I started coding in the early 90s. Assembly first, then C, then the C++ years where you'd fight the compiler more than you'd write features. By 2007 I was deep into enterprise systems — building a document engine with a colleague. My part was the fun stuff: a plugin system, a parallel B+Tree block file system, Lua scripting integration. I even wrote a custom virtual memory manager to fix LuaJIT's 1GB RAM limit on 64-bit — patching memory pages at the OS level, Windows and Linux, portable. The kind of thing where you're staring at hex dumps at 2am wondering if you've gone too far. My colleague handled the C core. We shipped it. Enterprise clients used it for years. But here's the thing nobody tells you about decades of systems programming: your hands pay the price . Thousands of hours of typing. Millions of keystrokes. I started dreaming about a world where I could just say what I wanted and watch the code appear. The voice coding rabbit hole (spoiler: it sucked for 20 years) I tried everything.…