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

As others have said, it's not so much that tinkering opportunities don't exist. It's more there's a slump in the market of doing relatively easy jobs for money. You can hack on esp32 all day, but there aren't many ways to make money doing so. Making software for the iPhone was (and is still, at this point) a pretty good gig.

I figure auto mechanics contended with this 25 years ago. Now it's hard to find someone to replace your water pump, if your vehicle even has one. Like auto mechanics, though, these machines still exist and there's still a big market for those skills. It might just require more legwork to find that work.

Six months ago, we _literally did not have Claude Code_. We had MCP, A2A and IDE integrations, but we didn't have an app where you could say "build me an ios app that does $thing" and have it build the damn thing start to finish.

Three months ago, we didn't have Opus 4.5, which almost everyone is saying is leaps and bounds better than previous models. MCP and A2A are mostly antiquated. We also didn't have Claude Desktop, which is trying to automate work in general.

Three _weeks_ ago, we didn't have Clawdbot/Openclaw, which people are using to try and automate as much of their lives as possible...and succeeding.

Things are changing outrageously fast in this space.

I feel like the nondeterminism makes LLM-assisted programming a different sort of concept than using a compiler. Your prompt isn't your source code.

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

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.