I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed(jamesdrandall.com)

848 points by jamesrandall 151 days ago | 668 comments

JKCalhoun 151 days ago |

I'm 61 (retired when I was 57).

I too began with BASIC (but closer to 1980). Although I wrote and published games for the Macintosh for a number of years as I finished up college, my professional career (in the traditional sense) began when I was hired by Apple in 1995 and relocated to the Bay Area.

Yeah, what started out as a great just got worse and worse as time went on.

I suspect though that to a large degree this reflects both the growing complexity of the OS over that time as well as the importance of software in general as it became more critical to people's lives.

Already, even in 1984 when it was first introduced, the Mac had a rich graphics library you would not want to have to implement yourself. (Although famously of course a few apps like Photoshop nonetheless did just that—leaning on the Mac simply for a final call to CopyBits() to display pixels from Adobe's buffer to the screen.)

You kind of have to accept abstraction when networking, multiple cores, multiple processes become integral to the machine. I guess I always understood that and did not feel too put out by it. If anything a good framework was somewhat of a relief—someone else's problem, ha ha. (And truly a beautiful API is just that: a beautiful thing. I enjoy working well constructed frameworks.)

But the latter issue, the increasing dominance of software on our lives is what I think contributed more to poisoning the well. Letting the inmates run the asylum more or less describes the way engineering worked when I began at Apple in 1995. We loved it that way. (Say what you want about that kind of bottom-up culture of that era, but our "users" were generally nerds just like us—we knew, or thought we knew anyway, better than marketing what the customer wanted and we pursued it.)

Agile development, unit tests, code reviews… all these weird things began to creep in and get in the way of coding. Worse, they felt like busywork meant simply to give management a sense of control… or some metric for progress.

"What is our code coverage for unit test?" a manager might ask. "90%," comes the reply from engineering. "I want to see 95% coverage by next month," comes the marching orders. Whatever.

I confess I am happy to have now left that arena behind. I still code in my retirement but it's back to those cowboy-programmer days around this house.

Yee haw!

dzonga 150 days ago | |

you also have bozo managers like my recent one measuring metrics like PR time open, review count

while the team hasn't shipped anything useful in 6 months.

kamaal 150 days ago | | |

Its crazy how management has gone from productivity to a kind of policing, crowd control and abstract number management that has no sense.

One of things that's being discussed now is AI won't really help people ship products faster, because no one was serious about building them at the first place. In most large corps the managerial layers simply care about preserving their own jobs and comp.

Also similar things an be said about Product management too. Only a few months they would says developers are busy with other things, now that we can ship quite fast, whats your world changing idea? None

abustamam 150 days ago | | |

Honest question — why don't managers like this get fired? My team wants us to ship fast. If I don't ship for a month I'm probably gonna lose my job, and rightly so.

If a whole team is spinning its wheels at the behest of its manager I feel like the manager should get axed.

tom_m 150 days ago | | |

Hey, I'm now measuring PR open time ... Only because there's been open PRs for months. It is of course possible that broad directional metrics are useful.

hippo22 150 days ago | |

I don’t have anything to add other than to say this was beautifully written.

wsc981 150 days ago | |

At least AI seems very useful to quickly write unit tests for the stuff I work with these days, like Angular & C#.

P.S.: I loved Glider and Glypha, great games!

tom_m 150 days ago | |

Thanks for sharing! I definitely agree. I've seen web software go downhill somewhere after 2013. It's been sad and now we have far more buggy apps and security issues on the Internet than ever before.

I used to love the 90s because it was "for nerds." The space wasn't crowded and you could actually do good work and research. So much research went into things and I feel like that died somewhere. Or is dying. You get a few good things coming out here and there, but it's masked by this "I want to be a celebrity" stuff that's going on. It started with conferences and such and has now progressed to YouTube and live streaming. That's kinda sickening to me honestly. What we have is pull in directions from the loudest voices in the room despite the fact this pull could be directly into flames.

As people try to sift through the confusion and overcrowding they tend to grab on to anything they can for refuge. Ironically they are often unaware of the dangerous situation they put themselves in.

I think cowboy coding may see a definition change.

chasd00 150 days ago | | |

people twisting and manipulating llms to do all sorts of unintended things reminds me of the late 90s early 2000s when everyone was twisting and manipulating html, webservers, and browsers to do all sorts of unintended things. It kind of has that feel to me, where it's something new and no one knows where it's going but i seeing a lot of "hey check this out, i put this together last night and it's kind of cool" again.

port11 150 days ago | |

I’ve never been asked for coverage as a metric or target, at least not by managers. Most of the… drudge that you describe seems to come from fellow developers. These are self-inflicted wounds by the “journeyman idealists”, making us all perpetual beginners.

(That said, I do like unit tests and I think code reviews can be useful for sparing if you have a good vibe and trust in the team.)

JKCalhoun 150 days ago | | |

I have seen coworkers, who are otherwise very nice people, become rather nasty when given some authority over other's code in the form of code reviews. The code review turns into "this is how I would have written it, rewrite it."

What we did before code reviews: we would get together with our fellow engineers in front of a whiteboard and knock out the structure of the code one was tasked with. We'd argue whether caching is necessary or if the framework provides it for us. We'd talk about concurrency issues and whether to use semaphores or locks…

Once the plan looked good, an engineer was trusted enough to go off and implement it.

Unit tests are fine. Before unit tests we had coworkers (QA) that did full test suites for integration, functional testing. At the more "unit level", robust param checking (with assertions, logging) happened early within the functions that could fail. (Obvious example: checking for zero in a function that might use that value to divide. Its a kind of unit test in situ.)

Of course when management uses unit tests as some kind of replacement for actual integration and functional testing they become an end unto themselves (bonus: the company is also able to lay off QA).

bitwize 150 days ago | |

> But the latter issue, the increasing dominance of software on our lives is what I think contributed more to poisoning the well. Letting the inmates run the asylum more or less describes the way engineering worked when I began at Apple in 1995. We loved it that way. (Say what you want about that kind of bottom-up culture of that era, but our "users" were generally nerds just like us—we knew, or thought we knew anyway, better than marketing what the customer wanted and we pursued it.)

That is why y'all needed the God-Emperor of Marketing to come in and rescue you from bankruptcy and put you on track to becoming a trillion-dollar company.

senfiaj 150 days ago | |

I'm a millennial, but I share some feelings. I also think modern programming careers often feel like factory jobs where most of the time you must be compliant with some BS. You often find the true joy only in personal projects.

konart 150 days ago | | |

Modern programming careers _are_ factory jobs.

Until you have some sort of senior+ position you are literally just standing in front of a conveyor line.

sho_hn 151 days ago |

My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI.

My experience so far is that to a first approximation, the quality of the code/software generated with AI corresponds to the quality of the developer using the AI tool surprisingly well. An inexperienced, bad dev will still generate a sub-par result while a great dev can produce great results.

The choices involved in using these tools are also not as binary as they are often made out to be, especially since agents have taken off. You can very much still decide to dedicate part of your day to chiseling away at important code to make it just right and make sure your brain is engaged in the result and exploring and growing with the problem at hand, while feeding background queues of agents with other tasks.

I would in fact say the biggest challenge of the AI tool revolution in terms of what to adapt to is just good ol' personal time management.

alexgarden 151 days ago |

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different.

Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code are rediscovering the magic that got them involved as engineers in the first place" <-- paraphrased for brevity.

I vividly remember, staying up all night to hand-code assembler primitive rendering libraries, the first time I built a voxel rendering engine and thinking it was like magic what you could do on a 486... I remember the early days at Relic, working on Homeworld and thinking we were casting spells, not writing software. Honestly, that magic faded and died for me. I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned.

These days, I've never been more excited about engineering. The tedium of the background wiring is gone. I'm back to creating new, magical things - I'm up at 2 AM again, sitting at my desk in the dark, surrounded by the soft glow of monitors and casting spells again.

chasd00 151 days ago |

What the author describes is also the feeling when you shift from being a developer all day to being a team lead or manager. When you become a lead you have to let go and get comfortable with the idea that the code is not going to be how you would do it. You can look at code produced by your team and attempt to replace it all with your craftsmanship but you're just setting yourself up to fail. The right approach is use your wisdom to make the team better, not the code. I think a lot of that applies to using AI when coding.

I'm turning 50 in April and am pretty excited about AI coding assistants. They make a lot of personal projects I've wanted to do but never had the time feasible.

qalmakka 151 days ago |

I am much younger than the author, but I've been coding for most of my life and I find close to no joy in using AIs. For me coding has always been about the nitty-gritty quirkiness of computers, languages, solving issues and writing new cool things for the sake of it. It was always more about the journey than the end goal, and AI basically hollows out all of the interesting bits about coding. It feels like skipping straight to the end of a book, or somewhat like that.

I don't know if I am the only one, but developing with chatbots in my experience turns developing software into something that feels more akin to filling out forms or answering to emails. I grieve for the day we'll lose what was once a passion of mine, but unfortunately that's how the world has always worked. We can only accept that times change, and we should follow them instead of complaining about it.

weli 151 days ago |

> I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I’m fifty now, and the magic is different, and I’m learning to sit with that.

Don't take this the wrong way but this is more of an age thing rather than a technology advancement thing.

Kids growing up nowadays that are interested in computers grow up feeling the same magic. That magic is partly derived from not truly understanding the thing you are doing and creating a mental "map" by yourself. There is nothing intrinsic to computing nowadays that makes it less magic than fiddling around with config.sys, in 50 years there will be old programmers reminiscing of "Remember when all new models were coming out every few months and we could fiddle around with the vector dimensionality and chunking length to get the best of gpt-6.2 RAG? Those were the times".

aabajian 151 days ago |

It seems AI is putting senior developers into two camps. Both groups relate to the statement, "I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I’m fifty now, and the magic is different, and I’m learning to sit with that."

The difference is that the first camp is re-experiencing that feeling of wonder while the second camp is lamenting it. I thankfully fall in the first camp. AI is allowing me to build things I couldn't, not due to a lack of skills, but a lack of time. Do you want to spend all your time building the app user interface, or do you want to focus on that core ability that makes your program unique? Most of us want the latter, but the former takes up so much time.

WoodenChair 150 days ago |

Ironically this post comes across to me as written by an LLM. The em-dashes, the prepositions, the "not this, that" lines. As a college instructor, I can usually tell. I put it through GPTZero and it said it's 96% LLM written. GPTZero is not full-proof but I think it's likely right on this one and I find it very ironic.

bjacobel 150 days ago | |

> Upgrading your CPU wasn’t a spec sheet exercise — it was transformative.

raincole 150 days ago | |

It uses even more em dashes than typical ChatGPT generated articles. At this point I think it's parody.

nunez 150 days ago | |

Pangram says 87%, and they are the gold standard right now.

fabianholzer 150 days ago | |

I find this knee-jerk reaction, that everything that shows certain stylistic choices is put under the suspicion of "might be generated", to have become a tedious cliché.

Unless the author had live-streamed the writing process, how could we know? Humans have been exposed to LLM generated texts on nearly all channels for more than three years, so by now it would be a surprise if there had not been a reciprocal reaction. Writers imitate what they read, the tools we shaped might have started to shape us.

stagg 150 days ago | |

I feel like if you converse with an LLM all day, you end up writing like one.

shminge 150 days ago | |

fwiw, it's 'foolproof' not 'full-proof'

grodriguez100 150 days ago | | |

That’s to make it clear it was written by a human and not by an AI :)

wdporter 150 days ago | | |

I think he might mean it does not fully prove anything. Is the dash an awkward attempt at a pun?

Eliezer 150 days ago | |

Came here to say the same.

mirrorlake 150 days ago | |

I feel like I'm being rickrolled over and over again by infomercial-grade slop.

gustavopezzi 151 days ago |

Thank you for writing this. My feelings are very similar to the ones described by the author and the timeline almost matches. The thrill of tecnology for me started to fast decay since the early 2010s and now I see it as a no-return stage. I still have fun with my retro hardware & software but I am no longer an active practitioner and I have pivoted my attention and my efforts somewhere else. Unfortunately, I no longer feel excited for the future decades of tech and I am distancing myself from it.

sho_hn 151 days ago | |

I think this is something else, though. Even before AI really hit sweng, there were early signs of a collective tech depression a la "The best idea we can come up with is strapping screens to people's heads?", the "Are we the bad guys?" convo around social media, the crypto brain drain, etc. The queue of Next Big Things has increasingly felt more forced and controversial to many, and being in tech last lost much of its lustre to them.

I think it's healthy for everyone to evaluate whether one's personal reaction to AI is colored by this trend, or whether it's really being evaluated independently. Because while I share many of the negative feelings listed earlier, to me AI does still feel different; it has a lot more real utility.

gustavopezzi 150 days ago | | |

If I look back, it was not even AI, since I don't use any AI model (almost at all). So, I don't think AI was really the main divisor for me. I have a feeling it was the "you don't own anything and everything is now a cloud/subscription" that was the main disappointment, which happened years before LLMs or AI-assisted programming.

tndibona 151 days ago | |

What else do you do to make rent ? I feel the same way as you and I have no idea what else pays well for quality craftsmanship. I am staring at the abyss of hyper intelligent people with posh resumes and now wondering what to do.

probably_wrong 151 days ago | | |

According to his profile, he teaches CS and Math.

abraxas 151 days ago | |

What do you do for living now (if anything)?

gustavopezzi 150 days ago | | |

I stopped working as a programmer and I'm teaching CS+math and homeschooling my kid.

abraxas 151 days ago |

I'm the exact age as the author and this post could have been written by me (if I could write). It echoes my story and sentiment exactly right down to cutting my literal baby teeth on a rubber key ZX Spectrum.

The anxiety I have that the author might not be explicitly stating is that as we look for places we add genuine value in the crevices of frontier models' shortcomings those crevices are getting more narrow by the day and a bit harder to find.

Just last night I worked with Claude and at the end of the evening I had it explain to me what we actually did. It was a "Her" (as in the movie) moment for me where the AI was now handholding me and not the other way around.

FeteCommuniste 151 days ago | |

> The anxiety I have that the author might not be explicitly stating is that as we look for places we add genuine value in the crevices of frontier models' shortcomings those crevices are getting more narrow by the day and a bit harder to find.

That's exactly it. And then people say "pivot to planning / overall logic / high-level design," but how long do we have before upper management decides that AI is good enough at that stuff, too, and shows us all the door?

If they believe they can get a product that's 95% of what an experienced engineer would give them for 5% of the cost, why bother keeping the engineer around?

nimonian 151 days ago | |

> this post could have been written by me (if I could write)

This post was written by AI

abraxas 151 days ago | | |

English is my second language so I'm not well tuned to picking up on the phrases that expose writing as AI generated. Even so it doesn't really change the sentiment being conveyed nor the fact that it's better writing than I could muster.

GMoromisato 151 days ago |

I'm lucky because I work as an independent consultant. I get paid to deliver solutions, but I get to choose how to create those solutions. I write whatever code I want however I want. As long as it solves the problem, no one cares.

I started programming in 1980, and I having just as much fun now as I did then. I literally cannot wait to sit down at my IDE and start writing.

But that was not always true. When I worked for a larger company, even some startups, it was not always fun. There's something about having full control over my environment that makes the work feel like play.

If you feel like programming isn't fun anymore, maybe switching to a consulting gig will help. It will give you the independence and control that you might be craving.

fourside 151 days ago | |

I have a hard time telling whether agentic coding tools will take a big bite out of the demand for software consultants. If the market is worried about SaaS because people think companies will use AI to code tools internally vs buying them, I would think the same would apply to consultants.

I’ve seen the code current tools produce if you’re not careful, or if you’re in a domain where training data is scarce. I could see a world where a couple of years from now companies need to bring outside people to fix vibe coded software that managed to gain traction. Hard to tell.

GMoromisato 151 days ago | | |

It's a good question. I think short-term (5 years) the easy jobs will go away. No one is going to write a restaurant web site by hand. Maybe the design will still be human-made, but all the code will be templated AI. Imagine every WordPress template customized by AI. That's a whole bunch of jobs that won't exist.

Right now I'm creating clinical trial visualizations for biotech firms. There's some degree of complexity because I have to understand the data schema, the specifics of the clinical trial, and the goals of the scientists. But I firmly believe that AI will be able to handle most of that within 5 years (it may be slower in biotech because of the regulatory requirements).

But I also firmly believe that there is more demand for (good) software today than there are programmers to satisfy it. If programmers become 10x more efficient with AI, that might mean that there will be 10x more programs that need writing.

andyjohnson0 151 days ago |

I'm a developer, mid/late fifties. My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20, so I guess I started writing code at about the same time as the OP even if I'm a few years older.

Yes, I mourn the end of my craft and all that that. But also:

This isn't the end of hand-written code. A few will still get paid to do it in niche domains. Some will do it as a hobby or craft activity - like oil painting or furniture making. The tooling will move on and become more specialised and expensive. Like owning Japanese woodworking tools.

But software construction as a human-based economic activity is clearly about to slam hard into a singularity, and many of us who rely on our hard-won skills to pay the bills and survive are going to find ourselves unemployed and unemployable. A few early adopters will get to stay on and sip their artesanal coffee and "build beautiful things" while their agent herds toil. But most of us won't. Software has always mostly been just CRUD apps, and that is going to need a whole lot less people going forward. People like me, perhaps, or you.

Some, who have sufficient financial and chronological runway, will go off and do other things. Many won't have that opportunity. I have personal experience of late-career unemployment - although I'm currently working - and its not pretty. A lot of lives are going to to be irreparably disrupted by this. Personally, I'd hoped that I could make it through to some stable kind of retirement, but I just don't see it anymore.

luquimarti 150 days ago | |

Man your first computer was the first compute Linus Torvalds had.

serf 151 days ago |

6 or 7 , 38 now -- and having a blast.

it isn't all funeral marches and group crying sessions.

And don't let the blog post fool you , it is a rant about AI -- otherwise we would have heard complaints about the last 200 paradigm shifts in the industry over the past thirty years.

Sure, we got our share of dilbert-style agile/waterfall/tdd jokes shoved in our face, but no one wrote a blog post about how their identity was usurped by the waterfall model .

>And different in a way that challenges the identity I built around it and doesn’t satisfy in the way it did.

Everyone should do their own thing, but might I suggest that it is dangerous for anyone in this world to use a single pillar as their foundation for all identity and plinth of their character.

jrmg 151 days ago | |

but no one wrote a blog post about how their identity was usurped by the waterfall model

I don’t know about that.

Waterfall mostly died before the rise of blogs, of course, but around the dawn of Agile I remember lots of posts about how nothing was properly designed any more, nothing was ever finished, and you never knew what the specification was.

They used to be real engineers, but now it was just all chaos! They couldn’t design anything any more!

rdiddly 151 days ago | |

Thanks for reminding me of the word plinth. I agree with the author that the job is less fun now, less interesting. I'm doing and accomplishing more, and it matters less. And unfortunately, having other ways of defining your identity doesn't really help, for me. What it does is make those other aspects of myself relatively more attractive as careers, in comparison to this one. Although then again, I suppose it's helping in the way you intend: I could leave (and I might), I could adapt. So I'm feeling none of the fear or anxiety about AI. Just something that I think is roughly boredom.

zahlman 151 days ago | |

> Sure, we got our share of dilbert-style agile/waterfall/tdd jokes shoved in our face, but no one wrote a blog post about how their identity was usurped by the waterfall model .

That's a difference in form, but not really a difference in content.

dogleash 151 days ago | |

> otherwise we would have heard complaints about the last 200 paradigm shifts in the industry over the past thirty years.

We have though. And they all received some version of "piss off, geezer."

Have you not noticed how the hype cycles and counter-hype haters buried most of the meaningful considered conversations about new technologies and methodologies across your career?

mosburger 151 days ago |

Oh my god. This is me. If I were any better at writing, I could have written this, the author is even the same age as me (well, a year younger) and followed a similar trajectory. And a lot of what I've been feeling lately feels similar to burnout (in fact I've been calling it that), but it really isn't burnout. It's... this, whatever this is... a "fallow period" is a good term.

And I feel like an old man grumbling about things changing, but... it's not the same. I started programming in BASIC on my Tandy 1000 and went to college and learned how to build ISA cards with handwritten oscilloscope software in the Computer Engineering lab. My first job was writing firmware. I've climbed so far up the abstraction chain over a thirty year career and I guess I don't feel the same energy from writing software that first got me into this, and it's getting harder to force myself to press on.

godshatter 151 days ago |

I'm 60, started with a Tandy Model I in junior high, learned 6809 assembly for my Color Computer, loved the fact we could put certain values in particular memory positions and change the video mode and put pixels to the screen. It's been decades of losing that level of control, but for me coding is the fun part. I've never lost that spark of enjoyment and really obsession I felt early on. I enjoy the supposedly boring job of writing SQL and C with embedded SQL and working with business concepts to produce solutions. Coding is the fun part for me, even now.

I got moved up the chain to management and later worked to get myself moved back down to a dev role because I missed it and because I was running into the Peter Principle. I use AI to learn new concepts, but mostly as a search engine. I love the tech behind it, but I don't want it coding for me any more than I want it playing my video games for me. I was hoping AI would show up as robots doing my laundry, not doing the thing I most enjoy.

gilbetron 150 days ago | |

TRS-80 CoCo! First computer I owned (started with a borrowed Commodore Pet). I appreciate the simplicity of flicking the switch and writing code in basic. One of my favorite gaming memories is this beauty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQKQHKdWTRs

jbreckmckye 151 days ago |

I don't disagree that technology is less fun in an AI era. The question is, what other careers are out there for someone who wants to make things?

About a decade ago, I went through a career crisis where I couldn't decide what job to do - whether technology was really the best choice for my particular temperament and skills.

Law? Too cutthroat. Civil service? Very bureaucratic. Academia? Bad pay. Journalism? An industry in decline.

It is a shame, what is happening. But I still think, even with AI hollowing out the fun parts, tech remains the best job for a smart, motivated person who's willing to learn new things.

Joel_Mckay 151 days ago | |

People get bored if they don't find real meaning in their work.

https://medium.com/ideas-into-action/ikigai-the-perfect-care...

Fact is, the tech sector is filled with folks that find zero joy in what they do, chose a career for financial reasons, and end up being miserable to everyone including themselves.

The ex-service people would call these folks entitled Shitbirds, as no matter the situation some will complain about everything. Note, everyone still does well in most large corporate settings, but some are exhausting to be around on a project. =3

Der_Einzige 151 days ago | | |

The reason we don’t have the right to be lazy is because of the people who find “meaning” in toil. I do not want to work and AI is the most anti work technology in human history.

Bertrand Russel literally wrote a book called “in defense of idleness” because he knew that heavy hitters like him had to defend work abolitionism. The “work is good” crowd is why we can’t have nice things. You guys are time thief’s and ontologically evil. May all work supporters reincarnate as either durian fruits or cockroaches.

chasd00 151 days ago | |

> who's willing to learn new things.

I tell my boys, get good at learning and you don't have to get good at anything else. I think that still holds now as much as ever.

r_lee 150 days ago | | |

how does that help pay the rent? or how would that get you past resume screening?

layer8 151 days ago | |

> Academia? Bad pay.

I think that bad pay is preferable to no fun. Of course, academia isn’t exactly a bed of roses either.

zozbot234 151 days ago |

There's nothing "hollowed out" about directing an AI effectively, the feedback is as quick and tight as it always was. The trick is that you don't just "vibe code" and let the AI one-shot the whole thing: you should propose the change first and ask the AI about a good, detailed plan for implementing it. Then you review what the robot has proposed (which is trivial compared to revising code!) make sensible changes, ask for feedback again, and repeat. By the time the AI bot has to write actual code, it's not running on vibes anymore: it's been told exactly what to do and how to assess the result. You spend more time upfront, but a lot less on fixing the AI's mistakes.

skydhash 151 days ago | |

> you should propose the change first and ask the AI about a good, detailed plan for implementing

Why ask though?

If I’m familiar with a project, more often than not, I usually have a very good idea of the code I have to write within minutes of reading the ticket. Most of the time taken is finding the impact of the change, especially with dependencies that are present in the business domain, but are not reflected in the code.

I don’t need to ask what to code. I can deduce it as easily as doing 2+2. What I’m seeking is a reason not to write it the way I envisioned it. And if those reasons are technical, it’s not often a matter of code.

zozbot234 151 days ago | | |

Because that's how you ensure that the AI has the right idea about what to do. If the proposed plan has problems, you work with the AI to fix them before setting it to work. AI is not as smart as you, so it needs to be told how to go about doing things.

chasd00 151 days ago | | |

> I don’t need to ask what to code. I can deduce it as easily as doing 2+2.

in those cases you wouldn't use an agent. It's not an xor thing, you use the tool where it works and not where it doesn't.

Kiro 151 days ago | | |

I admire your confidence. Must feel good to know you've perfected the craft.

benlivengood 151 days ago |

The contrast between this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46923543 (Software engineering is back) is kind of stark. I am using frontier models to get fun technical projects done that I simply didn't have time for since my late teens. It is still possible to understand an architecture down to the hardware if you want to, but it can happen a lot faster. The specifications are queryable now. Obscure bugs that at least one person has seen in the past are seconds away instead of minutes or hours of searching. Even new bugs have extra eyes on them. I haven't written a new operating system yet but it's now a tractable problem. So is using Lean or Julia or some similar system to formally specify it. So far I've been digging into modern multithreaded cache performance which is just as fascinating as directly programming VGA and sound was in the early PC days. Linux From Scratch is still up to date. You can get FPGAs that fit in your USB port [0]. Technical depth and low-level understanding is wherever you want to look for it.

[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/fomu

post-it 151 days ago | |

> Obscure bugs that at least one person has seen in the past are seconds away instead of minutes or hours of searching.

This is a huge one for me. Claude is significantly better at Googling than I am.

waffletower 151 days ago |

Not going to pull age or title rank here -- but I suggest if your use of AI feels empty, take advantage of its speed and plasticity and iterate upon its output more, shape the code results. Use it as a sculptor might too -- begin with its output and make the code your own. I particularly like this latter approach when I am tasked with use of a language I view as inferior and/or awkward. While this might read as idealistic, and I agree that there are situations where this interaction is infeasible or inappropriate, you should also be encountering problems where AI decidedly falls on its face and you need to intervene.

pixl97 151 days ago |

A blacksmith was a person that picked up chunks of carbon and heated them to they were glowing red and beat the iron to submission with a hammer in their hands.

Today iron is produced by machines in factories by the mega-tonne.

We just happened to live in the age where code when from being beaten by hand to a mass produced product.

And so the change of technology goes.

cenamus 151 days ago | |

And the blacksmiths losing their jobs are not allowed to feel bad about it?

rootusrootus 151 days ago | | |

Especially anyone in their 40s or 50s who is close enough to retirement that a career shift is unappealing but far enough from retirement that a layoff now would meaningfully change that timeline or QOL. I don't blame people for feeling uneasy.

I'm probably 7 or 8 years from an easy retirement myself, so I can appreciate how that feels. Nobody really wants to feel disruption at this age, especially when they're the breadwinner for a family.

52-6F-62 151 days ago | | |

No. By this logic, if they wanted to stay with the times they should have sought capital investment for their own industrial forges, joined their local lodges, climbed the ranks, lobbied their governments for loose safety regulations, and plied their workers with propaganda about how "we're in a recession and have to tighten our belts".

Think of the wonderful world we could have if everyone just got their shit together and became paper trillionaire technocrats.

pixl97 151 days ago | | |

You either become a foreman operating the machines or a Luddite burning them.

lowbloodsugar 151 days ago | | |

Some of them feel bad about it and some of them refined metallurgy to build Saturn V rockets and go to space. We are very much living in the new space race. The discussion here is split 50/50 between the “Thank you! I feel the same way” folks and the “I am having the time of my life!” folks.

newsoftheday 151 days ago | |

Blacksmiths were replaced by factories which produced deterministic products with 100% predictability.

AI can't produce code yet with 100% predictability. If that day ever arrives, the blacksmith analogy will be apt.

pixl97 151 days ago | | |

>with 100% predictability.

Not sure what world you're from, but lots of products get sent back to the manufacture because they break.

sejje 151 days ago |

I think one of the big distinctions between people who like building with AI and those who don't, is that the people who are pro-AI are building their own ideas, of which they have many.

The people who are anti-AI are largely building other people's ideas, for work. And they have no desire to ramp up velocity, and it's not helpful to them anyway because of bureaucratic processes that are the real bottleneck to what they're building.

Not everyone falls into these silos, of course.

alexpotato 151 days ago |

At my first full time job in the early 2000s I was tasked with building a webscraper. We worked for law firms representing Fortune 500 companies and they wanted to know who was running "pump and dump" stock schemes on stocks using Yahoo Finance message boards.

At the time, I didn't know the LWP::Simple module existed in Perl so I ended up writing my own socket based HTTP library to pull down the posts, store them in a database etc. I loved that project as it taught me a lot about HTTP, networking, HTML, parsing and regexes.

Nowadays, I use playwright to scrape websites for thing I care about (e.g. rental prices at the Jersey Shore etc). I would never think to re-do my old HTTP library today while still loving the speed of modern automation tools.

Now, I too have felt the "but I loved coding!" sense of loss. I temper that with the above story that we will probably love what comes next too (eventually).

randusername 151 days ago |

A lot of that magic still remains in embedded.

If vendors can't be bothered to use a C compiler from the last decade, I don't think they'll be adopting AI anytime soon.

At my work, as of 2026, we only now have a faction riled up about evangelizing clean code, OOP, and C++ design patterns. I hope the same delay keeps for all the rest of the "abstraction tower".

jnwatson 151 days ago | |

It is happening in embedded as well. I noticed just the upgrade from Gemini 2.5 to 3.0 Pro went from "I can get the assembly syntax mostly right but I don't understand register lifetimes" to "I can generate perfect assembly by hand".

I just saw a Reddit post yesterday about somebody that successfully one-shot in Gemini 2.5 the bare metal boot code for a particular board with the only input being the board's documentation.

abraxas 151 days ago | |

The issue is that AI will be creating software at whatever abstraction layer it is asked to produce. Right down to ASM maybe even machine code if someone actually wanted or needed that. Perhaps not the AI of today but given a few years I'll be quite surprised if it still can't.

skydhash 151 days ago | | |

If we can take a computer as powerful as today’s laptops and make it crawl because of the amount of inefficiencies in software like Teams, I’m not holding breath for embedded. If you apply the same kind of engineering principle as Anthropic, you’ll be laughed out of the room.

JetSetIlly 151 days ago |

I'm the exact same demographic as the author, just turned 50, writing code since childhood in BASIC. I'm dealing with the AI in programming issue by ignoring it.

I still enjoy the physical act of programming so I'm unsure why I should do anything that changes that. To me it's akin to asking a painter to become a photographer. Both are artists but the craft is different.

Even if the AI thing is here to stay, I think there will be room for people who program by hand for the same reason there's still room for people who paint, despite the invention of the camera.

But then, I'm somebody who doesn't even use an IDE. If I find an IDE obtrusive then I'm certain I'll find an AI agent even more so.

renegat0x0 151 days ago |

Programming is not art for me. I do not find it useful to gold plate solutions. I prefer getting the job done, sometimes by any means necessary for "the vehicle" to continue running.

AI often generates parts of code for my hobby projects, which allow me speed running with my implementation. It often generates errors, but I am also skilled, so I fix error in the code.

I use AI as boiler plate code generator, or documentation assist, for languages I do not use daily. These solutions I rarely use 1:1, but if I had to go through readme's and readthedocs, it would take me a lot longer.

Would there be more elegant solutions? often - yes. Does it really matter? For me - not.

tonymet 151 days ago | |

Perhaps detractors just gave up and didn't bother improving, but I'm able to prompt the AI to write excellent code. And it's very easy to correct when it's gone awry . This idea that all AI code is bad is just the ego talking.

bastardoperator 151 days ago | |

I'm yet to see perfect code from a human or ai. Most of the people I work with that want everything to be in a perfect state typically get way less done. To your point, sometimes we are just mechanics and that's okay.

pixelsort 151 days ago |

I was 7 in 1987, learned LOGO and C64 BASIC that year, and I relate to this article as well.

It feels as though a window is closing upon the feeling that software can be a powerful voice for the true needs of humanity. Those of us who can sense the deepest problems and implications well in advance are already rare. We are no more immune to the atrophy of forgetting than anyone.

But there is a third option beyond embrace or self-extinguish. The author even uses the word, implying that consumers wanted computers to be nothing more than an appliance.

The third option is to follow in the steps of fiction, the Butlerians of Dune, to transform general computation into bounded execution. We can go back to the metal and create a new kind of computer; one that does have a kind of permanence.

From that foundation, we can build a new kind of software, one that forces users to treat the machine as appliance.

It has never been done. Maybe it won't even work. But, I need to know. It feels meaningful and it has me writing my first compiler after 39 years of software development. It feels like fighting back.

tavavex 151 days ago | |

This proposal feels really vague to me, I don't really understand what this actually does. Can you explain more? What exactly is a computer with permanence? What is software that forces a user to treat the computer it runs on "as an appliance"? In what ways is this different from any general-purpose computer, and what's the reason why a user would pick this over something standard?

pixelsort 151 days ago | | |

Re: Permanence

I mean "permanence" in the same vague senses that I think the OP was hinting upon. A belief that regardless of change, the primitives remain. This is about having total confidence that abstractions haven't removed you the light-cone of comprehension.

Re: Appliance

I believe turing-completeness is over-powered, and the reason that AGI/ASI is a threat at all. My hypothesis is that we can build a machine that delivers most of the same experiences as existing software can. By constraint, some tasks would impossible and others just too hard to scale. By analogy, even a Swiss-army knife is like an appliance in that it only has a limited number of potential uses.

Re: Users

The machine I'm proposing is basically just eBPF for rich applications. It will have relevance for medical, aviation, and AI research. I don't suppose that end-users won't be looking for it until the bad times really start ramping up. But, I suppose we'll need to port Doom over to it before we can know for sure.

chasd00 151 days ago | |

> We can go back to the metal and create a new kind of computer; one that does have a kind of permanence.

it's kind of strange to think about but i guess now there's a new incentive to do something truly new and innovative. The llms won't be able to do it for you.

pixelsort 151 days ago | | |

My goal isn't to make LLM-assistance impossible; it will still be possible. In fact, GPT2-level inference is one of launch demos I have planned if I can finish this cursed self-hosting run.

My goal is to make training (especially self-training) impossible; while making inference deterministic by design and highly interpretable.

The idea is to build a sanctuary substrate where humans are the only beneficiaries of all possible technical advancements.

runjake 151 days ago |

I am a little older than OP. I don't think I've ever had that feeling about a programming project for work that came from someone else.

Generally, I get that feeling from work projects that I've self-initiated to solve a problem. Fortunately, I get the chance to do this a lot. With the advent of agentic coding, I am able to solve problems at a much higher rate.

Quite often, I'll still "raw dog" a solution without AI (except for doc lookups) for fun, kind of as a way to prove to myself I can still do it when the power's out.

danesparza 151 days ago |

I humbly submit this interview with Grady Booch (if you know, you know) talking about the "3rd golden age of software engineering - thanks to AI": https://youtu.be/OfMAtaocvJw

I feel like the conversation does a good job of couching the situation we find ourselves in.

phendrenad2 151 days ago |

As someone who has always enjoyed designing things, but was never really into PUZZLES, I always felt like an outsider in the programming domain. People around me really enjoyed the "fun" of programming, whereas I was more interested in the Engineering of the thing - balancing tradeoffs until within acceptable margins and then actually calling it "DONE". People around me rarely called things "done", they rewrote it and rewrote it so that it kept satisfying their need for puzzle-solving (today, it's Ruby, tomorrow, it's rewritten in Scala, and the day after that, it's Golang or Zig!)

I feel that LLMs have finally put the ball in MY court. I feel sorry for the others, but you can always find puzzles in the toy section of the bookstore.

dzonga 150 days ago | |

well said.

also coz of llms no more puzzle questions in interviews for those that have to go through them.

for some of us - we drink, eat, sleep - something called shipping - v1 might be shitty but it has to get out - no puzzles

duskdozer 150 days ago | | |

I haven't interviewed since LLMs - what are they like now?

keithnz 150 days ago |

I'm 54 and started programming when I was 7 also. While I've enjoyed coding throughout my career, I'm loving this new phase of software dev, a lot of the hassle has now been removed and now you can concentrate on ACTUALLY building things without so many side tracks and hiccups from technical details. I guess I'm not as attached to coding as I thought I was, I actually really enjoy building software and now that has become a lot easier and I feel experienced devs are really well suited to working with AI to get it to build the right thing and to consider robustness, performance, approach/structure, architecture etc. I'm really enjoying myself at the moment!

LatencyKills 150 days ago | |

I'm a year old than you. Recently, my father-in-law (an engineer in the '50s) was telling me about the transition from analog to digital electronics and how it changed his entire world.

I feel very fortunate that I was able to start out writing machine code and can now watch a machine write code on its own. I'm not even remotely claiming SOTA models can do what we do, but they are closer than ever before.

It's time to accept that the world has changed again.

strangattractor 151 days ago |

Having been in this game about 10 years longer I can understand how he feels. I distinctly remember when I realized that C compilers for the ARM produced better assembly than I could code by hand. Bitter sweet but the code being written became larger and more complex because of it.

Modern coding has become more complex than I would have ever thought possible. The number of technologies an individual would have to master to actually be a expert "full stack" coder is ludicrous. It is virtually impossible for an individual to prototype a complex Web based app by themselves. I think AI will lower that barrier.

In return we will get a lot more software - probably of dubious quality in many cases - as people with "ideas" but little knowledge start making apps. Not a totally bad thing but no utopia either. I also think it will likely reduce the amount of open source software. Content producers are already hoarding info to prevent AI bots from scraping it. I see no reason to believe this will not extend to code as more programmers find themselves in a situation more akin to musicians than engineers.

davebranton 151 days ago |

The deep, profound, cruel irony of this post is that it was written by AI.

Maybe if you work in the world of web and apps, AI will come for you. If you don't , and you work in industrial automation and safety, the I believe it will not.

windows_hater_7 150 days ago | |

I was thinking the same thing, but I thought I was being too cynical given it was a post lamenting about all the cognitive abstractions we have created.

hamdouni 151 days ago |

Total resonance with this part :

"They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of."

qsi 151 days ago |

Well-written and it expresses a mood, a feeling, a sense of both loss and awe. I was there too in the 8-bit era, fully understanding every byte of RAM and ROM.

The sense of nostalgia that can turn too easily into a lament is powerful and real. But for me this all came well before AI had become all consuming... It's the just the latest manifestation of the process. I knew I didn't really understand computers anymore, not in the way I used to. I still love coding and building but it's no longer central to my job or lif3. It's useful, I enjoy it but at the same time I also marvel at the future that I find myself living in. I've done things with AI that I wouldn't have dared to start for lack of time. It's amazing and transformative and I love that too.

But I will always miss the Olden Days. I think more than anything it's the nostalgia for the 8-bit era that made me enjoy Stranger Things so much. :)

raw_anon_1111 151 days ago |

I turn 52 this year. I also started at 10 years old programming in a combination of AppleSoft BASIC and assembly language and typing machine code out of books so I could use Double Hires graphics since it wasn’t supported by BASIc and doing my own assembly language programming.

I stuck with C and C++ as my bread and butter from 1996-2011 with other languages in between.

I don’t miss “coding” because of AI. My vision has been larger than what I could do myself without delegating for over a decade - before LLMs.

“coding” and/or later coordinating with people (dotted line) reporting to me has been a necessary evil until a year or two ago to see my vision go to implementation.

I absolutely love this new world. For loops and while loops and if statements don’t excite me in my 50s. Seeing my vision come to life faster than I ever could before and having it well archited does.

I love talking to “the business” and solving XYProblems and getting to a solution 3x faster

dsiegel2275 151 days ago |

Wow this hits home - I just turned 51 and I also started coding at age 7, writing BASIC on a TRS-80 Model III.

I still have a very distinct memory when my father told me he was buying us our first home computer. I remember him telling me that you could use the computer to make games. I was so excited by the idea and amazing by this technology (that I hadn't yet even remotely understood). I remember saying "Oh, you just tell it to make a game? And it makes a game?" He explained to me then what programming was.

When we got the TRS-80, he and I worked together to build a game. We came up with an idea for a text adventure game called "Manhole Mania" - you were a city works employee exploring the sewers after reports of strange noises. We never finished much of it - maybe just the first few "rooms".

Maybe this weekend I will tell Codex to make me a game.

ktrnka 151 days ago |

I'm a few years behind you. I got started on my uncle's handed down vic 20 in the late 80s.

The culture change in tech has been the toughest part for me. I miss the combination of curiosity, optimism, creativity, and even the chaos that came with it. Nowadays it's much harder to find organizations like that.

2close4comfort 150 days ago |

It is an interesting time to be at the peak of accumulated knowledge of a 50 year career and then see a tool that has the ability to create the code to preform a task I need. But that creation doesn’t feel the same and does take interaction from outside usually to make that code useable. I think that time for required interaction will be short lived and as code bases are slowly supplanted with generated code things will be more homogenized. I pray that will lead the people being allowed to solve more complex issue and I can’t wait to see the advancements to come. I just hope we can look back and say it was worth it, that don’t we end up with a bunch of AI generated crap that degrades technology by obscuring the useful and we end up worse than before.

alt227 151 days ago |

I prefer to see it as the automtion of the IT age.

All other professions had their time when technology came and automated things.

For example wood carvers, blacksmiths, butchers, bakers, candlestickmakers etc etc. All of those professions have been mostly taken over by machines in factories.

I view 'ai' as new machines in factories for producing code. We have reached the point where we have code factories which can produce things much more efficiently and quicker than any human can alone.

Where the professions still thrive is in the artisan market. There is always demand for hand crafted things which have been created with love and care.

I am hoping this stays true for my coding analogy. Then people who really care about making a good product will still have a market from customers who want something different from the mass produced norm.

karolist 151 days ago |

Was this text run through LLM before posting? I recognize that writing style honestly; or did we simply speak to machines enough to now speak like machines?

solarparade 151 days ago | |

Yes. This is absolutely chatgpt-speak. I see it everywhere now. It's inescapable. At least this appears to be largely human authored and have some substance, which is generally not the case when I see these LLM-isms.

hazyc 151 days ago |

I think the true genuinely-love-programming type of people will increasingly have to do what so many other people do, and that's separation of work and personal enjoyment. You might have to AI-architect your code at work, and hand code your toy projects on the weekend.

simonsarris 151 days ago |

> The feedback loop has changed. The intimacy has gone. The thing that kept me up at night for decades — the puzzle, the chase, the moment where you finally understand why something isn’t working — that’s been compressed into a prompt and a response

It's so strange to read because to me its never been more fun to make software, its especially never been easier for an individual. The boring parts are being automated so I can work on the bespoke and artistic parts. The feedback loop is getting shorter to making something nice and workable. The investigation tools for profiling and pinpointing performance bottlenecks are better than ever, where Claude is just one new part of it.

davidw 151 days ago |

50 myself, and started coding with a Commodore 64, but only really picked it up seriously with the advent of open source software, and that feeling of being able to dig around any component of the system I wanted to was exhilarating.

I think that's one of the biggest things that gives me pause about AI: the fact that, if they prove to be a big productivity boost, you're beholden to huge corporations, and not just for a one-time purchase, but on an ongoing basis.

Maybe the open source models will improve, but if keeps being driven by raw compute power and big numbers, it seems to tilt things very much in favor of those with lots and lots of capital to deploy.

epaga 151 days ago |

I gave up after the third “It’s not X, it’s Y” in like two paragraphs. Is nobody else allergic to that AI voice? Isn’t the author?

So depressing this is the current state of blogging. Can’t wait for this phase to be over.

r_lee 150 days ago | |

was this actually generated with Claude/GPT?

I didn't really notice it at first but on a second read it's full of this crap?

tonymet 151 days ago |

I have the opposite take. There’s nothing stopping you from jumping into any component to polish things up. You can code whatever you wish. And AI takes away nearly all of the drudgery : boilerplate, test cases, inspecting poor documentation, absurd tooling.

It also lets me focus more on improving things since I feel more liberated to scrap low quality components. I’m much braver to take on large refactors now – things that would have taken days now take minutes.

In many ways AI has made up for my growing lack of patience and inability to stay on task until 3am.

newsoftheday 151 days ago | |

> In many ways AI has made up for my growing lack of patience and inability to stay on task until 3am.

That is called...programming.

tonymet 151 days ago | | |

humans are distinguished from the lower primates by the use of tools.

bronlund 150 days ago |

I have been on much the same journey as OP and I agree on everything he writes. And even though the author tries to avoid sounding grumpy, you can still feel the sadness in between the lines - a sadness I don't share. Sure, I have gone from being inspired by the pure love of everything computer and a bottomless curiosity, to maintaining legacy systems for large corporations just to feed the kids. The internet is ruined by greed and control, most software is a total mess and having a 10 million times faster computer seemingly just makes the OS less responsive. Schools, not teaching how a computer works, but how to be productive in Microsoft Office. It's a long list.

Back in the eighties, how I looked at the future of computers, was mostly fuelled by sci-fi books and movies. Computers that could talk, that could think and even go insane - it was all too wonderful. All just fantasies. But now we are here. What we could only imagine back then has become a reality, and I kind of do feel the same curiosity and the same love for this new thing. Sure, it came with a couple of surprises like; you can't really program it, you just have to beg it. Or the fact that we now have a completely new genre of utility bills at the household. Still, it is magical - the same kind of magic I felt way back then.

So in one way, I feel that I have come full circle - except for one thing. One thing is different. Back then, there were just a few of us. I was almost nervous about letting anyone know what I really spent the afternoons doing, afraid that it would single me out - and not in a good way. Today, on the other hand, it is all of us.

ilitirit 151 days ago |

I'm roughly the same (started at 9, currently 48), but programming hasn't really changed for me. What's changed is me having to have pointless arguments with people who obviously have no clue what they're talking about but feel qualified either because:

a) They asked an LLM

b) "This is what all our competitors are doing"

c) They saw a video on Youtube by some big influencer

d) [...insert any other absurd reason...]

True story:

In one of our recent Enterprise Architecture meetings, I was lamenting the lack of a plan to deal with our massive tech debt, and used an example of a 5000 line regulatory reporting stored procedure written 10 years ago that noone understood. I was told my complaint was irrelevant because I could just dump it into ChatGPT and it would explain it to me. These are words uttered by a so-called Senior Developer, in an Enterprise Architecture meeting.

cepcode 150 days ago |

> And I thought: mate, you were already so far up the abstraction chain you didn’t even realize you were teetering on top of a wobbly Jenga tower.

But AI is different. If I program in a high level language like Python, sure I don't know what's going on under the hood. But you get a 'feel' for it because the same code usually reproduces the same results. Does AI reproduce the exact same results when I ask the same thing? That I don't know.

tim333 150 days ago | |

I was thinking the wobbly Jenga tower thing was unfair. The stack TypeScript runs on is fairly stable and buildable on. LLM output is much more random.

yayitswei 151 days ago |

Is there some magic lost also when using AI to write your blog post?

geetee 151 days ago | |

I miss human writing. I miss the different voices.

hackeman300 151 days ago | |

Seriously I thought I was going crazy with this. So many "it's not just x it's y". Short punchy sentences. Emdashes galore.

bitwize 151 days ago |

This isn't new. It's the same feeling the first commercial programmers had working in assembly, or machine code, once compilers became available. Ultimately I think even Mel Kaye forsook being able to handpick memory locations for optimum drum access before his retirement, in favor of being able to build vastly more complex software than before.

AI has just vastly extended your reach. No sense crying about it. It is literally foolish to lament the evolution of our field into something more.

anarticle 151 days ago |

I've written sse2 optimized C, web apps, and probably everything in between (hw, datasci, etl, devops).

I like coding with AI both vibe and assisted, since as soon as the question enters my head I can create a prototype or a test or a xyz to verify my thoughts. The whole time I'm writing in my notebook or whiteboard or any other thing I would have gotten up to. This is enabling tech, the trouble for me is there is a small thread that leads out of the room into the pockets of billion dollar companies.

It is no longer you vs the machine.

I have spent tons of time debugging weird undocumented hardware with throwaway code, or sat in a debugger doing hex math.

I think one wire that is crossed right now in this world is that computing is more corporate than ever, with what seems like ever growing platforms and wealth extraction at scale. Don't let them get you down, host your own shit and ignore them. YES IT WILL COST MORE -> YOUR FREEDOM HAS A PRICE.

Another observation is that people that got into the game for pure money are big mad right now. I didn't make money in the 00s, I did in the end of the 10s, and we're back at job desolation. In my groups, the most annoyed are code boot campers who have faked it until they made it and have just managed to survive this cycle with javascript.

Cycles come and go, the tech changes, but problem solving is always there.

dwoldrich 151 days ago |

I am in a very similar boat, age and experience-wise. I would like to work backward from the observation that there is no resource constraints and we're collectively hopelessly lost up the abstraction Jenga tower.

I observe that the way we taught math was not oriented on the idea that everyone would need to know trigonometric functions or how to do derivatives. I like to believe math curricula was centered around standardizing a system of thinking about maths and those of us who were serious about our educational development would all speak the same language. It was about learning a language and laying down processes that everyone else could understand. And that shaped us, and it's foolish to challenge or complain about that or, God forbid, radically change the way we teach math subjects because it damages our ability to think alike. (I know the above is probably completely idealistic verging on personal myth, but that's how I choose to look at it.)

In my opinion, we never approached software engineering the same way. We were so focused on the compiler and the type calculus, and we never taught people about what makes code valuable and robust. If I had FU money to burn today, I'd start a Mathnasium company focused around making kids into systems integrators with great soft skills and the ability to produce high quality software. I would pitch this business under the assumption that the jenga tower is going to be collapsing pretty much continuously for the next 25-50 years and civilization needs absolute unit super developers coming out of nowhere who will be able to make a small fortune helping companies dig their way out of 75 years of tech debt.

aeuropean12 151 days ago |

Well yes it has changed. But look at everything that can be accomplished with these abstractions/libraries/frameworks that exist.

Why reinvent the wheel.

Yes, there might be less room for the Wild Wild West approach, as mentioned in the article: But that is the structure of compounded knowledge/tooling/code available to developers/others to create more enriched software, in the sense that it runs on what is available now and provides value in today's age of computing.

I also had a 486DX2-66. And I recall coding in Assembly, Pascal, C etc.

I do not miss it. These days I can create experiences that reach so many more people (a matured Interneet with realtime possibilities - to simplify) and with so much more potential for Good. Good in the sense of usefulness for users, good in the sense of making money (yeah, that aspect still exists).

I do understand your sentiment and the despairing tone. There have been times when I was struck by the same.

But I do not miss 1995 and struggling with a low-level formatted HD and Assembly that screwed up my floppy disks, or the worms that reached my box, or the awful web sites in terms of UX that were around, or pulling coaxial cables around for LAN parties.

It's just a different world now. But I get what you are saying, and respect it. Stay optimistic. :)

rphv 150 days ago |

I struggle with posts like this.

Every generation of engineers believes they experienced the "real" era when things were understandable / meaningful. The people who mastered punch cards probably felt the same way when keyboards took over. The people who wrote in assembly probably felt the same way when C came around.

Abstraction didn't start with AI. It's been a defining feature of computing since the beginning.

For most developers, writing code has never been the point. Rather, it's been a tool: a means to build something useful, solve a problem, support a family, etc. The craft evolves and so must we.

Posts like this expose the risk in tying one's identity to a specific version of the game. When the rules change, it's a loss. That's human! But the deeper skill - judgment, taste, style, etc. — hasn’t gone anywhere. If anything, it matters more when raw output becomes cheap.

We can mourn the loss of forced difficulty, or we can choose new challenges. No doubt that's harder when one has spent decades mastering a specific skill, but it's still a choice.

The magic was never the machine. Rather, it's the _agency_.

And that’s still available!

hnthrowaway0315 151 days ago |

I have given the topic some thoughts. I concluded that the ONLY way for ordinary people (non-genius, IQ <= 120) to be really good, be really close to the genius, is to sit down, condensate the past 40 or so year's tech history of three topics (Comp-Arch, OS and Compiler) into a 4-5 years of self-education.

Such education is COMPLETELY different from the one they offered in school, but closer to those offered in premium schools (MIT/Berkeley). Basically, I'd call it "Software engineering archaeology". Students are supposed to take on ancient software, compile them, and figure out how to add new features.

For example, for the OS kernel branch:

- Course 0: MIT xv6 lab, then figure out which subsystem you are interested in (fs? scheduler? drivers?)

- Course 0.5: System programming for modern Linux and NT, mostly to get familiar with user space development and syscalls

- Course 1: Build Linux 0.95, run all of your toolchains in a docker container. Move it to 64-bit. Say you are interested in fs -- figure out the VFS code and write a couple of fs for it. Linux 0.95 only has Minix fs so there are a lot of simpler options to choose from.

- Course 2: Maybe build a modern Linux, like 5.9, and then do the same thing. This time the student is supposed to implement a much more sophiscated fs, maybe something from the SunOS or WinNT that was not there.

- Course 3 & 4: Do the same thing with leaked NT 3.5 and NT 4.0 kernel. It's just for personal use so I wouldn't worry about the lawyers.

For reading, there are a lot of books about Linux kernels and NT kernels.

zzzeek 151 days ago |

I'm 57 and wrote my first line of BASIC in 1980, so while I can still chime in on this specific demographic I feel that I ought to. So im like this guy, but like a lot of other people in my specific demographic we aren't writing these long melancholy blog posts about AI because it's not that big of a deal. As an OSS maintainer most of my work is a lot of boring slog adding features to libraries to suit new features in upstream dependencies, nitpicky things people point out, new docs, tons of tedium. Claude helps a ton with all of that. no way is Claude doing the real architectural puzzle stuff, that's still fully on me! I can just use Claude to help implement it. It's like the ultimate junior programmer assistant. It's certainly a new, different and unique experience in one's programming career but it really feels like another tool, like an autocomplete or code refactoring tool that is just a lot better, with similar caveats. I mean in my career, I've had to battle the whole time people who don't "get" source code control (starting with me), who don't "get" IDEs (starting with me), people who dont "get" distributed version control (same), people who don't "get" ORMs (oh yes, same for me though this one I took much more dramatic steps to appreciate them), people who don't "get" code formatters, now we're battling people who don't "get" LLMs used for coding, in that sense the whole thing doesnt feel like that novel of a situation.

it's the LLMs that are spitting out fake photos and videos and generating lots of shitty graphics for local businesses, that's where I'm still wielding a pitchfork...

paulmooreparks 151 days ago |

I'm 55 and I started at age 13 on a TI-99/4A, then progressed through Commodore 64, Amiga 2000, an Amiga XT Sidecar, then a real XT, and on and on. DOS, Windows, Unix, the first Linux. I ran a tiny BBS and felt so excited when I heard the modem singing from someone dialing in. The first time I "logged into the Internet" was to a Linux prompt. Gopher was still a bigger thing than the nascent World-Wide Web.

The author is right. The magic has faded. It's sad. I'm still excited about what's possible, but it'll never create that same sense of awe, that knowledge that you can own the entire system from the power coming from the wall to the pixels on your screen.

marttt 151 days ago | |

DOS is very much alive these days, though [0]. Text-mode internet is there (should you want online in the first place), and, thanks to some amazing devs, soundcard support has made a huge leap [1].

I use it every day lately (for text-related work and hobbyst-level assembly learning -- my intent is to write a small application to do paid work which involves chopping audio files). And -- I say a single-tasking system is a complete, true bliss in our days. Paired with a 4:3 Thinkpad screen, that DOS environment gives me instant focus for a long time -- which, to me, has been almost impossible to accomplish on a multi-tasking, contemporary-web-browser-equipped system recently.

Apparently, though, there seems to be AI for DOS, too [2]. :) I prefer my DOS machine to be completely offline, though. Peace and harmony for the soul!

0: https://freedos.org/ | http://svardos.org/ | https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/minidos-2026-relea... | https://bttr-software.de/forum/board.php

1: https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA

2: https://github.com/lanmeibuxie/AI-for-DOS

convivialdingo 151 days ago | |

Similar story for myself. It was long and tedious for my mental model to go from Basic, to Pascal, to C, and finally to ASM as a teen.

My recent experience is the opposite. With LLMs, I'm able to delve into the deepest parts of code and systems I never had time to learn. LLMs will get you to the 80% pretty quick - compiles and sometimes even runs.

JohnMakin 151 days ago |

I'm ~40ish but middle career and not in management. I envy this author, whatever joy he found in solving little puzzles and systems was extinguished in me very early in my career in an intense corporate environment. I was never one to love fussing much with code, but I do love solving system scale problems, which also involve code. I don't feel I am losing anything, the most annoying parts of code I deal with are now abstracted into human language and specs, and I can now architect/build more creatively than before. So I am happy. But, I was one of those types that never had a true passion for "code" and have meant plenty of people that do have that, and I feel for them. I worry for people that carved out being really good at programming as a niche, but you enter a point in your career where that becomes much less important than being able to execute and define requirements and understand business logic. And yea, that isn't very romantic or magical, but I find passion outside of what pays my bills, so I lost that ennui feeling a while ago.

layer8 151 days ago | |

Some may feel that it is a luxury to feel passionate about one’s profession, but for me a life without that is pretty depressing. A society should strive to make fulfillment in a profession possible for everyone.

JohnMakin 150 days ago | | |

To me it feels the opposite of miserable. I can give work my full attention because it allows me freedom (mostly) to pursue other passionate things. This 40 hour a week (speaking generally, for me it can triple that sometimes) cost to me is far smaller than the depression I’d feel caring deeply about my particular craft in a field that doesn’t give a shit about it. That was proven to me very early in my career and is definitely cynical, but I don’t know where all the bright eyed bushy tailed opinions out there are coming from. probably completely different domains than my viewpoint.

Of course society should be a lot of things but that’s not a reality. Like, imagine a world exists soon where not every person (or even the majority of people) are useful, even formerly useful people - we already live in this world! If raw intellectual output is the value generator in the world we live in, and is a meritocracy, the simple fact by statistics is most will be left behind. what society already does to the disabled, and the sick is proof of this already. These people take professions to suit their circumstances. I am one, and I am fine with it. but by the parameters of the game, this is how to best maximize my passion output. Many people have many ideas how to change “society” I personally think is a waste of time, society adapts to circumstances most of the time. Except the people at the bottom usually get a raw deal.

minder-4001 150 days ago |

I retired a month ago at 74. Like you I've used languages in anger that few these days have heard of (S3 anyone?), and design techniques that somehow seem to be devalued.

Claude and it's kin remind me of junior "just out of university" developers with piles of knowledge but no appreciation of the real world impact of anything. Of long conversations about edge cases and why they matter, extensive error-checking and logging.

The last place I worked had (some) users eager to be their own developer to get things done that much quicker. These are often the same users unable to accurately define what they really want, assuming that the nearby BA will understand and the magic will happen. They haven't worked out, and may not be interested in learning that they will be their own BA and that the uncertainties in their vision will be baked into the final offering.

In reality, I'm glad to be out, the fossil suffering the effects of the tools whilst unable to influence anything.

thom 150 days ago |

I too get less of a kick out of writing enterprise middleware than I did making games as a kid in the 80s. Why did the industry do this to me?!

jdlyga 151 days ago |

It's turned from SimCity into SimSimCity. It's like playing a simulation where you manage a person who's playing SimCity.

peter_d_sherman 151 days ago |

>"The abstraction tower

Here’s the part that makes me laugh, darkly.

I saw someone on LinkedIn recently — early twenties, a few years into their career — lamenting that with AI they “didn’t really know what was going on anymore.” And I thought: mate, you were already so far up the abstraction chain you didn’t even realise you were teetering on top of a wobbly Jenga tower.

They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of.

But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening.

The abstraction ship sailed decades ago. We just didn’t notice because each layer arrived gradually enough that we could pretend we still understood the whole stack.

AI is just the layer that made the pretence impossible to maintain."

Absolutely brilliant writing!

Heck -- absolutely brilliant communicating! (Which is really what great writing is all about!)

You definitely get it!

Some other people here on HN do too, yours truly included in that bunch...

Anyway, stellar writing!

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(computer_science)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction

https://ecommons.cornell.edu/entities/publication/3e2850f6-c...

kwar13 151 days ago |

> They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of.

yup.

TheRealPomax 151 days ago | |

I found it a very weird section of the article, undoing most of what had been written before.

Whether it's ROM programming, writing assembly, or C, or Rust, or JS-with-stdlib, at no point was anyone "teetering". Stacks have always existed, and whether your stack was small because it just had not much under it, or huge because it's 2026, they've by and large always been stable. That's the point of a stack: you can trust the parts below the layer you're working on, and the problems you solve are still real problems that for the most part don't require knowing the lower parts of the stack but are still real problem sin programming.

It's like making fun of people who drive a company rental because they don't want to own one themselves, and can't name any part of their engine: you're just being an ass.

Even the good TS programmers understand classic programming concepts like using the right data structures, paying attention to runtime complexity, and knowing when to go "maybe it's the step below me". They can work out difficult problems just fine.

You were writing an article about how fundamentally different AI has made things: why dunk on people who got into programming more recently than you and started higher on the ladder of abstraction, mocking them for "you were already about to fall". No, they weren't. They understood the core concepts just fine, and we collectively gave them stacks that they could trust. And they would have transitioned to "the next thing" just like you've been doing.

And then "AI" showed up, and it doesn't care about silly things like "how high up the ladder you are", it just went "your skills about how to schedule, structure, plan, describe, and manage projects is the thing that matters. Those other skills are nice to haves, and will make you better at being a PM, but they're not the main focus anymore". It doesn't matter where on the ladder you are, that affects everyone.

marginalia_nu 151 days ago |

You can still have fun programming. Just sit down and write some code. Ain't nobody holding a gun to your head forcing you to use AI in your projects.

And the part of programming that wasn't your projects, whether back in the days of TPS reports and test coverage meetings, or in the age of generative AI, that bit was always kinda soul draining.

AndrewKemendo 151 days ago |

Please stop upvoting these posts. We have gotten to the point where both the front page and new page is polluted with these laments

It’s literally the same argument over and over and it’s the same comments over and over and over

HN will either get back to interesting stuff or simply turn into a support group for aging “coders” that refuse to adapt

I’m going to start flagging these as spam

atan2 151 days ago | |

The article talks about human vs technology and the loss of connection between creation, intent, ownership, and control. Don't be condescending.

AndrewKemendo 151 days ago | | |

…like every other post of this kind

kraig911 151 days ago |

"Over four decades I’ve been through more technology transitions than I can count. New languages, new platforms, new paradigms. CLI to GUI. Desktop to web. Web to mobile. Monoliths to microservices. Tapes, floppy discs, hard drives, SSDs. JavaScript frameworks arriving and dying like mayflies."... made me think of

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

where we came from and where we're going this whole time in my career those things are kind of hard to pinpoint. Abstraction is killing us for sure. Time to market above all else. It's no wonder why software in cars, appliances and medical equipment is a factor that is killing people.

jppope 151 days ago |

Fantastic Article, well written, thoughtful. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes:

  * "Then it professionalised. Plug and Play arrived. Windows abstracted everything. The Wild West closed. Computers stopped being fascinating, cantankerous machines that demanded respect and understanding, and became appliances. The craft became invisible."

  * "The machines I fell in love with became instruments of surveillance and extraction. The platforms that promised to connect us were really built to monetise us. The tinkerer spirit didn’t die of natural causes — it was bought out and put to work optimising ad clicks."

  * "Previous technology shifts were “learn the new thing, apply existing skills.” AI isn’t that. It’s not a new platform or a new language or a new paradigm. It’s a shift in what it means to be good at this."

  * "They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of... But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening."

  * "Typing was never the hard part."

  * "I don’t have a neat conclusion. I’m not going to tell you that experienced developers just need to “push themselves up the stack” or “embrace the tools” or “focus on what AI can’t do.” All of that is probably right, and none of it addresses the feeling."

To relate to the author, I think with a lot of whats going on I feel the same about, but other parts I feel differently than they do. There appears to be a shallowness with this... yes we can build faster than ever, but so much of what we are building we should really be asking ourselves why do we have to build this at all? Its like sitting through the meeting that could have been an email, or using hand tools for 3 hours because the power tool purchase/rental is just obscenely expensive for the ~20min you need it.

Decabytes 151 days ago |

I too have felt these feelings (though I'm much younger than the author). I think as I've grown older I have to remind myself

1. I shouldn't be so tied to what other people think of me (craftsman, programmer, low level developer)

2. I shouldn't measure my satisfaction by comparing my work to others'. Quality still matters especially in shared systems, but my responsibility is to the standards I choose to hold, not to whether others meet them. Plus there are still community of people that still care about this (handmade network, openbsd devs, languages like Odin) that I can be part of it I want to

3. If my values are not being met either in my work or personal life I need to take ownership of that myself. The magic is still there, I just have to go looking for it

ge96 151 days ago |

Yeah I could use Cursor or whatever but I don't, I like writing code. I guess that makes me a luddite or something, although I still develop agents. I enjoy architecting things (I don't consider myself an architect) I'm talking about my hobby hardware projects.

towndrunk 151 days ago |

I know exactly how you feel. I don't know how many hours I sat in front of this debugger (https://www.jasik.com) poking around and trying to learn everything at a lower level. Now its so different.

jamesrandall 151 days ago | |

Yeah. Different is the word. In many ways it’s just another abstraction but we’re not machines and this, to me at least, just gives a very different feel.

kylehotchkiss 151 days ago |

There's 3-4 of these posts a day - why don't people spend more time hand-building things for fun in their free time? That's what led a lot of us to this career path to start with. I have a solid mix of hand-code and AI-assisted projects in my free time.

ookblah 151 days ago |

maybe we just change, honestly. i think when i were younger there was nothing to lose, time felt unlimited, no "career" to gamble with, no billion dollar idea, just learning and tinkering and playing with whatever was out there because it was cool and interesting to me. in some respects i miss that.

not sure how that relates to llms but it does become an unblocker to regain some of that "magic", but also i know to deep dive requires an investment i cannot shortcut.

the new generation of devs are already playing with things few dinosaurs will get to experience fully, having sunk decades into the systems built and afraid to let it go. some of that is good (to lean on experience) and some of it holding us back.

Zaskoda 151 days ago |

I found that feeling again while building a game on the EVM. All of the constraints were new and different. Solidity feels somewhere between and high and low level language, not as abstracted as most popular languages today but a solid step above writing assembly.

A lot of people started building projects like mine when the EVM was newer. Some managed to get a little bit of popularity, like Dark Forest. But most were never noticed. The crypto scene has distracted everyone from the work of tinkerers and artists who just wanted to play with a new paradigm. The whole thing became increasingly toxic.

It was like one last breath of fresh cool air before the pollution of AI tools arrived on the scene. It's a bitter sweet feeling.

NKosmatos 150 days ago |

Being a similar age with the author, I can relate with many things (like so many people in the comments below). The writing style is a bit strange and as mentioned by others, it might have been (re)written by AI, but the message is still there.

dwd 150 days ago |

Mid-50s and also started programming in BASIC on any computer I could get my hands on, whether my own C64 or the BBC Micros or IBM XTs at school.

My take on AI really comes down to this:

Debugging your own code was an adventure and finally getting something work was a major rush. You had a sense of achievement.

Debugging LLM generated code is hell - it's basically debugging someone else code. There's no sense of achievement and no jump out of your chair and bounce around the room moments.

Sure, the code comes out fast, and maybe I'll find joy in finishing some side projects I've been tinkering with on and off since I first started programming, or it may just end up feeling like it's not mine any more.

jamesgill 150 days ago |

"Then it professionalised."

Yeah. It's not that it wasn't 'professionalized' back in the day, it's that everything has changed--the attitude, the people involved, the kinds of businesses there are, the philosophy. There was a...mystery about it, a feeling like you were entering a different world and that world was a place where you were close the the machine and...I just can't describe it. It was more visceral.

I made my first BASIC program in the late 70s on a Decwriter, which was basically a wide-carriage printer with a keyboard, attached via acoustic modem to a time-sharing system. And it was the best thing ever.

js-j 151 days ago |

I can share a similar experience: I began to learn programming during my first school years, on an Apple II clone with Logo, a fancy language with turtle graphics as a most distinctive feature. We used to boot Logo off 5.25" floppy disks...

DanielBMarkham 151 days ago |

This is quite the lament. Very well written.

I'm about ten years ahead of the author. I felt this a long time before AI arrived. I went from solving problems for people to everything I tried to ending up in an endless grind of yak-shaving.

I worked my way through it, though. It made me both give up programming, at least in the commercial sense, and appreciate the journey he and I have gone through. It's truly an amazing time to be alive.

Now, however, I'm feeling sucked back into the vortex. I'm excited about solving problems in a way I haven't been in a long time. I was just telling somebody that I spent 4-6 hours last night watching Claude code. I watched TV. I scratched my butt. I played HexaCrush. All the time it was just chugging along, solving a problem in code that I have wanted to solve for a decade or more. I told him that it wasn't watching the code go by. That would be too easy to do. It was paying attention to what Claude was doing and _feeling that pain_. OMG, I would see it hit a wall, I would recognize the wall, and then it'd just keep chugging along until it fixed it. It was the kind of thing that didn't have damned thing to do with the problem but would have held me up for hours. Instead, I watched Pitt with my wife. Every now I then I'd see a prompt, pop up, and guide/direct/orchestrate/consult/? with Claude.

It ain't coding. But, frankly, coding ain't coding. It hasn't been in a long, long time.

If a lot of your job seems like senseless bullshit, I'm sad to say you're on the way out. If it doesn't, stick around.

I view AI as an extinction level threat. That hasn't changed, mainly because of how humans are using it. It has nothing to do with the tech. But I'm a bit perplexed now as to what to do with my new-found superpowers. I feel like that kid on the first Spiderman movie. The world is amazing. I've got half-a-dozen projects I'm doing right now. I'm publishing my own daily newspaper, just for me to read, and dang if it's not pretty good! No matter how this plays out, it is truly an amazing time to be alive, and old codgers like us have had a hella ride.

smallstepforman 150 days ago |

I’m 5 years older than James and had a similar discovery and enthusiasm path which got lost in the era commercial big modern systems. The soul of the machine has long since disappeared.

There was a brief period when I discovered BeOS 4.5 which brought the wonder back in September 1999. That was short lived. I occassionally get the bug with Haiku but sadly dont have the spare time during this last decade.

Enthusiast on small platforms still chase the bug, in these smaller communities you can actually make a difference, and there is still passion to be found there. There is also some innovation since experimental concepts can be tried out.

manjuc 151 days ago |

Same, been a product designer for years, still love design deep down but the essence is somehow not there anymore. reading this hit different. It's refreshing to see someone put it into words instead of the usual "stuff".

It lines up a lot with what I've been thinking as well and this is what I wrote today on my blog. https://www.immaculateconstellation.info/why-ai-challenges-u...

My_Name 151 days ago |

The irony is that you could still code the way you always did, where you control every pixel. Nothing is stopping you.

But you would not be able to make anything anywhere near as complex as you can with modern tools.

stronglikedan 151 days ago |

Same, but it changed when I was 17 and again when I was 27 and then 37 and so on. It has always been changing dramatically, but this latest leap is just so incredibly different that it seems unique.

tiahura 151 days ago |

Don't program as a career, but am also 50 and programming since TRS-80. AI has transformed this era, and I LOVE IT! I can focus on making and not APIs or syntax or all of the bootstrapping.

Movah 151 days ago | |

I wondered when I would see someone else mention TRS-80. Recall those days like yesterday "Hey Mah! It works!"

KingOfCoders 151 days ago |

Cool, at 7? I started at 9 and I'm 53 now. And Claude does all the things. Need to get adjusted to that though. Still not there.

Last year I found out that I always was a creator, not a coder.

dcanelhas 151 days ago |

> I wrote my first line of code in 1983. I was seven years old, typing BASIC into a machine that had less processing power than the chip in your washing machine

I think there may be a counterpoint hiding in plain sight here: back in 1983 the washing machine didn't have a chip in it. Now there are more low-level embedded CPUs and microcontrollers to develop for than before, but maybe it's all the same now. Unfathomable levels of abstraction, uniformly applied by language models?

oars 148 days ago |

Fantastic read. I'll definitely want to come back and read this again as LLMs get better and more of us code less in the coming years.

Archived blog here incase the original source becomes inaccessible: https://archive.is/3rsQu

j45 151 days ago |

Programming changed all along.

New concepts came out all along.

They became standardized all along and came down market to smaller and smaller projects.

Source control.

Cloud.

Agile/Scrum.

Code completion IDEs.

Higher Level languages.

These were not LLMs but did represent a shift that had to be kept up with.

LLMs are no different, just a bigger jump.

There is just as much opportunity here.

Software development and software developers are not going away.

More software that never could be built will now be built.

For the forseeable future there will always be software that needs to be overseen by a human.

_carbyau_ 150 days ago |

A lot of things that require both art and meeting constraints involve mindfulness, programming being one of them.

People used to talk about "getting into the zone" or "being in the flow" and how open offices disrupt that ability to focus or concentrate.

Now the only flow is management of agentic AI which I imagine is hard for people to get into the same mindfulness state.

bentt 151 days ago |

Some farmers probably lamented the rise of machines because they feared their strength would no longer be needed in the fields. These farmers were no doubt more concerned with their own usefulness as laborers than in the goals of the farm: to produce food.

If you program as labor, consider what you might build with no boss. You’re better equipped to start your own farm than you think.

jamwil 151 days ago | |

Many of them might have been troubled by the fact that they couldn’t afford a tractor. Many small farms became a few big ones, and so it will go in software.

bentt 151 days ago | | |

Didn’t that already happen in software? Seems like network effects got ahead of this.

nprateem 151 days ago |

Programming is dead. In the last 4 days I've done 2 months of work. The future is finally here.

Bad times to be a programmer. Start learning business.

CrzyLngPwd 151 days ago |

Starting code when I was 14, sold my first bit of code at 17, which was written in 6502 assembler.

40+ years later, been through many BASICs, C, C++ (CFront on onwards) and now NodeJS, and I still love writing code.

Tinkering with RPi, getting used to having a coding assistant, looking forward to having some time to work on other fun projects and getting back into C++ sooooon.

What's not to love?

mrcwinn 151 days ago |

Professional development is changing dramatically. Nothing stops anyone from coding "the old way," though. Your hobby project remains yours, exactly the way you want it. Your professional project, on the other hand, was never about you in the first place. It's always about the customer/audience/user, period full stop.

casey2 150 days ago |

I'm confused about the typescript jab. I'm not a web dev, but to my understanding is that you can easily get a target machines' instructions for typescript if you want. It's much closer to "real programming" than the unix/python detour people are obsessed with for some reason.

abcde666777 150 days ago |

To be honest I find myself in disagreement with this attitude despite being a semi old-school programmer myself (I cut my teeth on C/C++/assembly in the early 00s). I think the author is caught up in the artist's dilemma - that being, they want to take part in the craft for the joy of it rather than for the results it produces.

Harsh take: nobody's stopping you from doing that. You can dust off an old computer right now and write software for it. All of that joy still exists. It's just that nobody's going to pay you for it and it's no longer mainstream relevant - the world's moved on from those times, in many cases for good reasons.

So I think what the person really wants is to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be mainstream relevant and employable... whilst having fun.

That's a luxury. More specifically it's a first world luxury. Most people don't get to have that. True, many programmers did get to have it for a time - but that doesn't mean we're entitled to it forever - not unless it's somehow directly tied to producing valuable results.

But you know it's strange to me that programmers lose sight of this. I became a programmer because I saw Wolfenstein 3D on a 386, and was inspired by there being a "world in the box". I wanted to make worlds too. That's an important distinction: I didn't become a programmer because I wanted to write code, I became a programmer because I wanted to create worlds. The programming is a means to an end, it's not the end unto itself - at least I never looked at it that way. And that's in spite of the fact that I genuinely enjoy programming in and of itself. But I still value the outcome more.

And in fact I actually went through a related transition some years ago on a personal level, when I shifted from always trying to write game engines from the ground up to being willing to use engines like Unity or Unreal. It felt like a betrayal - I no longer had a deep understanding of every layer, I could no longer bespoke craft everything to my personal whims. But you know what? It was absolutely the right choice because it put me on track to actually finishing the games I was working on, which was the entire point of the exercise in the first place.

So I don't bemoan or regret it for a second.

Anyway hope that didn't sound too blunt - it's just my way of speaking - I can sympathize with the author but I just think it's on the self-indulgent side.

pkphilip 150 days ago |

I am the same age as the author and I started programming on the ZX Spectrum around 12 years old. My sentiments are exactly the same as the author's.

Programming just doesn't feel enjoyable anymore. It has become less a craft and more just a way of putting bread on the table.

hmaxwell 151 days ago |

You can still write code yourself. Just like you can still walk to work, you do not need to use a car.

toss1 151 days ago |

>>The machines I fell in love with became instruments of surveillance and extraction.

Surveillance and Extraction

"We were promised flying cars", and what we got was "investors" running the industry off the cliff into cheap ways to extract money from people instead of real innovation.

AIorNot 151 days ago |

I’m 50 too and I’ve complained and yearned about the “old” days too, a lot of this is nostalgia as we reminisce about periods of time in our youth when we had the exuberance and time to play and build with technology of our own time

Working in AI startups strangely enough I see a lot of the same spirit of play and creativity applied to LLM based tools - I mean what is OpenClaw but a fun experiment

Those kids these days are going to reminisce about the early days of AI when prompts would be handwritten and LLMs would hallucinate

I’m not really sure 1983, 1993 or 2003 really was that gold of age but we look at it with rose colored glasses

sowbug 151 days ago |

Did hardware engineers back in the 1970s-80s* think that software took the joy out of their craft? What do those engineers now think in retrospect?

*I'm picking that era because it seems to be when most electronic machines' business logic moved from hardware to software.

rraghur 151 days ago |

Are you me?

I'm 49.... Started at 12... In the same boat

First 286 machine had a CMOS battery that was loose so I had to figure that out to make it boot into ms-dos

This time it does feel different and while I'm using them ai more than ever, it feels soulless and empty even when I 'ship' something

metalrain 151 days ago |

I think it's the loss of control.

Even if you can achieve awesome things with LLMs you give up the control over tiny details, it's just faster to generate and regenerate until it fits the spec.

But you never quite know how long it takes or how much you have to shave that square peg.

aldousd666 151 days ago |

I'm 46 but same. I'm not quite as melancholy about it, but I do feel a lot of this.

harel 151 days ago |

I've had the same journey, same age markers. The sentiment is the same, but at the same time this new world affords me super powers I'm currently drunk on. When that drunkenness becomes a hangover I hope I won't be disappointed.

xg15 151 days ago |

But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening.

I feel this is conflating different things. Yes, the abstraction tower was massive already before, but at least the abstractions were mostly well-defined and understandable through interfaces: even if you don't understand the intricacies of your storage device, driver and kernel, you can usually get a quite reliable and predictable mental representation how files work. Same goes for network protocols, higher-level programming languages or the web platform.

Sure, there are edge cases where the abstraction breaks down and you have to get into the lower levels, but those situations are the exception, not the norm.

With AI, there is no clearly defined interface, and no one really knows what (precise) input a given output will produce. Or maybe to put it better, the interface is human language and your mental representation is the one you have talking to a human - which is far more vague than previous technical abstractions.

On the bright side, at least we (still) have the intermediate layer of generated code to reason about, which offsets the unpredictability a bit.

dnw 150 days ago |

The thing we loved hasn't changed. We just can't get paid for it anymore.

ibejoeb 150 days ago | |

Somebody still needs to do lower-level work and understand machine architecture. Those feeling like they might be replaced in web or app dev might consider moving down the stack.

innocentoldguy 151 days ago |

I have been around for a similar amount of time. Another change I have seen over the years is the shift from programming being an exercise in creative excellence at work to being a white-collar ditch-digging job.

adamtaylor_13 150 days ago |

This essay begins by promising not to be a "back in my day" piece, but ends up dunking on 20-year-olds who are only a few years into their career, as if they have any choice about when they were born.

solarized 150 days ago |

I feel like it’s pushing engineers into management level.

As an artisan, everything’s automated now.

You can’t just stay in the kitchen anymore.

you now have to focus on leverage. sales, growth, hiring, affiliating, etc.

To make more people’s lives better (with faster pace).

almosthere 151 days ago |

11 and now 45. I am still interested in it, but I feel like in my 20s I would get a dopamine rush when a row showed up in a database. In my 30s I would get that only if a message passed through a system and updated on-screen analytics within 10 seconds. Thank god for LLMs because all of it became extremely boring, I can't stand having to get these little milestones each new company or each new product I'm working on. At least with LLMs the dopamine hit comes from being in awe of the code that gets generated and realizing it found every model, every messaging system interface, every API, and figuring out how to make it backwards compatible, updating the UI - something that would take half a day, now in 5 minutes or less.

cs02rm0 151 days ago |

I'm 43. Took a year or so off from contracting after being flat out for years without taking any breaks, just poked around with some personal projects, did some stuff for my wife's company, petitioned the NHS to fix some stuff. Used Claude Code for much of it. Travelled a bit too.

I feel like I turned around and there seem to be no jobs now (500+ applications deep is a lot when you've always been given the first role you'd applied to) unless you have 2+ years commercial AI experience, which I don't, or perhaps want to sit in a SOC, which I don't. It's like a whole industry just disappeared while I had my back turned.

I looked at Java in Google Trends the other day, it doesn't feel like it was that long ago that people were bemoaning how abstracted that was, but it was everywhere. It doesn't seem to be anymore. I've tried telling myself that maybe it's because people are using LLMs to code, so it's not being searched for, but I think the game's probably up, we're in a different era now.

Not sure what I'm going to do for the next 20 years. I'm looking at getting a motorbike licence just to keep busy, but that won't pay the bills.

alex_suzuki 151 days ago | |

I’m 45 and contracted for over a decade before switching to product development. I used to still get inquiries from former customers, mainly for Java and Android work. But since about two years, it’s completely dried up. Anecdotally I’ve been hearing from friends who are still in the contracting/freelancing business that things are very tough right now. It makes sense to me, contractors are usually the first thing businesses cut when they’re either lowering their spending or becoming more efficient themselves.

mpakes 150 days ago |

If you are feeling the way that James does, that the magic is gone... I encourage you to try creating things in a new domain.

Try making music, creating videos, making interactive LED art, building robots, or fabricating toys.

The tools we have today suddenly make it far easier and more fun to experiment with a new craft. What was once daunting is now approachable.

Start by using an AI-powered tool—without shame—to make something superficially 'cool'. Yes, we all know you used a 'cheat code' but that's okay! Now you get to dive in and deconstruct what you created. Tear it apart and learn how and why it works. Go as deep as your motivation carries you. Experiment, hack, and modify.

Just as in software, there will be many many layers of abstraction that you can work through and learn about. Many of them are overflowing with magic and sources of inspiration, I promise.

The gears of capitalism will likely continue to aggressively maximize efficiency wherever possible, and this comes with both benefits and very real costs (some of which are described James's post).. but outside the professional sphere, it appears to me that we are entering a new hobbyist / hacker / creative renaissance. If you can find a way to release enough anxiety and let the curious and creative energy back in, opportunities start showing up everywhere.

sebringj 151 days ago |

idk, i'm loving the newness of all of it, I feel more empowered than ever before, like it's my time. Before startups would take like a year to get going, now it's like a month or so. It's exciting and scary, we have no idea where it's going. Not boring at all. I was getting bored as shit and bam, now i can dream up shit quick and have it validated to, ya i figured that out with an MCP so ya this is my jam. Program MCPs and speed it up!!!!!!

onion2k 151 days ago |

It'd be more strange if the thing you learned 43 years ago was exactly the same today. We should expect change. When that change is positive we call it progress.

bee_rider 151 days ago | |

In the grand scheme of things it wouldn’t actually be that strange: generations and generations of humans were mostly farmers and mostly did the same thing as their parents. Of course technology developed but lots of people did the same job with the same methods their whole lives.

But everybody on this site lived through the first half of a logistic curve so that perspective seems strange to us.

onion2k 151 days ago | | |

Peter Thiel talks about the difference in progress between bits and atoms. Progress in atoms (physical things) moves incredibly slowly, and has done for centuries. Progress in bits (software) moves astonishingly fast. We all work in software. We should not expect things to remain the same for very long because change is easy.

I think it'd be pretty incredible if we hit on the best way to write software 40 years ago when people had only been doing it seriously for a couple of decades. It's no more surprising that we find better approaches to coding than farming improving when the tractor replaced a horse.

Mr_Minderbinder 149 days ago |

> I understood that machine completely.

This claim is frequently made about that era yet ignores the fact it was almost certainly running proprietary software.

bananamogul 151 days ago |

'It’s not a “back in my day” piece.'

That's exactly what it is.

animal531 150 days ago |

Funny, because I started programming when I was 8, and I'm 49 now.

But I'm still having a great time, it really just depends on what you're working on.

sebnukem2 151 days ago |

Oh boy this hits home.

At this point I entered surviving mode, and curious to see where we will be 6 months, 2 years from now. I am pessimistic.

I want to tinker with my beloved Z80 again.

fabiensanglard 151 days ago |

> the VGA Mode X tricks in Doom

Doom does not use mode-X :P ! It uses mode-Y.

That being said as a 47 years old having given 40 years to this thing as well, I can relate to the feeling.

delaminator 151 days ago |

I'm 57. I was there when the ZX81 came out.

I had my first paid programming job when I was 11, writing a database for the guy that we rented our pirate VHS tapes from.

AI is great.

sweetheart 151 days ago |

> I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to

What a poetic ending. So beautiful! And true, in my experience.

TimPC 151 days ago |

I think more than ever programmers need jobs where performance matters and the naive way the AI does things doesn't cut it. When no one cares about things other than correctness your job turns into AI Slop. The good news right now is that AI tends to produce things that AI struggles to do well with so large scale projects often descend into crap. You can write a C-compiler for $20,000 with an explosive stack of agents, but that C-compiler isn't anywhere close to efficient or performant.

As model costs come down that $20,000 will become a viable number for doing entirely AI-generate coding. So more than ever you don't want to be doing work that the AI is good enough at. Either jobs where performance matters or being able to code the stack of agents needed to produce high quality code in an application context.

alex_suzuki 151 days ago | |

I wonder what other “crevices” (as the author put it) exist.

Another commentor mentioned embedded, and after a brief phase of dabbling in that, mainly with nRF5x micros, I tend to agree. Less training data and obtuse tooling.

layer8 151 days ago | |

> When no one cares about things other than correctness

I don’t get the impression that the majority particularly cares about correctness. In fact, it’s one of the weak points of AI.

vln 150 days ago |

The thing I loved has changed.

And I fell in love with it again. I'm learning how to work in this new world and it's fun as hell.

josefrichter 151 days ago |

A bit younger, and exact opposite. Probably the most excited I've ever been about the state of development!

kwar13 151 days ago |

I am younger than the author but damn this somehow hit me hard. I do remember growing up as a kid with a 486...

bmitc 151 days ago |

Humans have a special knack for taking the humanity out of basically anything. It's a bizarre pattern.

dave_sid 151 days ago |

Great post. Good to see someone posting something positive for a change about the shift in development.

28304283409234 151 days ago |

> Cheaper. Faster. But hollowed out.

Given the bazillions poured into it I have yet to see this proven to be cheaper.

elzbardico 151 days ago |

I don't know what these people from our now traditional daily lamentation session are coding where Claude can do all the work for them just with a few prompts and minimal reviews.

Claude is a godsend to me, but fuck, it is sometimes dumb as door, loves to create regressions, is a fucking terrible designer. Small, tiny changes? Those are actually the worse, it is easy for claude, on the first setback, decides to burn the whole world and start from zero again. Not to mention when it gets stuck in an eternal loop where it increasingly degenerates the code.

If I care about what I deliver, I have to actively participate in coding.

franze 151 days ago |

I'm 47 and excited to live in a time of the moat important innovation since the printing press.

mianos 150 days ago |

Why do people use the ' — ' all the time now? It's not a proper English separator.

burnerToBetOut 150 days ago | |

   > Why do people use the
   > ' — ' all the time now?
   > It's not a proper English
   > separator.

Care to take a wild guess where LLMs got it from?

duskdozer 150 days ago | |

LLMs love using them for whatever reason.

burnerToBetOut 150 days ago | | |

    > LLMs love using them
    > for whatever reason

Would you care to take a wild guess where LLMs got them from?

coolvision 150 days ago |

to me, programming has always been about problem solving, not s/w in itself. I love that with more progress in computing I can solve harder challenges, faster. I'm in my 40s and am more excited than ever about my work.

cadamsdotcom 151 days ago |

Abstractions can take away but many add tremendous value.

For example, the author has coded for their entire career on silicon-based CPUs but never had to deal with the shittiness of wire-wrapped memory, where a bit-flip might happen in one place because of a manufacturing defect and good luck tracking that down. Ever since lithography and CPU packaging, the CPU is protected from the elements and its thermal limits are well known and computed ahead of time and those limits baked into thermal management so it doesn’t melt but still goes as fast as we understand to be possible for its size, and we make billions of these every day and have done for over 50 years.

Moving up the stack you can move your mouse “just so” and click, no need to bit-twiddle the USB port (and we can talk about USB negotiation or many other things that happen on the way) and your click gets translated into an action and you can do this hundreds of times a day without disturbing your flow.

Or javascript jit compilation, where the js engine watches code run and emits faster versions of it that make assumptions about types of variables - with escape hatches if the code stops behaving predictably so you don’t get confusing bugs that only happen if the browser jitted some code. Python has something similar. Thanks to these jit engines you can write ergonomic code that in the typical scenario is fast enough for your users and gets faster with each new language release, with no code changes.

Lets talk about the decades of research that went into autoregressive transformer models, instruction tuning, and RLHF, and then chat harnesses. Type to a model and get a response back, because behind the scenes your message is prefixed with “User: “, triggering latent capabilities in the model to hold its end of a conversation. Scale that up and call it a “low key research preview” and you have ChatGPT. Wildly simple idea, massive implications.

These abstractions take you further from the machine and yet despite that they were adopted en masse. You have to account for the ruthless competition out there - each one would’ve been eliminated if they hadn’t proven to be worth something.

You’ll never understand the whole machine so just work at the level you’re comfortable with and peer behind the curtain if and when you need (eg. when optimizing or debugging).

Or to take a moment to marvel.

pfdietz 151 days ago |

I retired a few years ago and it's very clear that was a good thing.

4ndrewl 151 days ago |

and they still call themselves 'full stack developers' :eyeroll:

burnerToBetOut 151 days ago |

    > …Not burnout…

Than meybe wadeAfay? ;)

small_model 151 days ago |

Same as assembly programmers felt when C came along I guess

randcraw 151 days ago | |

I don't think so. A decent C programmer could pretty much imagine how each line of C was translated into assembly, and with certainty, how every byte of data moved through the machine. That's been lost with the rise of higher-level languages, interpreters, their pseudocode, and the explosion of libraries and especially, the rise of cut-and-paste coding. IMO, 90% of today's developers have never thought about how their code connects to the metal. Starting with CS101 in Java, they've always lived entirely within an abstract level of source code. Coding with AI just abstracts that world a couple steps higher, not unlike the way that templates in 4GL languages attempted but failed to achieve, but of course, the abstraction has climbed far beyond that level now. Software craftsmanship has indeed left the building; only the product matters now.

varispeed 151 days ago |

I was happy riding my horse when this dude invented a car.

enricotr 151 days ago |

The deepest thing I read from HN in months. Respect.

suprstarrd 151 days ago |

This is at least partially AI-written, by the way

h4kunamata 150 days ago |

Late 30s here, I have seen:

* dial-up being replaced by DSL

* CAT being replaced with fiber for companies

* VOIP replacing bulk BPX

* Cloud replacing on-prem to an extent

* Cloud services plague now called SaaS

* License for life being replaced by subscription

* AI driving everything to shit literally

The technology is no longer helping anything, it is actually tearing our society apart. Up to 2000s, things were indeed evolution, improvements, better life style be it personal or professional. Since 2000s, Enshitification started, everything gets worse, from services, to workflows, to processes, to products, to laws.

Gen-Z does not realize how bad things are, and how we are no longer becoming smarter but dumber, kids cannot even read but have every single social media account.

If they could spend one day back in early 2000s, the current generation would start a civil war in every single city across the globe.

leesec 151 days ago |

yeah coding is a lot more fun and useful now

recursive 151 days ago | |

It seems fun must be subjective. It seems less fun than ever to me.

cstever 150 days ago | |

It won't be called coding soon; Sometime in the future (soon?) we won't be talking about code. The few leftovers/managers/CEOs will only be talking about products not the code, not programming, not even operating systems. You won't hear about pull requests, or databases, or HTTP or any of that. You won't talk about programmers. At least not outside of "hobbies".

cookiengineer 150 days ago |

This article spoke to me, a lot. I had a similar experience, though I started with a "leftover" C64 that my uncle didn't need anymore when I was a child.

All the magic was in those magazines, where people shared code, optimizations, explanations, and new programs and games. In each of those magazines people were writing letters to the publisher team with their modifications. It was pretty awesome how the community spirit worked and shared the creative enthusiasm through "paper channels" before the online age.

Then came github. Github was amazing, the /explore page was my new tab page for at least the first 5 years. I loved the exploration part of what other humans built, what kind of ideas they had, and where they wanted to go with their projects. I just loved reading code and learning from it.

Now, post github and post LLM, I don't know what this means anymore. Doxxing communities rule the internet, people are abusing hate and misinformation to enforce their political views. The remaining ones try to shield themselves from information overload syndrome.

But what does it mean to contribute now? Are humans now something like Christoph Waltz in Zero Theorem? Algorithm monkeys training the AI at an input console? Is that what humanity envisions as its future these days?

I still build software, but my approach has changed. I am scared for future generations that will have forgotten how to read books, and where the knowledge and hacking spirit has been lost completely. So I am spending the time I have left optimizing for that future, because the trend of short lived media excessively emotionalizing every topic is clearly going there.

Maybe, some day in the future, a kid will read my wiki and be amazed on what you can do with a computer. That's enough motivation for me to keep going.

My goals are pretty clear for now:

- make knowledge decentralizable

- write down all the basics I need to know to exercise my craft

- write tools to combat surveillance, censorship, and cyber warfare

- write tools to share knowledge

sheikhnbake 151 days ago |

At least parts of this were written with AI

ossa-ma 151 days ago |

The irony of these "My craft is dead" posts is that they consistently, heavily leverage AI for their writing. So you're crying about losing one craft to AI while using AI to kill another. It's disingenuous. And yes it is so damn obvious.

coldtea 151 days ago |

>But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening. The abstraction ship sailed decades ago.

Bullshit. While abstraction has increased over time, AI is no mere incremental change. And the almost natural language interaction with an agent is not the same as Typescript over assembly (not to mention you could very well right C or Rust and the like, and know most of the details of the machine by heart, and no, microcode and low level abstractions are not a real counter-argument to that). Even less so if agents turn autonomous and you just herd them onto completion.

bee_rider 151 days ago | |

This LLM stuff is a little weird. Previously we had Python which was pretty close to pseudocode but you could run it directly. Now, these LLMs are one step more abstract, but their outputs aren’t runnable directly, they produce possibly incorrect code-like-text. Actually this seems like good news for programmers since you have to read the code in the lower-level language that gets produced.

kypro 150 days ago |

> I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic

I'm significantly younger than OP, but this was it for me too. I'm autistic and found the world around me confusing growing up. Computers were wonderful because they were the only thing that really made sense to me.

I was obsessed with computers since I was 5. I started programming probably around age 10. Then in my early teens I started creating Flash applications, writing PHP, Java, etc...

When I look back on my early career now it was almost magical. This in the mid to late 00s (late to some I know), but this was before the era of package managers, before resources like Stackoverflow, before modern IDEs. You had some fairly basic frameworks to work with, but that was really about it. Everything else had to be done fully by hand.

This was also before agile was really a thing too. The places I worked at the time didn't have stand-ups or retrospectives. There were no product managers.

It was also before the iPhone and the mass adoption of the internet.

Back then no one went into software engineering as a profession. It was just some thing weird computer kids did, and sometimes businesses would pay us to build them things. Everyone who coded back then I got along with great, now everyone is so normal it's hard for me to relate with me. The industry today is also so money focused.

The thing and bothers me the most though is that computers increasingly act like humans that I need to talk to to get things done, and if that wasn't bad enough I also have to talk with people constantly.

Even the stuff I build sucks. All the useful stuff has been build so in the last decade or so stuff I've built feels increasingly detached from reality. When I started I felt like I was solving real practical problems for companies, now I'm building chatbots and internal dashboards. It's all bollocks.

There was a post recently about builders vs coders (I can't remember exactly). But I'm definitely a coder. I miss coding. There was something rewarding about pouring hours into a HTML design, getting things pixel perfect. Sometimes it felt laborious, but that was part of the craft. Claude Code does a great job and it does it 50x faster than I could, but it doesn't give me the same satisfaction.

I do hope this is my last job in tech. Unfortunately I'm not old enough to retire, but I think I need to find something better suited to my programatic way of thinking. I quite like the idea of doing construction or some other manual labour job. Seems like they're still building things by hand and don't have so many stupid meetings all the time.

themafia 151 days ago |

> I’ve had that experience. And losing it — even acknowledging that it was lost

What are you talking about? You don't know how 99% of the systems in your own body work yet they don't confront you similarly. As if this "knowledge" is a switch that can be on or off.

> I gave 42 years to this thing, and the thing changed into something I’m not sure I recognise anymore.

Stop doing it for a paycheck. You'll get your brain back.

yalue 150 days ago |

Pathetically hypocritical to use AI to write this blog post when generic copy editors have been hit way harder by AI than programmers.

duskdozer 150 days ago | |

The whole blog is really bizarre, and LLM-generated

>The real AI risk isn't job loss — it's epistemic

>This morning I had a ChatGPT conversation that started about engagement metrics and ended up with a systematic destruction of my identity.

https://www.jamesdrandall.com/posts/real-ai-risk-isnt-job-lo...

russfink 150 days ago |

I must be the only one who thinks this, but this is the age of getting things done. I don’t have to worry about syntax or off by one errors, I tell it what to do and it generally does it, instantly!

Oh, and I’m 57 and was programming the Commodore Pet when I was 11. I’m relieved to be (mostly) free of syntactic shackles.

Vote me down, but also prove me wrong.

PaulDavisThe1st 150 days ago |

So tired of this sort of complaint (and I'm 62).

The computing the author enjoyed/enjoys is still out there, they are just looking for it in all the wrong places. Forget about (typical) web development (with its front and backend stacks). Forget about windows and macOS, and probably even mobile (though maybe not).

Hobby projects. C++/Rust/C/Go/some-current-Lisp. Maybe even Zig! Unix/Linux. Some sort of hardware interaction. GPL, so you can share and participate in a world of software created by people a lot more like you and a lot less like Gates and Jobs and Zuckerberg and ...

Sure, corporate programming generally tends to suck, but it always did. You can still easily do what you always loved, but probably not as a job.

At 62, as a native desktop C++ app developer doing realtime audio, my programming is as engrossing, cool, varied and awesome as it has ever been (probably even more so, since the GPL really has won in the world I live in). It hasn't been consumed by next-new-thing-ism, it hasn't been consumed by walled platforms, it hasn't been taken over by massive corporations, and it still very much involves Cool Stuff (TM).

Stop whining and start doing stuff you love.

pzo 150 days ago | |

Sure enjoy your retirement. But for me it's annoying some late 50s+ people telling what you just did. Think about people who are in their 20s or 30s - they are not even halfway through their path to retirement and some maybe even still paying out student debt.

> Stop whining and start doing stuff you love.

You have to understand that it's hard to do stuff that you love when you have to feed your family and pay mortgage or rent. Not everyone can be or want to be entrepreneur.

You are just talking from perspective of someone who already paid all debts raised all kids and now enjoying or soon will be enjoying retirement - at least meaning you can retire even if maybe don't want to.

PaulDavisThe1st 150 days ago | | |

Retired? I'm not retired and likely won't be for another 8 years.

> But for me it's annoying some late 50s+ people telling what you just did.

The author of TFA is at least 50!

> You are just talking from perspective of someone who already paid all debts raised all kids

That part is true. But that was more or less true when I was 50, too.

Finally, the article wasn't about the shitty economic world that we've created for so many people, it was about how programming has changed. Those two are inter-related but they are not the same.

codr7 151 days ago |

It's not like it's changing by itself, you can always opt out of the slop race and scratch your itches instead.

https://gitlab.com/codr7/rem

spenrose 151 days ago |

“... when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed”

Welcome to the human condition, my friend. The good news is that a plurality of novels, TV shows, country songs, etc. can provide empathy for and insight into your experience.

throwawaymeta01 151 days ago |

same bud.

maybe that just means it's a maturing field and we gotta adapt?

yes, the promise has changed, but you still gotta do it for the love of the game. anything else doesnt work.

RVuRnvbM2e 150 days ago |

Another victim of the LLM-induced malaise many are calling "Deep Blue".

realaaa 150 days ago |

good, quality rant ! lots of people can relate I am sure - but yes, this is a change we all need to adapt to now

Yours Truly Captain Obvious

schlap 151 days ago |

Old Man Yells at Clouds

lbrito 151 days ago | |

I'd feel the same when I was younger. Over time I've realized that they are the lucky ones. You too, if you're lucky, will one day be an old man doing old man things.

phendrenad2 151 days ago | |

Old Man Yells at Claude

SELECT CASE WHEN t.FLD4_TXT IN ('CCS', 'CAC', 'DEBT', ..... 'ZBBR') THEN '37772BCA2221' WHEN t.FLD4_TXT IN ('STCB') AND ISNULL(s.FLD5_TXT, s.FLD1_TXT) = 'X' THEN 'EUMKRT090011' END as [Id When CounterParty Has No Valid LEI in Region] -- remember, this is around 5000 lines long ....

> …I suspect going a more visual block > diagram route, to generate some > intermediate .md or whatever, might have > promise, especially for defining clear > bounds/separation of concerns…