A little background: Through my teens in the 90's I did a lot of the things you may expect. I was a script kiddie on mIRC, made a tank game in Unreal Engine, and did some Quake modding. From 2002-2004 I landed a job doing Java web dev, SQL, and overall database administration because my father's friend needed someone that could do that. I was ok at the job, but not great. Being young, my hobby that turned into a 9-5 made me want to stab my eyes out and I quit.
With that said, I can understand a lot of what's going on, but it doesn't "click" anymore. I spent 20 years as a career machinist, but I physically can't do that anymore. Here's the rub - my twin brother is a brittle diabetic and can't work (lots of other stuff going on as well), and our mother is getting old (father passed this year). The only reasonable way forward that I can see in order to be able to support my brother is trying to get back into development.
When I stopped, subversion was what we used. I'm trying to understand Git, but it's a giant conceptual leap. I guess, what I'd like to hear from you all is a way to jump back in as quickly as possible in such a way that it may be a career.
Thanks
I’m doing this now as I learn Unity and come back to C# after a couple decades away. It’s great for helping with syntax and reminding you of libraries, also with debugging steps as you mention. I haven’t had it full on hallucinate, but it has given me suggestions that fail to do the thing I specifically asked it for. I also went down a couple rabbit holes following its suggestions to later realize there was a much simpler answer that it didn’t tell me about. All in all, I’d still highly recommend it for my situation and OPs. If you’re able to follow the logic and point out the flaws, it’s a hell of a lot faster than googling or following tutorials.