alt Hacker NewsTools 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.
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The divide seems to come down to: do you enjoy the "micro" of getting bits of code to work and fit together neatly, or the "macro" of building systems that work?
If it's the former, you hate AI agents. If it's the latter, you love AI agents.
Maybe have a play with them a bit more. LLMs are quite good at coding, but terrible at software engineering. You hear people talk about “guiding them” which is what I think they are getting at. You still need to know what you are doing or you’ll just drive off a cliff eventually.
At the moment I am trying to fix a vibe coded application and while each individual function is ok, the overall application is a dog’s breakfast of spaghetti which is causing many problems.
If you derive all your pleasure from actually typing the code then you’re probably toast, but if you like building whole systems (that run on production infrastructure) there is still heaps of work to do.
> Agents have removed most of the satisfaction and fulfilment from designing, building, testing and completing a feature or component
I highly recommend not using these tools in their "agentic" modes. Stay in control. Tell them exactly what to write, direct the architecture explicitly.
You still get the tremendous benefit of being unlocked from learning tedious syntax and overcoming arcane infra bottlenecks that suck the joy out of the process for me, but you get freed from the tedious and soul crushing parts.
I am in my 50s. I agree with what others have said about your happy place. For me, it is not APIs and fine details of operator overloading. I love solving problems. So much so that I hope I never retire. Tools like Claude Code give me wings.
The need for assembly programmers diminished over the decades. A similar thing will happen here.
Scale the Lego pieces more and it’s the same. Bigger projects have more moving parts and require the same thinking.
> I'm in my 60s and retiring this summer.
Congrats! I'm in that age where I'm envying more the ones like you than the 20-something :)
Id agree it splits both ways. I think in the short run it can be super fun but once you expand your thoughts to the long run it takes the steam out of rediscovered joy of discovery and creation.
Its almost like it reignites novelty at things that were to administratively heavy to figure out. Im not sure if its fleeting or lasting.
OldAF. I have more ideas than I have time to code up prototypes. Claude code has changed all that, And given it cannot improve the performance of optimized code I've written so far, it's like having a never tiring eager junior engineer to work out how to make use of frameworks and APIs to deploy my code.
A year ago, cursor was flummoxed by simple things Claude code navigates with ease. But there are still corner cases where it hallucinates on the strangest seemingly obvious things. I'm working on getting it to write code to make what's going on in front of its face more visible to it currently.
I guess it's a question of where you find joy in life. I find no joy in frameworks and APIs. I find it entirely in doing the impossible out of sample things for which these agents are not competitive yet.
I will even say IMO AI coding agents are the coolest thing I've seen since I saw the first cut of cuda 20 years ago. And I expect the same level of belligerence and resistance to it that I saw deployed against cuda. People hate change by and large.