alt Hacker NewsI started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
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My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI.
My experience so far is that to a first approximation, the quality of the code/software generated with AI corresponds to the quality of the developer using the AI tool surprisingly well. An inexperienced, bad dev will still generate a sub-par result while a great dev can produce great results.
The choices involved in using these tools are also not as binary as they are often made out to be, especially since agents have taken off. You can very much still decide to dedicate part of your day to chiseling away at important code to make it just right and make sure your brain is engaged in the result and exploring and growing with the problem at hand, while feeding background queues of agents with other tasks.
I would in fact say the biggest challenge of the AI tool revolution in terms of what to adapt to is just good ol' personal time management.
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" <-- paraphrased for brevity.
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.
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 use your wisdom to make the team better, not the code. I think a lot of that applies to using AI when coding.
I'm turning 50 in April and am pretty excited about AI coding assistants. They make a lot of personal projects I've wanted to do but never had the time feasible.
I am much younger than the author, but I've been coding for most of my life and I find close to no joy in using AIs. For me coding has always been about the nitty-gritty quirkiness of computers, languages, solving issues and writing new cool things for the sake of it. It was always more about the journey than the end goal, and AI basically hollows out all of the interesting bits about coding. It feels like skipping straight to the end of a book, or somewhat like that.
I don't know if I am the only one, but developing with chatbots in my experience turns developing software into something that feels more akin to filling out forms or answering to emails. I grieve for the day we'll lose what was once a passion of mine, but unfortunately that's how the world has always worked. We can only accept that times change, and we should follow them instead of complaining about it.
> I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I’m fifty now, and the magic is different, and I’m learning to sit with that.
Don't take this the wrong way but this is more of an age thing rather than a technology advancement thing.
Kids growing up nowadays that are interested in computers grow up feeling the same magic. That magic is partly derived from not truly understanding the thing you are doing and creating a mental "map" by yourself. There is nothing intrinsic to computing nowadays that makes it less magic than fiddling around with config.sys, in 50 years there will be old programmers reminiscing of "Remember when all new models were coming out every few months and we could fiddle around with the vector dimensionality and chunking length to get the best of gpt-6.2 RAG? Those were the times".
It seems AI is putting senior developers into two camps. Both groups relate to the statement, "I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I’m fifty now, and the magic is different, and I’m learning to sit with that."
The difference is that the first camp is re-experiencing that feeling of wonder while the second camp is lamenting it. I thankfully fall in the first camp. AI is allowing me to build things I couldn't, not due to a lack of skills, but a lack of time. Do you want to spend all your time building the app user interface, or do you want to focus on that core ability that makes your program unique? Most of us want the latter, but the former takes up so much time.
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 longer feel excited for the future decades of tech and I am distancing myself from it.
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.
6 or 7 , 38 now -- and having a blast.
it isn't all funeral marches and group crying sessions.
And don't let the blog post fool you , it is a rant about AI -- otherwise we would have heard complaints about the last 200 paradigm shifts in the industry over the past thirty years.
Sure, we got our share of dilbert-style agile/waterfall/tdd jokes shoved in our face, but no one wrote a blog post about how their identity was usurped by the waterfall model .
>And different in a way that challenges the identity I built around it and doesn’t satisfy in the way it did.
Everyone should do their own thing, but might I suggest that it is dangerous for anyone in this world to use a single pillar as their foundation for all identity and plinth of their character.
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.
I'm 60, started with a Tandy Model I in junior high, learned 6809 assembly for my Color Computer, loved the fact we could put certain values in particular memory positions and change the video mode and put pixels to the screen. It's been decades of losing that level of control, but for me coding is the fun part. I've never lost that spark of enjoyment and really obsession I felt early on. I enjoy the supposedly boring job of writing SQL and C with embedded SQL and working with business concepts to produce solutions. Coding is the fun part for me, even now.
I got moved up the chain to management and later worked to get myself moved back down to a dev role because I missed it and because I was running into the Peter Principle. I use AI to learn new concepts, but mostly as a search engine. I love the tech behind it, but I don't want it coding for me any more than I want it playing my video games for me. I was hoping AI would show up as robots doing my laundry, not doing the thing I most enjoy.
I'm a developer, mid/late fifties. My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20, so I guess I started writing code at about the same time as the OP even if I'm a few years older.
Yes, I mourn the end of my craft and all that that. But also:
This isn't the end of hand-written code. A few will still get paid to do it in niche domains. Some will do it as a hobby or craft activity - like oil painting or furniture making. The tooling will move on and become more specialised and expensive. Like owning Japanese woodworking tools.
But software construction as a human-based economic activity is clearly about to slam hard into a singularity, and many of us who rely on our hard-won skills to pay the bills and survive are going to find ourselves unemployed and unemployable. A few early adopters will get to stay on and sip their artesanal coffee and "build beautiful things" while their agent herds toil. But most of us won't. Software has always mostly been just CRUD apps, and that is going to need a whole lot less people going forward. People like me, perhaps, or you.
Some, who have sufficient financial and chronological runway, will go off and do other things. Many won't have that opportunity. I have personal experience of late-career unemployment - although I'm currently working - and its not pretty. A lot of lives are going to to be irreparably disrupted by this. Personally, I'd hoped that I could make it through to some stable kind of retirement, but I just don't see it anymore.
Having been in this game about 10 years longer I can understand how he feels. I distinctly remember when I realized that C compilers for the ARM produced better assembly than I could code by hand. Bitter sweet but the code being written became larger and more complex because of it.
Modern coding has become more complex than I would have ever thought possible. The number of technologies an individual would have to master to actually be a expert "full stack" coder is ludicrous. It is virtually impossible for an individual to prototype a complex Web based app by themselves. I think AI will lower that barrier.
In return we will get a lot more software - probably of dubious quality in many cases - as people with "ideas" but little knowledge start making apps. Not a totally bad thing but no utopia either. I also think it will likely reduce the amount of open source software. Content producers are already hoarding info to prevent AI bots from scraping it. I see no reason to believe this will not extend to code as more programmers find themselves in a situation more akin to musicians than engineers.
The contrast between this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46923543 (Software engineering is back) is kind of stark. I am using frontier models to get fun technical projects done that I simply didn't have time for since my late teens. It is still possible to understand an architecture down to the hardware if you want to, but it can happen a lot faster. The specifications are queryable now. Obscure bugs that at least one person has seen in the past are seconds away instead of minutes or hours of searching. Even new bugs have extra eyes on them. I haven't written a new operating system yet but it's now a tractable problem. So is using Lean or Julia or some similar system to formally specify it. So far I've been digging into modern multithreaded cache performance which is just as fascinating as directly programming VGA and sound was in the early PC days. Linux From Scratch is still up to date. You can get FPGAs that fit in your USB port [0]. Technical depth and low-level understanding is wherever you want to look for it.
Programming is not art for me. I do not find it useful to gold plate solutions. I prefer getting the job done, sometimes by any means necessary for "the vehicle" to continue running.
AI often generates parts of code for my hobby projects, which allow me speed running with my implementation. It often generates errors, but I am also skilled, so I fix error in the code.
I use AI as boiler plate code generator, or documentation assist, for languages I do not use daily. These solutions I rarely use 1:1, but if I had to go through readme's and readthedocs, it would take me a lot longer.
Would there be more elegant solutions? often - yes. Does it really matter? For me - not.
I don't disagree that technology is less fun in an AI era. The question is, what other careers are out there for someone who wants to make things?
About a decade ago, I went through a career crisis where I couldn't decide what job to do - whether technology was really the best choice for my particular temperament and skills.
Law? Too cutthroat. Civil service? Very bureaucratic. Academia? Bad pay. Journalism? An industry in decline.
It is a shame, what is happening. But I still think, even with AI hollowing out the fun parts, tech remains the best job for a smart, motivated person who's willing to learn new things.
I think one of the big distinctions between people who like building with AI and those who don't, is that the people who are pro-AI are building their own ideas, of which they have many.
The people who are anti-AI are largely building other people's ideas, for work. And they have no desire to ramp up velocity, and it's not helpful to them anyway because of bureaucratic processes that are the real bottleneck to what they're building.
Not everyone falls into these silos, of course.
Not going to pull age or title rank here -- but I suggest if your use of AI feels empty, take advantage of its speed and plasticity and iterate upon its output more, shape the code results. Use it as a sculptor might too -- begin with its output and make the code your own. I particularly like this latter approach when I am tasked with use of a language I view as inferior and/or awkward. While this might read as idealistic, and I agree that there are situations where this interaction is infeasible or inappropriate, you should also be encountering problems where AI decidedly falls on its face and you need to intervene.
At my first full time job in the early 2000s I was tasked with building a webscraper. We worked for law firms representing Fortune 500 companies and they wanted to know who was running "pump and dump" stock schemes on stocks using Yahoo Finance message boards.
At the time, I didn't know the LWP::Simple module existed in Perl so I ended up writing my own socket based HTTP library to pull down the posts, store them in a database etc. I loved that project as it taught me a lot about HTTP, networking, HTML, parsing and regexes.
Nowadays, I use playwright to scrape websites for thing I care about (e.g. rental prices at the Jersey Shore etc). I would never think to re-do my old HTTP library today while still loving the speed of modern automation tools.
Now, I too have felt the "but I loved coding!" sense of loss. I temper that with the above story that we will probably love what comes next too (eventually).
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.
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.
This essay begins by promising not to be a "back in my day" piece, but ends up dunking on 20-year-olds who are only a few years into their career, as if they have any choice about when they were born.
Oh my god. This is me. If I were any better at writing, I could have written this, the author is even the same age as me (well, a year younger) and followed a similar trajectory. And a lot of what I've been feeling lately feels similar to burnout (in fact I've been calling it that), but it really isn't burnout. It's... this, whatever this is... a "fallow period" is a good term.
And I feel like an old man grumbling about things changing, but... it's not the same. I started programming in BASIC on my Tandy 1000 and went to college and learned how to build ISA cards with handwritten oscilloscope software in the Computer Engineering lab. My first job was writing firmware. I've climbed so far up the abstraction chain over a thirty year career and I guess I don't feel the same energy from writing software that first got me into this, and it's getting harder to force myself to press on.
I too get less of a kick out of writing enterprise middleware than I did making games as a kid in the 80s. Why did the industry do this to me?!
I gave up after the third “It’s not X, it’s Y” in like two paragraphs. Is nobody else allergic to that AI voice? Isn’t the author?
So depressing this is the current state of blogging. Can’t wait for this phase to be over.
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".
I humbly submit this interview with Grady Booch (if you know, you know) talking about the "3rd golden age of software engineering - thanks to AI": https://youtu.be/OfMAtaocvJw
I feel like the conversation does a good job of couching the situation we find ourselves in.
I am a little older than OP. I don't think I've ever had that feeling about a programming project for work that came from someone else.
Generally, I get that feeling from work projects that I've self-initiated to solve a problem. Fortunately, I get the chance to do this a lot. With the advent of agentic coding, I am able to solve problems at a much higher rate.
Quite often, I'll still "raw dog" a solution without AI (except for doc lookups) for fun, kind of as a way to prove to myself I can still do it when the power's out.
I'm the exact same demographic as the author, just turned 50, writing code since childhood in BASIC. I'm dealing with the AI in programming issue by ignoring it.
I still enjoy the physical act of programming so I'm unsure why I should do anything that changes that. To me it's akin to asking a painter to become a photographer. Both are artists but the craft is different.
Even if the AI thing is here to stay, I think there will be room for people who program by hand for the same reason there's still room for people who paint, despite the invention of the camera.
But then, I'm somebody who doesn't even use an IDE. If I find an IDE obtrusive then I'm certain I'll find an AI agent even more so.
The deep, profound, cruel irony of this post is that it was written by AI.
Maybe if you work in the world of web and apps, AI will come for you. If you don't , and you work in industrial automation and safety, the I believe it will not.
Total resonance with this part :
"They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of."
I was 7 in 1987, learned LOGO and C64 BASIC that year, and I relate to this article as well.
It feels as though a window is closing upon the feeling that software can be a powerful voice for the true needs of humanity. Those of us who can sense the deepest problems and implications well in advance are already rare. We are no more immune to the atrophy of forgetting than anyone.
But there is a third option beyond embrace or self-extinguish. The author even uses the word, implying that consumers wanted computers to be nothing more than an appliance.
The third option is to follow in the steps of fiction, the Butlerians of Dune, to transform general computation into bounded execution. We can go back to the metal and create a new kind of computer; one that does have a kind of permanence.
From that foundation, we can build a new kind of software, one that forces users to treat the machine as appliance.
It has never been done. Maybe it won't even work. But, I need to know. It feels meaningful and it has me writing my first compiler after 39 years of software development. It feels like fighting back.
Wow this hits home - I just turned 51 and I also started coding at age 7, writing BASIC on a TRS-80 Model III.
I still have a very distinct memory when my father told me he was buying us our first home computer. I remember him telling me that you could use the computer to make games. I was so excited by the idea and amazing by this technology (that I hadn't yet even remotely understood). I remember saying "Oh, you just tell it to make a game? And it makes a game?" He explained to me then what programming was.
When we got the TRS-80, he and I worked together to build a game. We came up with an idea for a text adventure game called "Manhole Mania" - you were a city works employee exploring the sewers after reports of strange noises. We never finished much of it - maybe just the first few "rooms".
Maybe this weekend I will tell Codex to make me a game.
Same, been a product designer for years, still love design deep down but the essence is somehow not there anymore. reading this hit different. It's refreshing to see someone put it into words instead of the usual "stuff".
It lines up a lot with what I've been thinking as well and this is what I wrote today on my blog. https://www.immaculateconstellation.info/why-ai-challenges-u...
Late 30s here, I have seen:
* dial-up being replaced by DSL
* CAT being replaced with fiber for companies
* VOIP replacing bulk BPX
* Cloud replacing on-prem to an extent
* Cloud services plague now called SaaS
* License for life being replaced by subscription
* AI driving everything to shit literally
The technology is no longer helping anything, it is actually tearing our society apart. Up to 2000s, things were indeed evolution, improvements, better life style be it personal or professional. Since 2000s, Enshitification started, everything gets worse, from services, to workflows, to processes, to products, to laws.
Gen-Z does not realize how bad things are, and how we are no longer becoming smarter but dumber, kids cannot even read but have every single social media account.
If they could spend one day back in early 2000s, the current generation would start a civil war in every single city across the globe.
I turn 52 this year. I also started at 10 years old programming in a combination of AppleSoft BASIC and assembly language and typing machine code out of books so I could use Double Hires graphics since it wasn’t supported by BASIc and doing my own assembly language programming.
I stuck with C and C++ as my bread and butter from 1996-2011 with other languages in between.
I don’t miss “coding” because of AI. My vision has been larger than what I could do myself without delegating for over a decade - before LLMs.
“coding” and/or later coordinating with people (dotted line) reporting to me has been a necessary evil until a year or two ago to see my vision go to implementation.
I absolutely love this new world. For loops and while loops and if statements don’t excite me in my 50s. Seeing my vision come to life faster than I ever could before and having it well archited does.
I love talking to “the business” and solving XYProblems and getting to a solution 3x faster
idk, i'm loving the newness of all of it, I feel more empowered than ever before, like it's my time. Before startups would take like a year to get going, now it's like a month or so. It's exciting and scary, we have no idea where it's going. Not boring at all. I was getting bored as shit and bam, now i can dream up shit quick and have it validated to, ya i figured that out with an MCP so ya this is my jam. Program MCPs and speed it up!!!!!!
Well yes it has changed. But look at everything that can be accomplished with these abstractions/libraries/frameworks that exist.
Why reinvent the wheel.
Yes, there might be less room for the Wild Wild West approach, as mentioned in the article: But that is the structure of compounded knowledge/tooling/code available to developers/others to create more enriched software, in the sense that it runs on what is available now and provides value in today's age of computing.
I also had a 486DX2-66. And I recall coding in Assembly, Pascal, C etc.
I do not miss it. These days I can create experiences that reach so many more people (a matured Interneet with realtime possibilities - to simplify) and with so much more potential for Good. Good in the sense of usefulness for users, good in the sense of making money (yeah, that aspect still exists).
I do understand your sentiment and the despairing tone. There have been times when I was struck by the same.
But I do not miss 1995 and struggling with a low-level formatted HD and Assembly that screwed up my floppy disks, or the worms that reached my box, or the awful web sites in terms of UX that were around, or pulling coaxial cables around for LAN parties.
It's just a different world now. But I get what you are saying, and respect it. Stay optimistic. :)
I'm a few years behind you. I got started on my uncle's handed down vic 20 in the late 80s.
The culture change in tech has been the toughest part for me. I miss the combination of curiosity, optimism, creativity, and even the chaos that came with it. Nowadays it's much harder to find organizations like that.
Some farmers probably lamented the rise of machines because they feared their strength would no longer be needed in the fields. These farmers were no doubt more concerned with their own usefulness as laborers than in the goals of the farm: to produce food.
If you program as labor, consider what you might build with no boss. You’re better equipped to start your own farm than you think.
50 myself, and started coding with a Commodore 64, but only really picked it up seriously with the advent of open source software, and that feeling of being able to dig around any component of the system I wanted to was exhilarating.
I think that's one of the biggest things that gives me pause about AI: the fact that, if they prove to be a big productivity boost, you're beholden to huge corporations, and not just for a one-time purchase, but on an ongoing basis.
Maybe the open source models will improve, but if keeps being driven by raw compute power and big numbers, it seems to tilt things very much in favor of those with lots and lots of capital to deploy.
I think the true genuinely-love-programming type of people will increasingly have to do what so many other people do, and that's separation of work and personal enjoyment. You might have to AI-architect your code at work, and hand code your toy projects on the weekend.
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.
I can share a similar experience: I began to learn programming during my first school years, on an Apple II clone with Logo, a fancy language with turtle graphics as a most distinctive feature. We used to boot Logo off 5.25" floppy disks...
It's turned from SimCity into SimSimCity. It's like playing a simulation where you manage a person who's playing SimCity.
> The feedback loop has changed. The intimacy has gone. The thing that kept me up at night for decades — the puzzle, the chase, the moment where you finally understand why something isn’t working — that’s been compressed into a prompt and a response
It's so strange to read because to me its never been more fun to make software, its especially never been easier for an individual. The boring parts are being automated so I can work on the bespoke and artistic parts. The feedback loop is getting shorter to making something nice and workable. The investigation tools for profiling and pinpointing performance bottlenecks are better than ever, where Claude is just one new part of it.
I have given the topic some thoughts. I concluded that the ONLY way for ordinary people (non-genius, IQ <= 120) to be really good, be really close to the genius, is to sit down, condensate the past 40 or so year's tech history of three topics (Comp-Arch, OS and Compiler) into a 4-5 years of self-education.
Such education is COMPLETELY different from the one they offered in school, but closer to those offered in premium schools (MIT/Berkeley). Basically, I'd call it "Software engineering archaeology". Students are supposed to take on ancient software, compile them, and figure out how to add new features.
For example, for the OS kernel branch:
- Course 0: MIT xv6 lab, then figure out which subsystem you are interested in (fs? scheduler? drivers?)
- Course 0.5: System programming for modern Linux and NT, mostly to get familiar with user space development and syscalls
- Course 1: Build Linux 0.95, run all of your toolchains in a docker container. Move it to 64-bit. Say you are interested in fs -- figure out the VFS code and write a couple of fs for it. Linux 0.95 only has Minix fs so there are a lot of simpler options to choose from.
- Course 2: Maybe build a modern Linux, like 5.9, and then do the same thing. This time the student is supposed to implement a much more sophiscated fs, maybe something from the SunOS or WinNT that was not there.
- Course 3 & 4: Do the same thing with leaked NT 3.5 and NT 4.0 kernel. It's just for personal use so I wouldn't worry about the lawyers.
For reading, there are a lot of books about Linux kernels and NT kernels.
> They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of.
yup.
I'm 61 (retired when I was 57).
I too began with BASIC (but closer to 1980). Although I wrote and published games for the Macintosh for a number of years as I finished up college, my professional career (in the traditional sense) began when I was hired by Apple in 1995 and relocated to the Bay Area.
Yeah, what started out as a great just got worse and worse as time went on.
I suspect though that to a large degree this reflects both the growing complexity of the OS over that time as well as the importance of software in general as it became more critical to people's lives.
Already, even in 1984 when it was first introduced, the Mac had a rich graphics library you would not want to have to implement yourself. (Although famously of course a few apps like Photoshop nonetheless did just that—leaning on the Mac simply for a final call to CopyBits() to display pixels from Adobe's buffer to the screen.)
You kind of have to accept abstraction when networking, multiple cores, multiple processes become integral to the machine. I guess I always understood that and did not feel too put out by it. If anything a good framework was somewhat of a relief—someone else's problem, ha ha. (And truly a beautiful API is just that: a beautiful thing. I enjoy working well constructed frameworks.)
But the latter issue, the increasing dominance of software on our lives is what I think contributed more to poisoning the well. Letting the inmates run the asylum more or less describes the way engineering worked when I began at Apple in 1995. We loved it that way. (Say what you want about that kind of bottom-up culture of that era, but our "users" were generally nerds just like us—we knew, or thought we knew anyway, better than marketing what the customer wanted and we pursued it.)
Agile development, unit tests, code reviews… all these weird things began to creep in and get in the way of coding. Worse, they felt like busywork meant simply to give management a sense of control… or some metric for progress.
"What is our code coverage for unit test?" a manager might ask. "90%," comes the reply from engineering. "I want to see 95% coverage by next month," comes the marching orders. Whatever.
I confess I am happy to have now left that arena behind. I still code in my retirement but it's back to those cowboy-programmer days around this house.
Yee haw!