
I love stories, and life has given me plenty to tell. It has long been my plan to put them down on paper. My path has taken me through 15 years of entrepreneurship, travelling, and finally, immigrating. I found myself again in a new place as an employed software engineer, and now, five years onwards, I am transitioning back to independence.

I was born in soviet Moscow and went to school in a new, unknown country that had yet to define itself. I belong to the single, non-indoctrinated generation of Russians around: we were taught that anything was possible and that our only limits were those we set for ourselves. This played some bad jokes on me: Once my childhood was over, the country decided to make another turn, this time back to authoritarianism, and together with its people, happily embraced the old and familiar soviet dogmas.

So, a year after graduating high school, I jumped on the website development bandwagon that has carried me for the last 20 years.

My experience was not purely virtual: my severe first \[ad]venture was an e-commerce website that sold shoes and accessories (my friend brought the idea, not a passion for shoes!). The next one was even more grounded: a chain of gadget repair stores. The third I would call 'Chinese adventures', as I was involved in trading activities for many small-scale entrepreneurs like me in China. These adventures, spanning from 2000 to 2014, were thrilling but ended abruptly as Russia took a turn I couldn't follow.

That time, my country decided to be, once again, the bad guy and no one asked me if I wanted to participate, so I quit.

The word 'quit' is nice and short! Applying it to reality was a grilling experience. It took me several attempts and struggles to acquire a new true home: Israel. Most of my current stories are related to this land and its people.

I'm practical, so I write about entrepreneurship, technology, business, and ideas in general. I have never been short of ideas, and I believe in the power of sharing them to make the ideas a part of reality, to let them sprout and witness the fruits.

To set the record straight, I am a Christian, so my viewpoint is not so common in Israel or the world of tech. This lens offers a distinctive angle to my experiences and reflections.


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Immigrant, Enterpreneur, Husband, Father and Son

Rodion Kuprin


Sleep deprivation caused by frequent Iranian strikes activated my default mode network, and I decided to support my job search with some ideas that might sound superficial — but need to be voiced to become real. So let's start with this one:

**Software is mostly solved.**

I'm echoing many voices in the industry here: something shifted around December 2025, and AI-assisted coding stopped feeling like a tool and started feeling like a talented colleague sitting next to you, doing stuff *with* you, not *for* you.

It all sounds trivial at this point, but it's hard to discern the voices of those for whom AI has *enabled* coding from those of us who have been coding for a living for many years. Both perspectives are valuable — but the miracles are different. If you just discovered you can build something with AI, that's wonderful. My miracle is different: I've been a professional if-else-typist for twenty years, and I don't need to get my hands dirty anymore.

I can talk with AI about architectural decisions, about the contract points between abstraction layers, about why we made certain choices in the past — but I don't write code myself anymore.

This sounds liberating for some of us and horrifying for others: there's no need not only to write, but also to *see* the code with your own eyes most of the time.

So, what are we to do now, if we're not doing what we were hired to do?

It appears we can start thinking again.

---

I'm not really fond of "writing code" — but I am quite fond of being an engineer: planning, projecting, and building a mechanism that comes to life like a Golem: lifeless matter being animated. (No Talmudic puns intended.)

This is my passion and my joy, the reason I've been staring at this screen since the age of twelve. And I think, as time went by, I was robbed of it.

SaaS and smartphones brought money into our corner — where nerds were enjoying themselves and having much fun in their caves! — and with money came the managers, new paradigms of efficiency, whole new professions that existed just to make us predictable. Shiny glass towers were erected specifically to lure us out into the light.

Not all of it was bad. Many of us learned to build for people, not just for ourselves. (Think about your banking app fifteen years ago: horrible then, so good now.) We learned to speak the language of users and the language of business.

But with the good came the ugly: business perceived software as a bottleneck. Each line of code had a price tag. We were surrounded by managers who handled our efficiency and gradually removed the fun from the work — at least, for me.

Now, don't misunderstand me — I am not proclaiming a "back to the caves" revolution. Not just yet. But as I remember myself a few years ago, it was a sad picture.

---

Now, with a significant portion of my brain free from micro-decision-making, typing, and testing small and medium features, I am naturally getting back to product building: instead of thinking small and focused, I am thinking broad and big!

This sounds like the opposite of what is expected of a cubicle (or open space) dweller: mind your own and deliver your part on time. Collaborate, but not too much. Smile, but do not laugh.

I remember how it was two-three years ago and before: yes, I can think product, I got much of my career being more 'product' than not, but when you have code in front of you, you develop tunnel vision, you deliberately ignore the 'big picture' to get your job done for this day. I remember clearly that I was implementing less-than-optimal product decisions without looking back.

And over the years, when I was deprived of product thinking by product managers and other nice people, I haven't been convinced that you can painfully decouple product as a concept and idea from product as a set of features, and from product as code.

Now, I don't have to pretend that you can.

What if my part is done in an hour and tested and integrated in another hour? What if I have time to look around? What if I know something about the product we're building that no one else knows — because I'm the one building it? What if I see something that a person who never works with code simply cannot see?

I think the answers to these questions are worth exploring.


AI-assisted coding shifted from tool to colleague. Now that the typing is done, engineers can finally start thinking again.

Product Thinking

Software Is Mostly Solved