I fully understand, Paul. In my youth, ego driven young eyes saw a coding superhero in the mirror. In contrast. all this AI stuff sometimes makes me feel superannuated.
Pardon me while I feed my pigeons. I remember starting a new project for a 6809 controller. I wrote a state machine in DeSmet C, which I used to read an opcode matrix, which could then step through code. A front end showed a model of memory.
I think I did that in a couple of weeks, which I'm sure I made up in the project by having a really cool, somewhat slow, debugger.