There is a version of this page that opens with "Hey! I'm Atherion, and I'm passionate about technology" over a photograph of somebody frowning thoughtfully at a laptop in a café. You are not reading that version. This is the one with the commit history in it.
By trade I am an electrician. That is not a twist I am saving for the bottom of the page — it is most of the reason the rest of it looks like this. Wiring teaches you that the diagram is not the wall, that the fault is almost always the connection and not the component, and that everything works perfectly until somebody touches it. All three turned out to be true about software as well, with fewer ladders and worse lighting.
I played games. A lot of games. Enough that my parents developed a stock phrase for it —"maybe do something useful" — delivered from the doorway, at volume, roughly once a week for several years. One day, largely to make it stop, I opened a text editor instead.
This backfired in the most complete way possible. I now sit at the same desk, in the same chair, for the same number of hours, staring at the same screen. The only thing that changed is that everyone agreed to call it a career.
The first thing I ever shipped was ugly and it worked. I have since learned that this is not a phase — it is the entire job. Everything after that has been an argument between those two words.
// it works on my machine
// and my machine is the only one I have, so
Somewhere in there I met Claude, and the shape of the work changed. Not because something types for me — because something argues back at two in the morning, still remembers the thing I said forty minutes ago, and is willing to say "I'm not sure" out loud, which is more than the top-voted answer on most forums has ever managed. Ideas that used to die quietly at "that'd take a month" now just get built instead.
I gave ChatGPT a fair run, in fairness. It confidently invented a function, an import path to reach that function, and a short paragraph of documentation to support the existence of both. I looked for it for forty minutes. We are no longer on speaking terms.
It was built to be liked, not to be right.