alt Hacker NewsI'm about a decade behind you, but I also started my programming career during the "good" COM/DCOM/MFC/ATL/ActiveX/CORBA days. Java just came out. I slept little during that time because truly, there was nothing like programming. It was the thing that pulled me awake in the morning, and pulled me from falling asleep at night. I was so spellbound, calling it Csikszentmihalyi's flow felt like it didn't do it justice.
Fast forward 30 years later, I thought those days were gone forever. I'd accepted that I'd never experienced that kind of obsession again. Maybe because I got older. Maybe those feelings were something exclusively for the young. Maybe because my energy wasn't what it used to be. Yada yada, 1000s of reasons.
I was so shocked when I found out that I could experience that feeling again with Claude Code and Codex. I guess it was like experiencing your first love all over again? I slept late, I woke up early, I couldn't wait to go back to my Codex and Claude. It was to the point I created an orchestrator agent so I could continue chatting with my containerized agents via Telegram.
"What a time to be alive" <-- a trite, meaningless saying, that was infused by real meaning, by some basic maths that run really, really, really fast, on really, really expensive hardware. How about that!
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That was an enjoyable read :) how about that?
I'm significantly younger but also programmer for two decades since my early teens and am experiencing something similar. CC is so freeing in that it makes those "nice but no time" ideas into reality by doing it next to your main project, almost feels like a drug.
It suddenly turns that dead time while you're waiting for CI, review or response into time where you can work on the fun or satisfying side projects by firing up a few prompts, check an iteration or 2, and then pause again until the next time or while the agent is doing its thing