Old Man Yells at Clouds
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.
I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
181–190 of 697 posts
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#182I 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.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#183> 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.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just told my gardener to cut the grass and work on some flower installations. I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some. Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making me enjoy gardening again!
*I'm so excited about landscape design. Can't wait to do more. Employing a gardener to do the gardening for me is really making me enjoy landscape design again!
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Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#185[deleted]
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#186Wow... 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 just told my gardener to cut the grass and work on some flower installations. I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some. Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making me enjoy gardening again!
As mosburger says, this is a great analogy. Do you think that the great artists paint, sculpt, and draw everything by hand, by themselves? Of course not... they never did, and they don't today. You're being offered the ability to join their ranks.
It's your studio now. You have a staff of apprentices standing by, eager for instructions and commands. And you act like it's the worst thing that ever happened to you.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a part of it, but I also feel like a Luddite (the historical meaning, not the derogatory slang). I do use these tools, clearly see their potential, and know full well where this is going: capital is devaluing labor. My skills will become worthless. Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there. If I could destroy these things…
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You can reject the ideas in the aggregate. Regardless, for the individual, your skills are being devalued, and what used to be a reliable livelihood tied to a real craft is going to disappear within a decade or so. Best of luck
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#188I 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.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#189Wow... 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…
In the second half of my 40s now and I'm in the same boat. I started slapping keys on a c64 when I was 2 years old. Really enjoyed software development until 10-15 years ago. With the current LLM tooling available the number of systems I've been able to build that are novel and tackle significant problems has been kind of mind blowing over the past 8 months or so.
Staying up late, hacking away at stuff like I used to, and it's been a blast.
Finally, Homeworld was awesome and it felt magical playing it.
Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
#190The 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.
I felt the same. I resonate with the message, but it really rings hollow with so much AI directing.
I'd wish people would stop doing that. AI writing isn't even particularly good. Its not like it makes you into Dostoevsky, it just sloppifies your writing with the same lame mannerisms ("wasn't just X — it was Y"), the same short paragraphs, the same ems.