How I Rediscovered Enthusiasm in the World of Technology After the Rise of LLMs

When LLMs entered my daily life as a software engineer, my feeling was that you could talk about anything with them, and it seemed like there was a real human being on the other side. Back in 2022, users would access ChatGPT to ask it anything — including software coding problems (sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, sometimes you had to tweak things a little). Now, in 2026, LLMs like Claude Opus 4.5 make you realize that the code they write is better than that of a senior software engineer. There was a moment in my life when I said — and I think each of us has thought this at least once — "Will I be replaced by a machine?" , "Will I stop writing code?" , "Will I keep working in this field?" . All these questions were keeping me up at night. I was struggling, and I wasn't even productive at work anymore. Until I read a book by Bulgakov — The Master and Margarita . The story is about the Devil visiting Moscow in the 1920s under the Stalinist regime, causing all sorts of chaos and l