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

I prefer to see it as the automtion of the IT age.

All other professions had their time when technology came and automated things.

For example wood carvers, blacksmiths, butchers, bakers, candlestickmakers etc etc. All of those professions have been mostly taken over by machines in factories.

I view 'ai' as new machines in factories for producing code. We have reached the point where we have code factories which can produce things much more efficiently and quicker than any human can alone.

Where the professions still thrive is in the artisan market. There is always demand for hand crafted things which have been created with love and care.

I am hoping this stays true for my coding analogy. Then people who really care about making a good product will still have a market from customers who want something different from the mass produced norm.

It's also that when you move to being a leader, you suddenly have to learn to quantify and measure your productivity in a different way, which for a while can really do a number on your self-image.

What does it mean to be a productive developer in an AI tooling age? We don't quite know yet and it's also shifting all the time, so it becomes difficult to sort yourself into the range stably. For a lot of accomplished folks this is the first time they've felt that level of insecurity in a while, and it takes some getting used to.

I'm 57. I was there when the ZX81 came out.

I had my first paid programming job when I was 11, writing a database for the guy that we rented our pirate VHS tapes from.

AI is great.

I think more than ever programmers need jobs where performance matters and the naive way the AI does things doesn't cut it. When no one cares about things other than correctness your job turns into AI Slop. The good news right now is that AI tends to produce things that AI struggles to do well with so large scale projects often descend into crap. You can write a C-compiler for $20,000 with an explosive stack of agents, but that C-compiler isn't anywhere close to efficient or performant.

As model costs come down that $20,000 will become a viable number for doing entirely AI-generate coding. So more than ever you don't want to be doing work that the AI is good enough at. Either jobs where performance matters or being able to code the stack of agents needed to produce high quality code in an application context.

At least then you’re being honest about you hating your intended audience, and not proudly posting the slop vomited forth from your algorithmic garbage machine as if it were something that deserved the time, thought and consideration of your equals.