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...