Published: 2026-07-27 14:00
On a fall day in 1994, my dad brought home a beige Windows 3.1 PC.
This was the start of what my life would become: a software engineer, a technologist, and a tinkerer. I don't remember the exact date or time, but the memory of that computer is solidified in my mind.
My father walked through the door of our home in southwestern Pennsylvania carrying a box that looked massive to my six-year-old self. It contained the thing that sparked a passion that still hasn't burned out.
I watched him clean the desk before setting up the computer. Papers and odds and ends had collected there since our move the year before. I was antsy. I see that same feeling in my own children when something new and exciting comes home. I should apologize to my dad for how noisy, fidgety, and annoying I probably was.
I had never seen a computer before that day. My dad placed the long monitor on top of the rectangle that I would later learn contained the actual computer and turned it on. The screen lit up but was still black. Then text started streaming from bottom to top, like a reverse waterfall of information.
My mind filled with awe and wonder.
A few minutes later, my dad was giving us a tour of what this new device could do. Type words, draw images, and play games.
The possibilities became clear, or as clear as they could be to a six-year-old. I wanted to touch it. I wanted to make letters appear on the screen. I wanted to play the games.
That was the beginning of my technological trajectory.
The beige PC became normal after a while. I exhausted what I could do with it at my age and spent many days playing RollerCoaster Tycoon 2.
Then the internet arrived.
We got dial-up, plugged it in, and my mind exploded again. I could talk to people across the world, learn almost anything, and make stuff in a way that was different from MS Paint.
In third grade, I built my first website. It was crude and had Pikachu all over the background because I played a lot of Pokémon Blue on my Game Boy. Still, it was something I constructed with words. I was telling the computer what to display and where to put it.
Then my teacher pulled the website up on the classroom computer.
Seeing something I made on my computer appear on hers was new. Seeing my classmates react to it made the satisfaction even better. My exploration was no longer limited to the computer sitting in our house. Something I built could leave the house and reach other people.
As I got older, the wonder changed shape. I kept pushing against the boundaries of what I understood. In high school, I tested out of the basic computer class and was invited to the advanced class. That was where I learned programming, but more importantly, I learned how to solve problems with software.
Again, my mind expanded. What could I create with nothing but a computer and a set of special words?
Could it do my homework for the classes I hated?
Could I write a program that brought down the entire school network? Fortunately, I never deployed anything like that, though I did prove it would work on the small network I had set up in my room at home.
After high school, I went to college for computer science and dropped out during my second year. I eventually got a degree, but not in computers. The classes were stale and disconnected from the way I learned to work. Write code on paper with a pencil? No, thanks. That's not how I do this stuff.
I started to wonder whether I wanted to work in technology at all. I loved tinkering with computers, but if a career in technology felt like college, I was going to hate it.
Because of my experience in college, I changed majors. I thought I needed the right degree to compete in the technology world. After college, I took a job in the oil and gas industry. I knew a few people doing research for those companies, and the work paid well for my age. I tried to push computer technology aside. I was no longer pursuing technology and thought it needed to be a tool, not a passion.
That didn't last long. Technology absorbed my free time again. I kept learning and building because I couldn't stop tinkering.
Some time after I got married, I became a contractor at Google doing analyst work for the machine learning team. The work involved recommending items in Google's shopping tab. It was boring, and the work was manual.
I realized that much of what I did each day could be automated. So I built a Chrome extension to do as much of my job as possible.
It let me get more work done in less time. A human still needed to verify the results, but the extension automated most of the process. I shared it with a coworker, and he was impressed by how much more he could do in the same amount of time.
This was when I remembered my love for computer technology. Building something that solved my problem kicked me back into the passion. Seeing my coworker find value in the same tool took that passion to another level.
Eventually, my manager found out about it and asked me to share it with the full team. I stopped doing only analyst work and focused completely on the Chrome extension.
That was when I realized I should make technology my career. I had built something to solve a problem my team had, and I loved doing it. I was getting paid to do what I had been doing as a hobby: tinkering with computers.
But the wonder of that six-year-old boy had faded into the background. Computers had become normal again. My job was meaningful, and it never felt like just a job, but I was working full-time, paying bills, and supporting a family. Maybe that was all that remained, and if so, that was okay. Most people never find passion in the job that pays their bills.
Then large language models and generative AI arrived.
At first, I was unimpressed. Everything I tried to do with the early versions was something they weren't ready for. I wrote them off as a fancy way to ask a computer for information. Not useless, but not very impressive to me.
Then the models got better at following directions. They started using the same command-line tools I use every day on my computer, and they became capable of doing useful work for me.
The wonder of my six-year-old self came flooding back. My mind expanded with the world of potential again, just as it had when my dad turned on the beige PC decades ago.
If I can talk to the computer in English, it can use the same tools I do, and it can build things for me, then the possibilities are bounded only by software and hardware. I'm able to think more about the problems I want to solve instead of every detail of syntax and build errors.
The biggest hurdle now is whether I am willing to try an idea. Is the problem worth solving? Will it provide enough benefit to justify its existence over the long term? Every idea can be tried and discarded if it doesn't work, without months of effort feeling wasted. That used to limit my willingness to try the ideas that popped into my mind.
The effort required to solve problems with software has dropped lower than ever. If I'm honest, I was burned out on building new ideas because so much of what I built was never used by anyone other than me. I used to become emotionally attached to the software I created. Now I don't have to. Every idea can be thrown away with no hard feelings.
That is how I know this is a big deal. Not because the companies building these models say it is. Because the feeling is familiar.
I felt it in 1994 when my dad showed me what I could do on that beige computer. I felt it when the internet let me put a crude website in front of my third-grade class. I felt it when a Chrome extension turned a repetitive job into a tool I could build and improve.
And now I feel it. The technology has become a source of childlike wonder again.