong sides.

Here I go again optimizing.

The irony is, this is a Claude prompt.

Am I doomed?