alt Hacker News> LLM watch-six-agents-writing-and-you-proofreading gave me so much existential crisis and depression
this is extremely bizarre because I’m 53, been coding since 12, and it has had literally the exact opposite effect on me, I find it tremendously exciting, like riding a snowmobile instead of manually cross-country skiing
but I do think that if you’re not ready to work like this, you may need to consider a career pivot in the short term
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Coding since 11. Using AI makes me completely lethargic. I really don't know how to fill the minutes that AI takes to write code. Maybe if AI gets faster I will be able to enjoy it.
That said, like many people here I have invested quite some time in becoming a skilled and experienced coder, so there is no denying that this whole AI craze makes me feel like something is taken away from me.
I'm with you on this being incredibly exciting.
I'm 40 and have been doing this since I was 12 as well. Once I became a staff engineer at a large company and ended up being a less Hands-On with code and more on team leadership and system architecture, it set me up for this perfectly.
I missed writing code (or so I thought) but what I realized is that I actually missed bringing ideas to life. Coding was just a means to do that and the new tools with LLM and agents have allowed me to do the core of what I love way more than coding by hand could have ever allowed
I’m retired, so a career pivot isn’t in the cards for me.
I’m also not really in the HN gestalt, so to speak. I have some views that are common, hereabouts, and some, not so much.
I’m enjoying having an LLM “pair partner.”
I am 50, coding since ~12. Started with Apple II, during the uni times wrote my own editor in assembly for BK-0010 (a soviet computer), then 30 years in computer networking with some high performance dataplane stuff more recently;
The last years somehow it felt like there’s nothing new anymore, the same 10 ideas being regurgitated with slight modifications. I tinkered with AI for the past 2 years but it was mostly a “tool for writing boilerplate”. I have tried a few ideas for agents but didn’t see how it could work.
That changed with Opus 4.6 and the subsequent wave of local models - now I try 10 ideas a day and it’s like magic! And if something doesn’t work - jumping into the code and debugging it is huge fun!
Understanding that the era of the almost-free cloud tokens might come to an end, I run my own harness pointing to my own GPUs running Qwen3.5-27B, and the last few days it has been very busy! :)
My harness doesn’t “pressure cook” since it doesn’t make sense to do that with only one GPU (besides many other reasons), it runs everything in a linear fashion, including subagents, and logs everything - reading the logs as they go by is another cool thing - sometimes I pick up interesting things from it !
The distribution of people’s moods related to AI seems indeed bimodal. And I feel lucky somehow ending up in the “enthusiastic” rather than “depressed” part of it. To the folks in the other one: I am sorry. I don’t know why it is this way. If I knew I might have given unsolicited advice.
Way to blame the poster for their problems, and what the hell is a "short term career pivot"?
Your analogy is a bit weird to me. Snowmobile is exciting for a short while, but I'm much more fond of cross country skiing. The connection with nature, the silence.
Or maybe your analogy is correct. AI is a bit as if everyone in the mountains drove around in a snowmobile, noisy and a smell of gasoline.