Well what else are you interested in? There is a lot more to life than technology, maybe take a break and learn a new skill or get exposed to something new.

one thing that helped is taking a little break and find a new passion. i made some 3d prints and with raspberry pis built some fun stuff and played around and came back more energised. Having fun or building stuff and not going completely out of the loop will re ignite it for you

go fishing

Have you considered getting laid? Don't knock it til you try it.

I think our interests change as we age. My kids take up so much time I find myself spending less and less time paying attention to "tech."

Boris Cherny, the creator and Head of Claude Code at Anthropic who built Claude Code, has stated in recent interviews that he no longer codes. This is a massive step forward and a promotion of sorts for those who can code, who understand the intricacies and are best positioned to direct and manage LLMs and AI agents. Step into it. We're continually developing personally, it's ongoing and inevitable. This is developing professionally with a whole new playing field of possibilities. Start playing around and your passion will lead to a great, new fit for you.

Begin with defining and understanding your genuine desire, or what you'd like to desire.

If the desire is the tinkering of old, find yourself something with bad documentation and figure it out, or dive in to something outside your typical realm: infosec, encryption, video encoding/decoding, etc. If the joy is the tinkering, do the tinkering yourself.

If the desire is "be employed in tech", then explore the realm of "agentic engineering". Spec-driven development, prompt engineering, context management, etc. There are still open questions and questions that are currently "solved" with less than optimal solutions. Alternatively, there are many projects that are refusing AI contribution, so any of those companies are places where you'd be on a level field with your coworkers, though I suspect many of them will still use LLMs for research, prototyping, and rubber-ducking.

There's a large gulf between "build me a web browser" and the amount of work that would go in to prompting to get something that competes in compatibility and performance with the current leaders.

But, there's two ways to use the tools at hand. Using it to do your work for you is leading to disillusionment. You might find that using it only for research (as opposed to manually digging through 8 year old reddit posts and poorly written man pages) is a better fit for you.

I was just thinking about the historical precedent for this pattern. Imagine you're a farmer when internal combustion engines are first becoming popular. Your neighbor has one and he planted twice the acreage you have in the same amount of time. If your love is the farming itself, you've an opportunity to acquire and learn the use of a tractor. If your love is the horses, you'll need to weigh that love against the financial incentive of the tractor. You might figure out that you can keep a horse or two just in case the tractor's down, or just for your love of horses. However, refusing the tractor outright will likely lead to your farmer acquiring your land in some future.

Art is another example. I know my way around a digital editor. I've seen some impressive generated results. I don't make any money from my art, so the decision is perhaps easier. I derive joy and calm from the manual process of dragging graphite across paper, and massive joy from the smiles my gifts produce. I'd argue that any such gift created by a prompt would never generate such a smile, and I'd get none of the meditative calm from the creation process.

This is the same. There's a new tool that's all the craze. You can either go all in, stick to your guns, or keep your favorites around for fun. You just have to decide what's right for you, and nevermind about the neighbors, because if it's not for you no amount of their enjoyment will transfer to you.

Technology is not life. It might make your life easier or it might connect you to people or experiences that would be hard to achieve without it. But technology is not the end goal. You past interest have brought you here. That doesn't mean it was "wrong" or that you can't find the passion again. But it seems like you need a break and maybe a new passion for a while