Thank you for your encouragement, and I know it's sincere. In a purely technical sense, if you have the resources, AI is an good tutor I'm constantly astonished by it myself.

However, the difficult part about what you said is this before AI, even relatively simple tasks carried a certain cost. But with the introduction of AI, that cost has actually gone up. And honestly, what shocked me when I first encountered AI was that the code it introduced was several orders of magnitude more impressive than anything I had access to in my environment.

Of course, I'm not saying I was diligently studying open source code before that. The environments where I primarily studied were centered around old books like Effective C++ or EIP. My skills themselves were outdated, and the code I was commissioned to work on in Korea and Japan was also built on very lagcy technology. The kind where everything is crammed into a single PHP view, or where a WinForm application controls everything through one global singleton—essentially procedural programming and heavyweight coding.

But with the introduction of AI, surviving on these so-called legacy technologies suddenly became drastically more difficult. The problem was, most of the documentation I could access was this outdated. It's not that I delayed my studies, either. For instance, I knew Redis was released in 2009, but the first time I actually used it was in 2020. The gap between America and the non-American world is that vast.

So, learning modern coding techniques actually took quite a long time. Patterns like the event bus pattern, which I'm familiar with now, and other specific patterns. So I'm not denying your goodwill—as you said, I am taking on my own challenges.

It's just that AI has been a field of shock, making me realize just how narrow my world was and how terribly inadequate my coding skills are. And to close that skill gap, I'm reading HN.

To be fair, being from a small country can help too. (Hi from Lithuania.) It helps with marketing, because while it's difficult being Worlds Amazon, it's easier and more marketable to be lithuanian version.

Yes, it has downsides too, as economy and people resources work depending on scale - smaller community is going to be smaller - but it's a way to startup and build a base solution, while thinking of something else that may change the rest of the world later.

Of course, yeah, in the end it's just different...

P.S. I'm in same boat technology wise. It's difficult to learn everything, and learn it "on time" :)

We are both navigating a challenging road. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors, my friend.