[chrisbenson]

I'm the cohost of the Practical AI podcast, which is one of the world's most popular AI podcasts, and we regularly discuss this topic in our shows.

https://practicalai.fm

Here's my two cents...

I'm 55 years old and been programming since I was 10.

Yes, programming has forever changed - especially since Opus 4.5 was released in late November. Programmers who don't use AI models and agents are obsolete in a professional context. It's not a question of journey versus destination. It's that the nature of the journey has changed and productive velocity has significantly increased. Embrace it just like you have presumably embraced every other productivity improvement over the decades. Most of us aren't coding assembly any more because pre-AI tools and languages accelerated our productivity. Now it's time to do that again, recognizing that the journey may be a different experience from the coding process you love, but we're not yet going from "Hello, World" to large complex production-ready systems in a single prompt.

I point out that if you're programming for personal satisfaction rather than professionally, then nothing has changed. Use AI or don't use AI; whatever works for you. You have the luxury of being a hobbyist.