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

jamesdrandall.com

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

#121

Post by FeteCommuniste »

abraxas wrote: post #69

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 t…

> 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?

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

#122

Post by dingnuts »

xtracto wrote: post #106
alexgarden wrote: post #48

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…

Yes yes yes!!! I'm 45 yo. And also started programming quite early around 1988. In my case it was GWBAsic games and then C ModeX and A Later Allegro based games. Things got so boring in the last 15 years, I got some joy in doing AI research (ML, agents, Genetic Algorithms, etc). But now, it's so cool how I can again think about something and build it so easily. I'm really excited of what I can do now. And im ot talki…

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

#123

Post by sisnxb »

alt227 wrote: post #114
summa_tech wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue at the core of the analogy is that factories, traditional factories, excel at making a ton of one thing (or small variations thereof). The big productivity gains came from highly reliable, repeatable processes that do not accommodate substantial variation. This rigidity of factory production is what drives the existence of artisan work: it can always easily distinguish itself from the mass product.…

What assembly lines and factories did for other manufacturing processes is to make it feasable for any person to be able to make those things. In the past only very skilled professionals were able to create such things, but mechanisation and breaking down manufacturing processes into small chunks made the same things be able to be achieved by low skilled workers. IMO that is exactly what is happening here. Ai is maki…

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

#124

Post by fourside »

GMoromisato wrote: post #70

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…

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.

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

#125

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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

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

#126

Post by anonymous908213 »

alexgarden wrote: post #48

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…

> I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned.

This seems like a false dichotomy. You don't have to do this. It is still possible to build magical things. But agents aren't it, I don't think.

It is honestly extremely depressing to read this coming from a founder of Relic. Relic built magic. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes formed an important part of my teenage years. I formed connections, spent thousands of hours enjoying them together with other people, and pushed myself hard to become one of the top 100 players on the CoH leaderboards. Those competitive multiplayer games taught me everything there was to know about self-improvement, and formed the basis of my growth as an individual - learning that if I put my mind to it, I could be among the best at something, informed my worldview and led me to a life of perpetually pushing myself to further self-improvement, and from there I learned to code, draw, and play music. All of that while being part of amazing communities where I formed friendships that lasted decades.

All of this to say, Relic was magic. The work Relic did profoundly impacted my life. I wonder if you really believe your current role, "building trust infrastructure for AI agents", is actually magic? That it's going to profoundly impact the lives of thousands or millions?

I'm sorry for the jumbled nature of this post. I am on my phone, so I can't organize my thoughts as well as I would like. I am grateful to you for founding Relic, and this post probably comes off stupidly combative and ungrateful. But I would simply like to pose to you, to have a long think if what you're doing now is really where the magic is.

Edit: On further consideration, it's not clear the newly-created account I'm responding to is actually Alex Garden. The idea of potentially relating this personal anecdote to an impersonator is rather embarrassing, but I will nonetheless leave this up in the hope that if there are people who built magical things reading this, regardless of whether they're Alex Garden or someone else, that it might just inspire them to introspection about what building magic means, about the impact software can have on people's lives even if you don't see it, and whether this "agent" stuff is really it.

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

#127

Post by aabajian »

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.

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

#128

Post by jayd16 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #92
sho_hn wrote: post #14

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…

> If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.

Hope: I want to become a stronger dev.

Reality: Promoted to management (of AI) without the raise or clout or the reward of mentoring.

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

#129

Post by FeteCommuniste »

qalmakka wrote: post #119

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 s…

> 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.

Same. It scratches my riddle-solving itch in a way that the process of "prompt-honing" has yet to do.

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

#130

Post by post-it »

benlivengood wrote: post #117

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 a…

> 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.

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