Ten months ago I had no idea what I would be doing a year later.
From a distance it is very convenient to turn the past into a route.
This is where it all began.
This is where I understood something.
This decision led to the next one.
In reality I saw no route at all back then.
I was living in a watchman’s hut. There were two dogs nearby. I read the Bible a lot, sat at a laptop and tried to work out what to do next.
There was no grand career plan. No idea of “getting into AI”, of becoming an engineer, of growing into something within a few months.
I just had to live through the next day and keep doing something.
Waiting for nothing
Probably the most important thing left over from that time has nothing to do with any particular technology.
I got used to figuring out things I do not understand. To not waiting for the moment when I would be prepared enough.
Open the documentation.
Try it.
Break it.
Work out why it broke.
Redo it.
Sometimes ask an AI. Then check whether it lied. And carry on.
Now this looks like a completely ordinary way of working. Back then it was only taking shape.
There was no sense of being an engineer. There was a person with a laptop who found it interesting to understand how the next unknown thing was put together.
The Bible lay next to me
In that period faith took up far more room than career plans.
Not because I had found answers to everything. Rather the opposite.
When the usual supports run short, the questions become very simple.
What actually matters?
What can you lean on at all?
What do you do when you do not understand where you are going?
I am not sure that ten months on I answer them much better.
But I remember the point itself clearly.
The hut.
The dogs.
The laptop.
The Bible.
And the next day, which arrived regardless.
Then came the test task
One day Kirill dropped by the hut for tea. A friend.
He was the one who brought up ChatMe.
I did the test task. They took me on in support.
Looking back now, there is a strong temptation to call this “the start of a new career”.
But at the time it was simply a job. Tickets. Clients. Bots. Scenarios. Problems that had to be worked through.
And then a strange thing happened.
I started removing from that job the parts I did not want to do by hand. First one repeating task. Then another.
After that came analytics, LLMs, integrations, logs, agents and my own tools for investigations.
And at some point it turned out that what had changed was not only how I worked. The work itself had changed.
This story continues here: How I accidentally became an AI automation engineer.
Sometimes the beginning of a path does not look like a beginning. Sometimes it is simply a place from which nothing is visible yet.