That being said, I may get to that stage. How-ever there is still a lot more growing pains to be had with LLM/AI before it reaches that point - if it ever does.

If I give it anything resembling anything that I'm not an expert on, it will make a mess of things.

Yes there is mad dash by Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, and China not to cede their position to each other - it actually isn't about who will buy or pay for the service its more of a Business Strategic position to obtain critical mass in a new market using their massive reserve of cash. The users right now are insignificant to their goal - they probably aren't even given a second thought.

I have my own personal reservation about it all.

A-10 Cuba! came out around 1996, and only now am I getting to know its internal engine. For example, it utilizes a signed Q15.16 fixed-point representation for its X and Z axes. For instance, a raw value of 98,304 (0x00018000) decodes to 1.5 units - where a unit is defined as 6607.92 feet - which translates to 9,911.88 feet in the game world. Then to top it off, it uses a different coordinate scaling convention for its up axis. For example the up-axis resolution is 1/10th of a foot so a raw value of 10,000 is actually 1,000 feet. Then there are other discrete exponent scaling factors which the game applies to maintain numerical precision and accuracy.

I had a great time learning all this well reverse engineering the game, and also come to learn even today how common it is for chips not to come with FPU unit, and how common it is that those chips actually perform fixed point arithmetic.

So there is a big hurdle to get over in the initial stages but you soon find out that a lot higher code structure/scaffold isn't wiped out by the compiler. For example, the generated assembly code very closely mirrors the C/C++ function boundaries. This enables you to infer the over-all original code structure/layout basically from the call chain, and then you can manually step through and figure out what the original programmer was trying to achieve - abet the order of execution does get messed up by the compiler but it isn't that bad.

In my project with A-10 Cuba, I was successful in reverse engineering its file format, the over-all module layout, engine and rendering engine during my three weeks break. I still have some time to work out the AI logic, and mission design but one builds on another. What do I mean one builds on another? Well when you first start you have no types, not structs. So the first days you think you're making absolutly no progress because you're trying to calculate pointer offsets and structs layouts in IDA. I highly recommend Google Gemini or Claude code to do this heavy lifting because you can get away with a lot by asking it (for this IDA Pseudocode, infer what the struct layout is and tell me what it is doing?).

The first stage of getting those first struct layout is painstaking, then you soon can branch off one strut, or struct pointer to another. This feeds back like a feed-back loop - because programmers are lazy. And you soon have a large part of the struct/code-flow layout figured out.

You then take the structs/code-flow, and pesudo code and then do a re-write in a modern C/C++ compiler until you have a working version.

"I tried the local Iranian market. I showed it to friends, family, and potential clients. Their response: "Nobody in Iran will pay $500/month for this. The Persian language quality isn't perfect. We'll use free ChatGPT instead.""

Which should of been free feed-back on the risk vs reward.

I've worked on Titling Systems, Game Development (C/C++), Integration Systems, and Backend database systems. All those niche data models/systems live rent free in my head. It is all absolutely worthless to my current employer or people around me because they're focused on solving their unique problems which at the end of the day just become another piece of worthless business procedure in my head. It is worthless because of the fact that business and people only care about solving their problem, once its solved they just move onto the next.

Question: How do people figure out how to deal with this world?

Answer: People choose to plug themselves into a world of their choosing.