I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion

[dead]

I'm the cohost of the Practical AI podcast, which is one of the world's most popular AI podcasts, and we regularly discuss this topic in our shows.

https://practicalai.fm

Here's my two cents...

I'm 55 years old and been programming since I was 10.

Yes, programming has forever changed - especially since Opus 4.5 was released in late November. Programmers who don't use AI models and agents are obsolete in a professional context. It's not a question of journey versus destination. It's that the nature of the journey has changed and productive velocity has significantly increased. Embrace it just like you have presumably embraced every other productivity improvement over the decades. Most of us aren't coding assembly any more because pre-AI tools and languages accelerated our productivity. Now it's time to do that again, recognizing that the journey may be a different experience from the coding process you love, but we're not yet going from "Hello, World" to large complex production-ready systems in a single prompt.

I point out that if you're programming for personal satisfaction rather than professionally, then nothing has changed. Use AI or don't use AI; whatever works for you. You have the luxury of being a hobbyist.

> If I wanted to become a project manager I would have become one.

It's not so much a project manager. I have something I want to build, I create the plan and work slowly through it with Claude. Stopping at every piece and reviewing as I go.

I can confirm the code is good, but also when it takes a different approach I question why it took that approach. Occasionally I learn something.

> who just wants the end result regardless of how it's made.

Sometimes you want the app but don't care how it gets created, because its helping you focus on what you really want to do. For example I created a mindmap App in XCode on-par with XMind. Not every feature, but everything I use.

> An engineer can delegate -- period.

Yes and no. Engineering does involve delegation but what defines an engineer is is what work they do, not what work they pass onto others.

If it helps you understand this, consider the role of an engineer as someone that makes engineering decisions. If you give a specification to a colleague and ask them to write code for you, then you're delegating those engineering decisions. When you write high level code, yes you allow a compiler or interpreter to determine how to turn your instructions into machine code, but you have made engineering decisions in order to design the end result. If you give instructions via product specifications, then you have acted as a project manager or business analyst, not as an engineer.

To use another analogy, imagine you are a chef and you go to eat at a restaurant you don't work in. When you order from the menu, you are not a chef at that moment, even if your background suggests you are capable of being one. Similarly, ordering code from an AI agent does not give you the right to call yourself an engineer when doing so, as you did very little of the real engineering work to produce the end result.

> If all you do is write code you're not an engineer.

Engineering requires thought and application of thought, and if you're outsourcing both then you don't qualify as an engineer.

> The engineer who spends 90% of his time architecting systems and testing them at a high level is making safer and more stable software than the codemonkey who spends 90% of his time tinkering with the details.

The devil is in the details. A technical architect that doesn't understand the tradeoffs in the designs they're specifying isn't worth the money they earn.

> Who said anything about "saving time"?

Almost everyone that is selling the benefits of AI. Clearly you haven't been paying attention to industry trends.

It's just a different journey. Now you need to define your architecture and requirements up front in documents, understand models and their cost/capabilities, do detailed reviews of any generated code, basically manage modern CI/CD software developement with a set of new tools. You can certainly write detailed code if you want, and probably should regularly to keep up to speed. Developing software these past few decades has been very inefficient and way more expensive than it should have been. It doesn't surprise me that technology has evolved to solve these problems. Analogy: We can still construct building using manual artisans but leveraging machinery and modern architecture techniques makes sense doesn't it?