Tools like Claude Code are the ultimate cheat code for me and have breathed new life into my desire to create

I'm in my 60s and retiring this summer. I feel the opposite. Agents have removed most of the satisfaction and fulfilment from designing, building, testing and completing a feature or component. And if frameworks are a problem, learning to create simply and efficiently without them has its own sense of satisfaction.

Maybe it's a question of expectations. I suspect weavers felt the same with the arrival of mechanised looms in the industrial revolution. And it may be that future coders learn to get their fulfilment otherwise using agents.

I can absolutely see the attraction to business of agents and they may well make projects viable that weren't previously. But for this Luddite, they have removed the joy.

Same age, same situation.

I got completely fed up of continually having to learn new incantations to do the same shit I’ve been doing for decades without enough of a value add on top. I know what I want to build, and I know how to architect and structure it, but it’s simply not a good investment of my increasingly limited time to learn the umpteenth way to type code in simply to display text, data, and images on the web - especially when I know that knowledge will be useful for maybe, if I’m lucky, a handful of years before I have to relearn it again for some other opinionated framework.

It’s just not interesting and I’ve become increasingly resentful of and uninterested in wasting time on it.

Claude, on the other hand, is a massive force multiplier that enables me to focus on the parts of software development I do enjoy: solving the problems without the bother of having to type it all in (like, in days of old, I’d already solved the problem before my fingers touched the keyboard but the time-consuming bit was always typing it all in, testing and debugging - all of that is now faster but especially the typing part), focussing on use cases and user experience.

And I don’t ever have to deal directly with CSS or Tailwind: I simply describe the way I want things to look and that’s how the end up looking.

It’s - so far at any rate - the ultimate in declarative programming. It’s awesome, and it means I can really focus on the quality of the solution, which I’m a big fan of.

I'm 56 and still coding full-time. My least favorite part of the job has always been trying to learn some brand new tech, googling with 47 tabs open, and you don't even know enough to ask the right questions yet. Turns out you were stuck on something so beginner that Stack Overflow didn't even have a post on it. ChatGPT has made that part of the job soooooo much less painful. But I'm not ready to let Claude run wild yet. I still want to understand everything I'm pasting.

You know you could just choose a framework and stick with it? The way you look down on "the whole profession" for what's basically a straw man and your own decision is a bit bizarre. Especially coupled with the fact that tech has never moved so fast as right now, being on top of the AI-game is a target changing a hundred times faster than frontend frameworks back in the days.

“yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details”

Implementation details can very much matter though. I see this attitude from my managers that now submit huge PRs, and it is becoming a big problem.

I definitely agree that these tools allow one with an in-depth developer background to cover territory that was too much work previously. But plop me into a Haskell codebase, and I guarantee I’d cause all kinds of problems even with the best intentions and newest models. But the ramp up for learning these things has collapsed dramatically, and that’s very cool.

I still don’t want to have to learn all the pitfalls of those frameworks though. Hopefully we will converge on a smaller number, even if it’s on tooling that isn’t my favourite.

> yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details

Where do I even begin...yes, you should care about implementation details unless you're only going to write stuff you run locally for your own amusement.

Not nearly your age but I agree with your sentiments entirely. I mainly focused on using computing not for business purposes but scientific purposes and how we can forward science using compute and technology and I’ve felt much the same way for some time. The new layers and layers of abstraction added little in the way of productivity to getting to the root problems I wanted to and there have always only been so many hours in the day and dollars in the sponsoring agency’s purse to pursue new innovative work.

Now a lot can be cast off to LLMs to focus on the problem space and the innovative computing use around them. It’s been exciting to not worry about arbitrary idiosyncrasies and machete through jungles of technical minutia to get to the clearing. I still have to deal with them but less of them. And I don’t have to commit nearly as much in the technical space to memory to address problems, I can often focus on higher level architectural decisions or new approaches to problems. It’s been quite enjoyable as well.

Turning 50 this year.

Coding has never _stopped_ being a passion for me, but my increasingly limited time becomes an issue.

And Claude code (and cursor) saves me So. Much. Time.

I only have 10-20 active years ahead of me, so this is really, really important. Young ppl don’t get it.

> Angular, React, Vue, whatever - as if solving business problems just became too boring for software developers, so we decided to spend our cycles on the new hotness at every turn.

They often do solve business problems around responsive design, security and ux.

Currently working maintenance with one foot in a real legacy system and the other foot in modern systems the difference is immense.

> It'll also be good to see leetcode die.

Agreed. Leetcode caused more harm than good.

> Years ago I completely stopped coding, becoming tired of the never ending rat race of keeping up with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks for everything, node for this, npm for that, Angular, React, Vue, whatever

Have you tried Claude? No, Opus? No, not that version, it's two weeks old, positively ancient lol. Oh wait, now OpenClaw is the cool thing around the block.

My dude, the rat race just became a rat sprint. I hope you're keeping up, you're no spring chicken any more.

> with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks for everything, node for this, npm for that, Angular, React, Vue, whatever - as if solving business problems just became too boring for software developers, so we decided to spend our cycles on the new hotness at every turn

I kinda feel the same way when I visit Home Depot once a year

I also find these things incredibly annoying. But I've been actively working in webdev the past couple of years so I was actually keeping up with stuff. And I still consider this a cheat-code.

It makes it so easy to cut through the bullshit. And I've never considered myself scared of asking "stupid" questions. But after using these AI tools I've noticed that there are actually quite a few cases where I wouldn't ask (another human) a question.

Two examples: - What the hell does React mean when they say "rendering"? Doesn't it just output HTML/a DOM tree and the browser does the actual rendering? Why do they call it rendering? - Why are the three vectors in transformer models named query, key & value? It doesn't really make sense, why do they call it that?

In both cases it turns out, the question wasn't really that stupid. But they're not the kind of question I'd have turned to Stackoverflow for.

It really is a bit like having a non-human quasi-expert on most topics at your fingertips.

> as if solving business problems just became too boring

And yet, having customers and listening to them is the whole point.

Anything that re-ignites a person's zest for thinking and creating is a net gain.

That said, it is paradoxical that the catalyst in this case is a technology that replaces thinking.

You truly speak for many. I don't have the energy to center a div anymore, and to be honest, that time was thrown away [excluding money, a pretty big exclusion]. I am sure my boss's "Uber for cats" will work, I just like using AI at this point. I can iterate on 15 "Uber for cats" with 200 centered divs, spitting out documentation and excellent objects all day.

But the real talk we need to have is... "Uber for cats"