In high school, I figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up pretty quickly—in the 9th grade, I ended up at a regional polytechnic olympiad held at the coolest tech university in Omsk. I only took 4th place, but my path was set right then and there.

Only my vision of this path was naive, as it turned out in practice. I thought I’d become some sort of Tony Stark who could build anything out of anything, as long as the desire was there. But in reality, it wasn’t so fun, and a design engineer in instrument-making spends way more time on boring paperwork that doesn’t really affect anything. Even when I eventually moved into IT, I kept running into the feeling that we are all just cogs in a machine.

And even when I started having an impact on the projects I was part of, I found myself at a crossroads: either you tone down your ambitions and keep doing hands-on engineering tasks, or you start discussing them while others actually do the work.

But now, with neural nets, everything has changed.

Huge corps, without which it’s supposedly impossible to build something truly big, actually aren’t meant for that—they exist for risk management. How many ideas have died in this deaf, closed-loop game of telephone between business analysts, architects, managers, and stakeholders?

How many pet project ideas have died, shattering against the reality that to make them happen, you had to set up the infrastructure, environments, CI/CD, and so on and so forth?

Now there’s much less of this “friction” between an idea and its execution—and we can finally step away from the factory machines and get back to our workshops. We can build things the way we see them, not the way it’s profitable for someone else.

Of course, everything comes with a price: the responsibility is no longer spread across all your colleagues; the success of a project isn’t guaranteed and depends entirely on your drive. But the most important thing is that the hammer forging these awesome things doesn’t actually belong to you. It might stop working at the most crucial moment, or suddenly start forging differently—maybe better, but differently, which is the key part.

But let’s not forget: Tony Stark built his first reactor sitting in a cave with terrorists.