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

Haha! Your analogy doesn't work on multiple levels. Firstly, if you're outsourcing your work to AI you're not the engineer anymore. A civil engineer is different from a manager of a civil engineering project. Just like I wouldn't call myself an artist if I got AI to generate me some art, I wouldn't call myself a software engineer if I got AI to write all the code for me.

Secondly, it's not just about "enjoying the journey of construction", it's also about caring about the quality of the end results. Getting vibe coded software that is as stable as a "bridge that is safe and lasts for a century" is not a matter of careful engineering decisions, it's mostly a matter of luck, because you don't have the necessary oversight in the quality of the output unless you're doing extensive reviews of the generated code, at which point you greatly diminish the time you're supposedly saving.

> This has been 100% my experience. I enjoy the puzzle solving and the general joy of organizing and pulling things together. I could really care less about the end result to meet some business need. The fun part is in the building, it's in the understanding, the growth of me.

Quite a few of the projects I always wanted to do have components or dependencies I really don't want to do. And as a result, I never did them, unless they eventually became viable to do in a commercial setting where I then had some junior developer to make the annoying stuff go away.

Now with LLMs I have my own junior developer to handle the annoying stuff - and as a result, a lot of my fun stuff I was thinking about in the last 3 decades finally got done.

One example from just last week - I had a large C codebase from the 90s I always wanted to reuse, but modern compilers have a different idea of how C should look like. It's pretty obvious from the compiler errors what you need to do each case, but I wasn't really in the mood for manually going through hundreds of source files. So I just stuck a locally running qwen coder in yolo mode into a container, forgot about it for a week, and came back to a compiling code base. Diff is quick to review, only had a handful of cases where it needed manual intervention.

It depends on what you enjoy more — building the pieces or putting the pieces together in clever ways.

I'm more on the second group so LLMs let me get to that part faster without having to get bogged on in the "small stuff".

But I do get the people that enjoy the craftsmanship of the finer details instead.

There is some joy in catching the LLM in a house of cards misunderstanding of how something works. They’ll weave really convincing fictions about from a bit of debugging. Then the Socratic probing of that can be fun. In part because the LLM tries to use big words to often seem smart.

Then you hopefully capture that information somehow in a future prompt, documentation, test, or other agent guardrail.

So I finds fun in the knowledge engineering of it all. The meta practice of building up a knowledge base in how to solve problems like this codebase.

I was never a coder, but I can understand this frustration. For some, the efficiency is probably really exciting, but for those who really enjoyed solving the puzzles, something is lost. For me personally, AI and vibe-coding have opened up a whole new world (I built a mobile app), but I get why it's killing the passion for some.