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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

#41

Post by nightski »

chasd00 wrote: post #27

What the author describes is also the feeling when you shift from being a developer all day to being a team lead or manager. When you become a lead you have to let go and get comfortable with the idea that the code is not going to be how you would do it. You can look at code produced by your team and attempt to replace it all with your craftsmanship but you're just setting yourself up to fail. The right approach is u…

It's fun managing a bunch of inexperienced juniors when there are no consequences (aka the infamous personal projects). It's a lot more stressful when it matters.

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

#42

Post by sho_hn »

gustavopezzi wrote: post #29

Thank you for writing this. My feelings are very similar to the ones described by the author and the timeline almost matches. The thrill of tecnology for me started to fast decay since the early 2010s and now I see it as a no-return stage. I still have fun with my retro hardware & software but I am no longer an active practitioner and I have pivoted my attention and my efforts somewhere else. Unfortunately, I no long…

I think this is something else, though. Even before AI really hit sweng, there were early signs of a collective tech depression a la "The best idea we can come up with is strapping screens to people's heads?", the "Are we the bad guys?" convo around social media, the crypto brain drain, etc. The queue of Next Big Things has increasingly felt more forced and controversial to many, and being in tech last lost much of its lustre to them.

I think it's healthy for everyone to evaluate whether one's personal reaction to AI is colored by this trend, or whether it's really being evaluated independently. Because while I share many of the negative feelings listed earlier, to me AI does still feel different; it has a lot more real utility.

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

#43

Post by tndibona »

gustavopezzi wrote: post #29

Thank you for writing this. My feelings are very similar to the ones described by the author and the timeline almost matches. The thrill of tecnology for me started to fast decay since the early 2010s and now I see it as a no-return stage. I still have fun with my retro hardware & software but I am no longer an active practitioner and I have pivoted my attention and my efforts somewhere else. Unfortunately, I no long…

What else do you do to make rent ? I feel the same way as you and I have no idea what else pays well for quality craftsmanship. I am staring at the abyss of hyper intelligent people with posh resumes and now wondering what to do.

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

#44

Post by atan2 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #32

Please stop upvoting these posts. We have gotten to the point where both the front page and new page is polluted with these laments It’s literally the same argument over and over and it’s the same comments over and over and over HN will either get back to interesting stuff or simply turn into a support group for aging “coders” that refuse to adapt I’m going to start flagging these as spam

The article talks about human vs technology and the loss of connection between creation, intent, ownership, and control. Don't be condescending.

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

#45

Post by recursive »

NiloCK wrote: post #33
thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking directly, if I catch the scent of ChatGPT, it's over. People put out AI text, primarily, to run hustles. So its writing style is a kind of internet version of "talking like a used car salesman". With some people that's fine, but anyone with a healthy epistemic immune system is not going to listen to you. If you want to save a few minutes, you'll just have to accept that.

What's your target false positive rate? I mean, obviously you can't know your actual error rates, but it seems useful to estimate a number for this and to have a rough intuition for what your target rate is. Did chatGPT write this response?

This is how LLMs poison the discourse.

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

#46

Post by mrcwinn »

Professional development is changing dramatically. Nothing stops anyone from coding "the old way," though. Your hobby project remains yours, exactly the way you want it. Your professional project, on the other hand, was never about you in the first place. It's always about the customer/audience/user, period full stop.

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

#47

Post by zozbot234 »

There's nothing "hollowed out" about directing an AI effectively, the feedback is as quick and tight as it always was. The trick is that you don't just "vibe code" and let the AI one-shot the whole thing: you should propose the change first and ask the AI about a good, detailed plan for implementing it. Then you review what the robot has proposed (which is trivial compared to revising code!) make sensible changes, ask for feedback again, and repeat. By the time the AI bot has to write actual code, it's not running on vibes anymore: it's been told exactly what to do and how to assess the result. You spend more time upfront, but a lot less on fixing the AI's mistakes.

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

#48

Post by alexgarden »

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 are rediscovering the magic that got them involved as engineers in the first place" I vividly remember, staying up all night to hand-code assembler primitive rendering libraries, the first time I built a voxel rendering engine and thinking it was like magic what you could do on a 486... I remember the early days at Relic, working on Homeworld and thinking we were casting spells, not writing software. Honestly, that magic faded and died for me. I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned.

These days, I've never been more excited about engineering. The tedium of the background wiring is gone. I'm back to creating new, magical things - I'm up at 2 AM again, sitting at my desk in the dark, surrounded by the soft glow of monitors and casting spells again.

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

#49

Post by AndrewKemendo »

atan2 wrote: post #44
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #32

Please stop upvoting these posts. We have gotten to the point where both the front page and new page is polluted with these laments It’s literally the same argument over and over and it’s the same comments over and over and over HN will either get back to interesting stuff or simply turn into a support group for aging “coders” that refuse to adapt I’m going to start flagging these as spam

The article talks about human vs technology and the loss of connection between creation, intent, ownership, and control. Don't be condescending.

…like every other post of this kind

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

#50

Post by paulmooreparks »

I'm 55 and I started at age 13 on a TI-99/4A, then progressed through Commodore 64, Amiga 2000, an Amiga XT Sidecar, then a real XT, and on and on. DOS, Windows, Unix, the first Linux. I ran a tiny BBS and felt so excited when I heard the modem singing from someone dialing in. The first time I "logged into the Internet" was to a Linux prompt. Gopher was still a bigger thing than the nascent World-Wide Web.

The author is right. The magic has faded. It's sad. I'm still excited about what's possible, but it'll never create that same sense of awe, that knowledge that you can own the entire system from the power coming from the wall to the pixels on your screen.

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