My relation with my critical side is symbiotic as long as I am not tired ( maybe kind of like dealing with annoying people IRL :D ). If I am tired I can spiral to the state of being like I would be hurt animal - not allowing anyone near me for any reason or I will bite.
With this job I am never tired, maybe because my critical self washes me in endorphins everytime I think how bad I had it at my previous jobs.
My job is maintenance/updates of corporate linux packages and some minor oddball projects. I have everything set up so I can work only with linux shell, where pretty much everything is text based :) I also need to use english daily for talking with people from around the world - this is another positive aspect. I love english, it is whole separate culture for me to learn about.
I am supposedly not earning that much when comparing to others in this career but I don't spend much on anything. If I really want something - I will make it myself. My critical side also says that I don't belong in this career since I am an electrician and I should appreciate it as long as it lasts and I am earning much more than I ever was.
What kind of work do You do? From quick look at your profile you seem to be interested in linux/programming. I am kind of newish at this IT career thing but supposedly there are many programming jobs available, are these hard to find jobs?
I have very good imagination. I often try to use it to predict all possible situations that can occur related to problems I am trying to solve. If I don't miss some important detail - I am usually correct at preparing for situations thanks to this.
My internal monologue is constant and omnipresent, especially if I am alone. It is usually critical of everyone and everything. It can even make me laugh at horrible but grotesque situations, but it allows me to appreciate things and situations that many people consider purely bad because they can't see any depth.
I am 27, not sure if I am autistic but I can relate to a lot of people are saying in their posts/comments about that. I don't like labeling myself because too often, I see people trying to put me in the nearest stereotype known to them.
Things from your post I can relate to:
My subconscious can solve entire problems for me but I can't force it or can miss it easily. It is a subtle feeling to me. Btw. - everything is a problem or a project to me.
My memory is horrible. The only way for me to think and not forget what are my conclusions is to write down, reread, correct, reread, reorganize written text which is better than my memory. I do remember some events which made me learn something important.
Doing even 2 things at once is very frustrating to me.
I can figure out social interactions if I plan them. I am still learning and getting better at it but pain of social rejection is almost physical to me.
I have a great job now because I can do pretty much whatever I want as long as I can get it done, is text based, only mental, managers are very nice to me. My previous jobs were horrible experiences. Just mountains of misery, not only for me. The feeling of powerlessness made these even worse.
I think that's your whole post answered to.
Chatgpt sub is more expensive than just their api. I use their api with shell gpt, it costs me less than 1$ per month with my usage.
Learn linux of course.
Download data dump of stack overflow, wiki, etc. Set up software to search through it, for example "codesearch", maybe there is something better. This guarantees independence from bot infected search results.
That's a setup for a decade, maybe then local LLMs will be smoothed out and reliable enough to use daily.
This stuff absolutely doesn't need to be expensive. I was doing electronics for a long time now. I guess I am at professional level but I never got regular 9-5 job doing electronics, I was always doing odd jobs like repair, design, construction.
I only recently got modern tools for this. For years my books, parts, tools and methods were mostly from 70s/80s that I got from various public dumps. That was 10 years ago though, now these places are closed.
If you need to do something really fast and cheap - draw a pcb with sharpie and use ferric chloride to etch it. Modern oscilloscope is a luxury. Since I was working mainly with audio stuff I had a diy amplifier with a speaker connected to it that I used to listen to waveforms.
A lot of tools can made by hand too. There is a ton of old projects for old atmega microcontrollers. One of the best projects like this was sold as generic chinese made "multipurpose tester" which - last time I checked - was not properly designed when looking at the original. Original would this one - https://www.mikrocontroller.net/articles/AVR_Transistortester But everything necessary for this project is here - https://github.com/svn2github/transistortester/tree/master