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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

#61

Post by 52-6F-62 »

cenamus wrote: post #31
pixl97 wrote: post #25

A blacksmith was a person that picked up chunks of carbon and heated them to they were glowing red and beat the iron to submission with a hammer in their hands. Today iron is produced by machines in factories by the mega-tonne. We just happened to live in the age where code when from being beaten by hand to a mass produced product. And so the change of technology goes.

And the blacksmiths losing their jobs are not allowed to feel bad about it?

No. By this logic, if they wanted to stay with the times they should have sought capital investment for their own industrial forges, joined their local lodges, climbed the ranks, lobbied their governments for loose safety regulations, and plied their workers with propaganda about how "we're in a recession and have to tighten our belts".

Think of the wonderful world we could have if everyone just got their shit together and became paper trillionaire technocrats.

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

#62

Post by cs02rm0 »

I'm 43. Took a year or so off from contracting after being flat out for years without taking any breaks, just poked around with some personal projects, did some stuff for my wife's company, petitioned the NHS to fix some stuff. Used Claude Code for much of it. Travelled a bit too.

I feel like I turned around and there seem to be no jobs now (500+ applications deep is a lot when you've always been given the first role you'd applied to) unless you have 2+ years commercial AI experience, which I don't, or perhaps want to sit in a SOC, which I don't. It's like a whole industry just disappeared while I had my back turned.

I looked at Java in Google Trends the other day, it doesn't feel like it was that long ago that people were bemoaning how abstracted that was, but it was everywhere. It doesn't seem to be anymore. I've tried telling myself that maybe it's because people are using LLMs to code, so it's not being searched for, but I think the game's probably up, we're in a different era now.

Not sure what I'm going to do for the next 20 years. I'm looking at getting a motorbike licence just to keep busy, but that won't pay the bills.

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

#64

Post by bee_rider »

coldtea wrote: post #13

> But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening. The abstraction ship sailed decades ago. Bullshit. While abstraction has increased over time, AI is no mere incremental change. And the almost natural language interaction with an agent is not the same as Typescript over assembly (not to mention you could very well right C or Rust and the like, and know most of the details of the machine by heart, and…

This LLM stuff is a little weird. Previously we had Python which was pretty close to pseudocode but you could run it directly. Now, these LLMs are one step more abstract, but their outputs aren’t runnable directly, they produce possibly incorrect code-like-text. Actually this seems like good news for programmers since you have to read the code in the lower-level language that gets produced.

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

#65

Post by lowbloodsugar »

cenamus wrote: post #31
pixl97 wrote: post #25

A blacksmith was a person that picked up chunks of carbon and heated them to they were glowing red and beat the iron to submission with a hammer in their hands. Today iron is produced by machines in factories by the mega-tonne. We just happened to live in the age where code when from being beaten by hand to a mass produced product. And so the change of technology goes.

And the blacksmiths losing their jobs are not allowed to feel bad about it?

Some of them feel bad about it and some of them refined metallurgy to build Saturn V rockets and go to space. We are very much living in the new space race. The discussion here is split 50/50 between the “Thank you! I feel the same way” folks and the “I am having the time of my life!” folks.

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

#66

Post by randusername »

A lot of that magic still remains in embedded.

If vendors can't be bothered to use a C compiler from the last decade, I don't think they'll be adopting AI anytime soon.

At my work, as of 2026, we only now have a faction riled up about evangelizing clean code, OOP, and C++ design patterns. I hope the same delay keeps for all the rest of the "abstraction tower".

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

#67

Post by newsoftheday »

pixl97 wrote: post #25

A blacksmith was a person that picked up chunks of carbon and heated them to they were glowing red and beat the iron to submission with a hammer in their hands. Today iron is produced by machines in factories by the mega-tonne. We just happened to live in the age where code when from being beaten by hand to a mass produced product. And so the change of technology goes.

Blacksmiths were replaced by factories which produced deterministic products with 100% predictability.

AI can't produce code yet with 100% predictability. If that day ever arrives, the blacksmith analogy will be apt.

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

#68

Post by rootusrootus »

cenamus wrote: post #31
pixl97 wrote: post #25

A blacksmith was a person that picked up chunks of carbon and heated them to they were glowing red and beat the iron to submission with a hammer in their hands. Today iron is produced by machines in factories by the mega-tonne. We just happened to live in the age where code when from being beaten by hand to a mass produced product. And so the change of technology goes.

And the blacksmiths losing their jobs are not allowed to feel bad about it?

Especially anyone in their 40s or 50s who is close enough to retirement that a career shift is unappealing but far enough from retirement that a layoff now would meaningfully change that timeline or QOL. I don't blame people for feeling uneasy.

I'm probably 7 or 8 years from an easy retirement myself, so I can appreciate how that feels. Nobody really wants to feel disruption at this age, especially when they're the breadwinner for a family.

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

#69

Post by abraxas »

I'm the exact age as the author and this post could have been written by me (if I could write). It echoes my story and sentiment exactly right down to cutting my literal baby teeth on a rubber key ZX Spectrum.

The anxiety I have that the author might not be explicitly stating is that as we look for places we add genuine value in the crevices of frontier models' shortcomings those crevices are getting more narrow by the day and a bit harder to find.

Just last night I worked with Claude and at the end of the evening I had it explain to me what we actually did. It was a "Her" (as in the movie) moment for me where the AI was now handholding me and not the other way around.

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

#70

Post by GMoromisato »

I'm lucky because I work as an independent consultant. I get paid to deliver solutions, but I get to choose how to create those solutions. I write whatever code I want however I want. As long as it solves the problem, no one cares.

I started programming in 1980, and I having just as much fun now as I did then. I literally cannot wait to sit down at my IDE and start writing.

But that was not always true. When I worked for a larger company, even some startups, it was not always fun. There's something about having full control over my environment that makes the work feel like play.

If you feel like programming isn't fun anymore, maybe switching to a consulting gig will help. It will give you the independence and control that you might be craving.

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