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 literally driving some prominent figures to the asylum. As you may have noticed, it has nothing to do with the world of technology. So why did it "save" me? Why did I feel the urge to say "thank you" to it?
It was Bulgakov's imagination and creativity — the way he uses them to describe a communist Moscow and criticize the representatives of the USSR — that made me realize that I too can use my creativity to do something, both at work and outside of it. That I am not a monkey writing the same function 100 times in different contexts. That I am a designer of scalable and maintainable software architectures. And that my value always comes from the knowledge I use to create working software.
What I can say to all my colleagues who have found themselves in the same situation is this: the world changes, so embrace change, and always let enthusiasm guide you in designing software — and try to see the glass as half full.
I wish everyone a positive 2026, under the sign of AI.
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