Different strokes, I guess. FWIW, I also started at 8 -- with a Commodore 64 and a Commodore Vic-20, both connected to a television -- and I found the process of trail-and-error learning my way through BASIC to be absolutely awesome.

I would start with a completely blank slate and then, gradually, be able to create something out of nothing. If I was clever enough, it could do whatever I wanted (as long as my wants were modest). It was magical and I have nothing but fond memories of the time I spent doing that.

I did the same thing writing sample code from DirectDraw APIs to make windows games. There was a huge gap between copying tutorials and writing my own game. I never got there. LLMs could bridge the divide. Tutorials can give me the nuts and bolts and feel of whats possible. LLMs can bring into reality the bigger ideas from my mind.

> Computers sucked ass! Until like a year ago.

They can't have sucked that much if you saw fit to build a career around them.

Aside from the Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC (CP/M!), at various times a secondhand BBC Model B and then later the family PC, I wrote complex programs for a Sharp PC-1246 (because I had the cassette interface).

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/1421/sharp-pc-1246/

This was the very opposite of unsatisfying. I don’t recognise this idea that computers sucked.

AI-assisted coding is, to me, way more soul-destroying than hitting the limits of a simple home computer. In most regards I feel like I have reached the end of my interest in computing, and the pivot I had in mind — teaching - looks like it has been joy-deadened too. Nobody is going to want to learn how anything that is not AI actually works, tech people insist that AI will replace (they say augment, they mean replace) teachers and trainers, politicians seem to be listening, and non-tech people now increasingly resent technology.

I barely recognise the industry I spent my life in; I do not recognise the evident enthusiasm for a world that is abandoning a whole, transformative pedagogy in favour of the programming equivalent of games consoles: button pushing vibes.

I am not at all of the opinion that AI has no value, though it does not have anywhere close to the value people insist it must have for me. I am learning, trying to find an ethical angle on it that doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable and exhausted by the hype.

But it is the final nail in the coffin of the joy of tech work for me, and as a single middle-aged man I perceive this as life changing and very likely life-shortening, in the way that psychologically unhealthy things are a health risk for older adults: unless I find something that gives my work life a sense of connected purpose again, I figure I will be gone before the Spectrum makes it to fifty.

So yeah, no. No.

That is some next-level motivated reasoning

>You got one of these thingies and thought you could do anything..

Why did you think that? Did you see people use it like that? anything? really?

For me, computers became intriguing after I started programming in BASIC. Not before that. Before that I was just curious about what the big deal about these things are...

In the literature, there would be passages that describe how computer followed "instructions", but I never could make sense of that or understood what an "instruction" was. So it didn't really sway me either way. I just tried hard and remained curious to understand what this "instruction" was and how I could give it to computers...

May be your falling the same way for LLMs now..

Figuring out inscrutable errors seems highly educational. I guess I don't have enough data to determine whether your bad experience was more or less common (probably less common on HN though). I imagine some (like yourself at 8) found computers frustrating and bad, while others (some peer posters on HN, who might also have been a bit older when they started) found them frustrating and good!