[kamaitachi]

I just retired after 40 years writing code.

The last year or so wasn’t fun - battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted.

For a long time, I thought I’d do a lot of hobby or open source coding when I retired.

I haven’t even tried. I’m not burned out, but find I’ve lost the passion for coding I once had.

Is that AI? Or is it me?

Maybe as my retirement progresses, I can rekindle that passion, but as of now, I don’t miss tech.

Sorry, got to go - my garden needs me :-)

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I retired, after 30-some years. Actually, I was forced to retire, by folks that don't think us greyheads should be working. Fortunately, I had the means to retire. Those means had nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly, and stayed at a job for a couple of decades.

But I have been doubling down on my tech work. Once the knuckleheads were removed from the soup, the flavor improved markedly. I love this tech stuff.

Oh, and I have been using AI. It just helped me to find a nasty crashing problem, and I hope that it will help me to determine the best way to fix it.

[pyrophane]

Yeah, I've realized that the things I don't like in tech have everything to do with the culture and politics. When I've been able to work with a small team of people I really like and respect, I've generally been quite content.

[hylaride]

I've rekindled by passion by working for a startup again.

My previous employer (which I also joined as a startup) ended up in a situation where the head product manager became VP of engineering (it's a complicated story - don't ask). We also had a yes-man director of Eng and together they went all-in on very orthodox scrum, where they sat in the sprint planning/point meeting and overrode every decision of what to take off the backlog and enforcing "themes" of each sprint to ensure that only product work got done. It was very rare that any tech-debt work got dealt with, and security work was only done if it burned down CVEs or other "quantifiable" metrics that were contractually obligated.

I ended up ok as there was eventually an exit, but the core experienced engineering team all left within 6 months.

Now I'm not only allowed, but encouraged to take initiative and while of course I do product work, I can also take a step back before taking two steps forward again.

[xp84]

Good for you. It’s so exhausting dealing with these people who are constantly chasing a fantasy that through some process, or through sheer force of will, we can achieve a system where all the feature work gets done super quickly and we never have to pause or slow down to handle engineering concerns because they simply don’t exist.

[dreamcompiler]

The only thing worse is when they expect you to do all the above after they cut your budget in half. I'm so sick of hearing "Do more with less."

"Yes we want you to build a faster-than-light spaceship. Your energy budget is this candle."

Why do we give managerial control to insane people?

[xp84]

I think they get that control because they promise this nonsense to whoever hires them. Essentially, they're flim-flam men. They low-bid to get the contract and then try to make their underlings make good on the promises they made.

I'd never be hired as a CTO because I'd probably tell them "Yeah, you can have 95% less bugs, just stop trying to ship 100 features a quarter. Maybe do half that. Or you can ship twice as many features as you do now, just put up with way more bugs and instability! Instant "Strong No Hire."

[anonymars]

I think to paraphrase Plato's Republic, who else would want it?

[nwhnwh]

The ERP field is filled with these people.

[skeeter2020]

>> they went all-in on very orthodox scrum

do you mean "unorthodox"? What you describe sounds both terrible and not very scrum-like, at least ideally (I too have experienced when whatever terrible approach you use is labelled "agile" by leadership...)

[ElevenLathe]

I somewhat recently had a conversation about how we were going to start being more "strict" about how we do Agile (with a straight face). And they were right!

[hylaride]

Well, except for the fact that they took over the planning process, everything else was orthodox. From the fibonacci pointing system to the retrospectives where we had to go into detail about how the timelines didn't line up perfectly. But we were "working faster" because we were gradually getting more points into a sprint! (queue eye rolls)

What's worse is that I kept getting written up because my main role was DevOps, which meant I was highly interrupt driven...which isn't something you can point reliably.

[SlightlyLeftPad]

Any tips on finding this again? I had a great situation turn sour in exactly this way once growth and leadership change came.

[skeeter2020]

nothing tactical from me, but I've fostered a strategic approach over the years that's lead to a deep appreciation for the real-time experience. You can probably recognize when it's good (and bad) once you've worked for a while, and you really need to consciously pause and remark "If this isn't nice, what is?"^1 at those times when it is good.

A decade of consulting had me always ready to wrap my engagement at the end of any day, and (for better and worse) I carried this with me to future jobs. I always miss (at least some of) the people, but never the situation when it turns sour and I leave. The good news: you often get a chance to work with the good ones again (even if that's because you entice them away to your next gig).

^1 https://archive.org/details/ifthisisntnicewh0000vonn/mode/2u...

[simgt]

Same here, it has always been a state transition. There's always that snake showing up who forces everyone to watch their back and eventually disband. A tech coop seems like a good option, but it's almost exclusively web dev.

[tasuki]

> [...] nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly [...]

Textbook FIRE strategy.

[Xirdus]

I'd say it's missing the FI part and the RE part of the FIRE strategy. Even if they did retire early with financial independence, it's never been their goal and they never actively worked toward it. The reason regular saving and regular humble living look a lot like FIRE saving and FIRE humble living is that an average person can only do so much to increase their net worth, so the possible variance between any two people is very limited.

[jimbokun]

> Even if they did retire early with financial independence, it's never been their goal and they never actively worked toward it.

He did work toward it by saving and living frugally.

[Xirdus]

But not actively. At best, they passively worked toward it. They never consciously took any steps to ensure they have FI or can ever RE. It just happened to them while they were working on other goals.

[embedding-shape]

"Lived humbly" is vastly different from "reduce expenses and maximize savings" which FIRE is all about. I've basically always earned more than I could spend, although I thought nothing about saving money, does that mean I'm doing FIRE too, or just happened to be "living humbly"?

[magneticnorth]

> "Lived humbly" is vastly different from "reduce expenses and maximize savings" which FIRE is all about.

As someone who has successfully FIREd, I would disagree. If you are fortunate to be in a successful tech career and have a like-minded spouse, you don't need to do anything extreme to be able to FIRE. We only own one home that is comfortable but not impressive; we take care of our cars and drive them 10+ years; we leaned into hobbies that are cheap or money-saving (cooking, gardening, hiking, biking) and didn't get into owning boats or taking trips with first-class airfare and all-inclusive resorts.

I would say we "live humbly" and therefore had savings that covered expenses well before the age of 65. Part of our motivation was early retirement, but you can be doing the same thing without intent to retire early.

If it gets you to the point that you could retire early, then you were following a FIRE strategy, even if you weren't doing it with that goal in mind.

[embedding-shape]

Well, I'm also FIREd, and obviously I'd disagree with your disagreement :)

I do agree you don't need to do anything extreme, personally I basically stumbled upon financial independence, I was just doing what I thought was fun, turned out it was profitable as well, and here we are with 24/7 freetime for ~50 more years or whatever.

But when I talk with peers who are all into aiming for "FIRE", then that's very different from the experience I had actually achieving it, I haven't though about retirement a single time, and obviously don't relate at all to these people who think about "reduce expenses and maximize savings", but I'd still relate to "lived humbly", fwiw.

[sph]

"reduce expenses and maximize savings" simply means spend less than you earn. Live below your means. We call that 'living humbly' in the modern world, when you're not buying the latest phone and watching the latest movie at $50 a pop.

[aurareturn]

The best position anyone can be in 2026 is having financial freedom so you can leverage AI to build whatever you want.

The worst position is working in a company with non-technical and AI psychosis management.

[chrisweekly]

Figuring out what you want to build isn't necessarily easy.

[coldtea]

Being unemployed and unemployable with depleting savings is even less easy however.

So being financial independent even if undecided on what you want to build is still way better.

[jimbokun]

Which is why you need the financial freedom to spend time figuring it out.

[aurareturn]

Absolutely. AI lets you prototype much faster and financial freedom gives you time.

[jebarker]

What does it even mean to say you want to build something but you don’t know what it is?

[VectorLock]

Building is fun, but deciding what to build can be difficult. "Maker ennui."

[nwhnwh]

"non-technical and AI psychosis management" man, I am done... I am so much done.

[RobRivera]

I will admit, when it came to brainstorming sources of crashes with threads, AI has helped me find sources I hadn't considered (as a systems guy, multi threading real experience is something I am sprinting through)

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Basically, my app is a memory hog. I went all-in on performance, and neglected frugality. Lots of caches, local copies, and pass-by-value.

I suspect the best solution will be architectural, which promises to be a pain.

[RobRivera]

Yea, one cant go all in on performance, and then not co soder architecture.

A language choice is a starting point but you have to know the techniques of architecture learned.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

It looks like it wasn't too painful. I just kept a couple of array references too long. The LLM gave me some threaded crap, and I now need to make sure to let go, before another thread grabs the PC.

That's the issue with the new "memory is cheap" model. I cut my teeth with 256 BYTES (not KB or MB) of space for the program, the stack, and the scratch.

But I've gotten sloppy, over the years.

[junon]

Man as a not (yet) greybeard, I wish we had more of them in the teams I've been on in the last ~10 years.

[dlev_pika]

> Those means had nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly, and stayed at a job for a couple of decades.

Finally some real talk for common folk. Godspeed, friend

[gosub100]

Fwiw we hired a "gray head" earlier this year and it was a huge mistake. guy has solid Linux knowledge but has absolutely zero motivation to get work done. If you don't constantly prod him on his progress he will just sit there and stare at the code. No longer am I going to be dazzled by someones 30 year tech resume.

[pipes]

The battling ai bit you mentioned. This is my life right. Ai is both amazing and shit. I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code and having amazing lives. Meanwhile I am going insane with stress because I've burnt so much time trying to wrangle it on a team I've just joined. My productivity has not been good. I half feel like I am being gas lit by YouTubers and half feel "no I'm just doing it wrong"

[swiftcoder]

> I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code

If they are, they aren't producing anything useful with it. Just look around - do you see a sudden increase in actually useful software alongside the AI boom?

What they are mostly doing is a snake-eating-it-own-tail million lines of code LLM harness to burn tokens faster to write more code... to write a 10 million lines of code LLM harness. Or endlessly bikeshedding the perfect LLM-powered bespoke personal knowledge base.

In normal software engineering jobs, we're debugging problems a bit quicker, we're writing boilerplate faster, we have a lot of questionable new test suites... but the game is more or less the same as it was before

[43fg]

My strong feeling is that the firms who get too deep into this and have lost the ability to engage deeply with their minds (necessary requirement for imagination) are long term fooked and will get destroyed by those who preserved the ability to imagine and create and recognise the subtleties, nuances etc of product development.

[sillyfluke]

The AI cartel's hope is that the market will stay irrational longer than the naysayers can stay solvent both financially and intellectually.

Putting it a different way, it won't matter if the firms who went too deep at the very beginning are fucked if the rational are forced to succumb to the market pressures created by the irrational and thus are reluctantly pushed to adopt AI-first workflows for appearance's sake in order to survive anyway. Because then everybody will be likewise fucked and completely dependent on AI, despite it being a subpar development paradigm with respect to robustness of the systems under development. History has taught us that it is adoption dynamics not capability that determines the winning paradigm or technology (Betamax vs VHS is one historical example. Javascript vs everything else is another one).

(We know it's a subpar development paradigm with respect to robustness because the entire coding agent paradigm turns the most knowledgeable programmer into a person "who doesn't know what they don't know" because development speed far exceeds their ability to reason about the codebase and the underlying SOTA models that they depend on to fix the bugs that the model itself has introduced are at best unreliable narrators with no objective evidence of correctness or deterministic behavior.)

[ssfrr]

Don't compare your inside to other people's outside.

[chrisweekly]

great advice

[pjc50]

I am not convinced that the "dark factory" / "gas town" people are actually shipping anything that isn't also part of the AI ecosystem. At least the noise/ship ratio is incredibly high.

[dude250711]

What about shipping tweets and blog posts? Also team demos "how to use AI for basic imaginary hello-world scenarios".

[ilaksh]

The leading edge models are pretty good but we are still at the "rain man" stage so it's "jagged" intelligence.

It may be three years or so before the new compute-in-memory devices fully make it out of the lab and increase efficiency by about 100 times, allowing us to deploy models with human level complexity (100T vs current 10T SOTA) at scale.

[rootusrootus]

> I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code and having amazing lives

That is when I realize I'm spending too much time on HN. Because it is really only here that this vibe is so strong. My impression is that there is a lot of motivated reasoning in the folks that frequent HN.

It may also be that I work a boring job. If I turned up our code output by 10x it would not improve anything about our product. People who are pumping out dramatically more code have to be in an entirely different world. Or, you know, they're full of shit.

[dlev_pika]

You are not crazy.

[mrinterweb]

I feel this so much. I woke up at 1am last night stressing about AI and my potential lack of productivity. 2am rolls around, and I could not get back to sleep so I worked till 4:30am. Slept fine till 7:00am. AI has been causing a lot of stress for me and many others lately. My biggest source of stress is what will AI transform the human work world into by the time my children need a job? Most of us live in a capitalist society so AI utopia is right off the table.

[beached_whale]

More and more I have realized it was not the coding that I enjoyed, but solving problems/puzzles. This fits into the beautiful code not really mattering to more than myself but the solution for people, but that is hard to let go of.

[bluGill]

We have long ago learned as an industry that code tends to live for a long time and so maintainable code is important. However for individuals your stance is just fine.

[beached_whale]

Some code definitely does, but it isn't the product. People, outside the devs making it, don't value how good the code is, but how well it solves the problem.

[salutis]

But there is no dichotomy, is there? Good code is code that solves the problem well. Today and sustainably into the future. What else would "good code" even mean in general context?

[azangru]

> battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted

What I am selfishly curious about is: is it possible to remain a software developer, and ignore AI? To write code the same way we did before 2022? I understand that there are many companies in which managers demand more of workforce — but are there still places where people are satisfied to not rush ahead and do business same way they did three or four years ago?

In other words, is it possible to not battle with AI trying to get it what we want? Were you forced to do this by your employer, or was this entirely self-inflicted?

Asking for a friend.

[gonzalohm]

Yes it is. You don't need to announce whether you are using AI or not. Just keep doing your job, use AI when it pleases you and keep building manual code when you think that's better.

That's what I do, I have never been asked if I use AI to write my code.

If it's dumb code I use AI. If it's something that I want to craft I don't

[aeyes]

Where I work % of code written by AI and AI spend is tracked all the way down to the individual person.

It is obvious to me that this will be used in performance reviews in the future.

[newsoftheday]

They started doing that tracking where I worked until last summer, stress so high, GERD kicked in worse than it'd ever been and that's going back to the 1980's. I retired, and I do thank God I was able to. I now just dabble every week or so in my personal side projects.

[anticorporate]

Garbage like this is why the tech industry desperately needs widespread unionization.

[gonzalohm]

That's so stupid. Let the agent write code that will never be used then and you focus on the important code

[sfn42]

What's stupid in my opinion is this idea that the LLM can't be used to write good code. Like you use it for throwaway code.

I use LLMs heavily, bit it doesn't diminish the quality of my code at all. If anything it raises the quality. Because I keep it on a tight leash and make sure every like of code is what I want it to be. If you let the thing run wild for hours and barely glance at the result sure you'll be producing slop. But there's nothing stopping you from being more involved using it as a tool rather than a slave, and getting great results that way.

[toast0]

My personal situation is unusual, but I don't see my coworkers being forced into AI. They also don't seem to be ignoring it, but they're also not using it very much afaik.

Some do try feeding it log based mysteries, which sometimes spots problems but usually not the one that was being investigated.

So far, all their attempts to write code with AI don't seem to have been worth the time. Although there's one report of good unit tests being generated.

I don't get much feedback on my open source projects, because the audience is limited, but I did get an annoying report recently where the reporter was using AI instead of their brain. AI took them (and me) through a pretty wild goose chase over a very simple reported error (unused variables in a couple places). Just remove them and carry on.

[sph]

Yes: work for 90% of the world that isn't a purely tech company, but just need a working product delivered on time and at cost.

No one has asked me to use adopt LLMs in my consulting work, at least as of yet.

[sevenzero]

>is it possible to remain a software developer, and ignore AI? To write code the same way we did before 2022

Yes if it's your own company or if you're self employed and can compete.

[andriy_koval]

> In other words, is it possible to not battle with AI trying to get it what we want? Were you forced to do this by your employer, or was this entirely self-inflicted?

if you work in company with lots of AI generated code, then you can't handle it without AI usage anymore..

[willtemperley]

Working on my own product using Claude, I feel like front-end coding hasn’t changed much. It still requires a lot of manual tweaking and understanding users at a human level.

Personally I’m happy that the backend and algorithmic side writes itself.

[chrisweekly]

That's refreshing to read (frontend is my wheelhouse). I mostly agree. It seems like most people using AI treat FE as a solved problem, satisfied using tailwind and settling for "looks close enough".

[willtemperley]

I think there will always be space for good artisanal FE. This is a Ford Model T moment, the software production line has just been invented, but that didn’t stop smaller sports car manufacturers pushing the envelope.

[varjag]

There are spots and niches where you can do this but I expect them to dry up within a year.

[jasonkester]

Yeah, of course. I’ve only ever been disappointed by ai, so I don’t use it.

I run my own shop, so I can do what I want, but I’m happy with my pace (which I’ve noticed is quite fast compared to folks I’ve worked with), and I don’t find “speed of writing code “ to be a bottleneck.

When and if it gets good, I’ll hop in. But for the time being I don’t get the sense that I’m missing out on anything.

[hermitcrab]

Same here. I am maintaining and enhancing several 100k of C++ I have written over 20 years. I use MS Copilot to write little snippets now and then. But I always modify them to fit my own style. It is challenging enough to navigate and understand all that code without letting an AI loose on it.

[rdbl27]

Yes, in the same sense that it is still technically possible to ride a horse to work instead of using a car.

You can code in assembly instead of using a compiler, too.

[dheera]

> are there still places where people are satisfied to not rush ahead and do business same way they did three or four years ago

They're getting outcompeted.

[eudamoniac]

No, their competition thinks they're getting outcompeted, just have to wait 6 more months for the AI to really get going. Meanwhile no one is shipping anything good.

[runtime_terror]

Are they? Have any examples?

[hermitcrab]

I'm less worried about being 'outcompeted' by clankers than the possibility that AI slop products become so numerous that it is almost impossible to get noticed.

[skeledrew]

You can always start your own practice and ignore AI, if you're serious enough.

[hellohello2]

I'm curious, have you tried working seriously with claude code or gpt codex and which part of it did you not enjoy? What makes you wish to write code like 2022?

[toast0]

Having watched people use these kinds of tools, it feels like trying to tell an intern to do a project.

Except with an intern, hopefully there's personal development and you only have to be very specific a few times. And the intern's manager gets good feels for helping someone grow, and maybe it's a hiring pipeline.

If I'm going to have to do that for everything, I would rather just do the work myself.

I have seen some sessions with let's call it over agressive autocomplete... That's mildly tempting, but I'm happy with my disintegrated development environment, and it doesn't have any way to do autocomplete at all, so that's not happening for me either.

[hellohello2]

Current SOTA is far past "agressive autocomplete" at this point, more like ask for a PR for a small feature and its done... I guess for me the fun is you can build a lot yourself, without relying on others. I hear you for the social aspect though & thanks for sharing your pov.

[coldtea]

If you just like talking and some program comes out (aka "business problem solving") you might like it.

If you like coding (aka "problem solving"), it feels like crap.

And if you like still having an IT job in a couple of years, it feels like dangerous crap.

(Of course you can be hoping you'll be the one selected, out of millions laid off, to get to keep working on a higher level).

[hellohello2]

Perhaps its the apprehension/anxiety that makes it feel bad then? I like coding (building things) and couldn't care less about businesses, and am having a great time. In the current state of AI, mass layoffs probably won't happen. But I guess its a bit scary that we don't know how much more it will improve...

[coldtea]

>Perhaps its the apprehension/anxiety that makes it feel bad then?

It's a big part. But the erosion of what coding means is another big part for some.

>I like coding (building things) and couldn't care less about businesses

There are people who like coding, but they mean "building things" by it, and other who like coding and mean "coding" itself. The latter we aren't as pleased.

(I also like building things, but I like building them via coding, not thru vibing and getting them spit out).

[jon-wood]

> the current state of AI, mass layoffs probably won't happen.

I’m sorry, what? Have you been paying any attention at all to the state of the industry lately?

[hellohello2]

I wasn't clear enough, I was replying to "you'll be the one selected, out of millions laid off," in context I meant "mass layoff" as in "95% of everyone is out of a job permanently".

[tonyedgecombe]

It will be somewhat ironic if the people losing out in this transition are the ones screaming about it’s benefits.

[alchemism]

I’d probably let go of the employees who decline using agentic tools first, tbh. All things being equal.

[claytongulick]

And that's the problem.

The companies that agree with you will be at an interesting place when they have piles of AI slop code and no talented developers.

[alchemism]

I can’t say Claude Code is not a great product with solid market fit even though the code inside it is aesthetically garbage.

[azangru]

> have you tried working seriously with claude code or gpt codex and which part of it did you not enjoy?

I haven't. But I found myself, to my surprise, not particularly interested in trying; which makes me wonder what motivates other developers if not peer pressure or demands for more productivity. I find coding interesting and fulfilling enough to do it on my own. I do ask LLMs questions from time to time, but for that, even a chatgpt or a gemini in a browser tab is enough.

The best experience I had so far is with code reviews, when the models pointed out my mistakes. But I haven't yet gotten to the point where I would want them to write code for me.

[hellohello2]

Just to share my perspective, I have not had this much fun programming as when I first learned to code. It's really something you have to try for yourself to actually understand. Its like a new form of programming, where code is "soft" instead of "hard"; on the whole feels similar, but also completely new.

The opinons on this site make me realize most people here are into programming for the money, rather than for the fun of building things. Which is completely fine, but it leads to most commenters being depressed rather than enthralled, which feels honestly confusing at times. Obviously socially things are looking pretty bleak but if you find coding fulfilling on its own, lets just say you can look forward to fulfillment lol

[__lain__]

Yeah go to a niche market C++ shop

[OnionBlender]

What niche market? I work for a hardware company writing C++ code and my company literally has a dashboard for managers that shows employee's token usage. My manager warned me that my low usage will reflect poorly on me during performance reviews later this year.

[randusername]

I'm banking on this. I don't really know anyone younger than me at the moment that writes C++. Best-case scenario I'll be in-demand. Worst-case when my grandchildren visit me at my cardboard box I can tell them spooky bedtime stories about SFINAE.

[sharkweek]

Father in law was a real estate agent from the 80s until maybe 5 years ago.

The day he retired was the day he absolutely positively suddenly wanted nothing to do with real estate anymore. He loved the career but it was interesting watching him just suddenly be done with it.

He found other hobbies and interests pretty quickly once he took an inventory of how he wanted to spend his time.

[XorNot]

Suddenly then all at once has been a common pattern for me too.

Its liberating to have the experience to know that once you're done with something you won't miss it's absence.

[sqircles]

Sounds quite normal, honestly. Programming is in a dark place right now relative to how I used to enjoy it. I haven't touched a personal project in many months. You did something for four decades and whatever mystery may have been left there is probably gone with AI.

Try identifying what made it feel like a "passion." Was it problem solving and discovering new things on your own by piecing things together? Then yeah, AI probably has something to do with that in regard to software development - but there are many other avenues you can take to fulfill that whether it be unrelated hobbies or charity work, etc.

[coldtea]

>Try identifying what made it feel like a "passion." Was it problem solving and discovering new things on your own by piecing things together? Then yeah, AI probably has something to do with that in regard to software development - but there are many other avenues you can take to fulfill that whether it be unrelated hobbies or charity work, etc.

If you had a passion for coding, then unrelated hobbies or charity work wont fulfill it.

And if you have no job or a shit job or a shit coding job because of AI, no much means or morale for hobbies and charity either...

[creaturemachine]

Congratulations! Tech doesn't have to be the end goal. Personally I can't wait to shake this industry and find a new path in retirement.

[kamaitachi]

Thanks! I’m one of the lucky ones who really loved my career. I was lucky enough to avoid roles or companies that would suck the life out of me:-)

5/5 would recommend :-)

[ItsBob]

I'm hoping to retire in the next 12 months (52 years old). When I do, I'll be buying a Chromebook. Any and all PC-related shit is being sold off.

I will quite literally never write a line of code again... with any luck!

[reylas]

Just curious, what are you doing for healthcare. I can retire money wise soon, but healthcare is an issue. May have to work 10 more years just because of that.

[floren]

Yes, that's a concern for me too, I'd like to retire early but healthcare has me wondering about getting a job as a teacher or something just to make sure I can afford it if I get cancer at 55.

[SoftTalker]

If you don't have much income, healthcare.gov plans are pretty cheap.

Some people will just risk doing without. Most will be fine; that's how insurance works.

[sunsetSamurai]

if you're in the US, ACA is an option, but it'll be expensive if you don't qualify for any subsidies.

[ItsBob]

I live in the UK :-)

[zikduruqe]

I'm just a little bit older, and have to work a little longer due to some personal things.

But, as it stands today, I rarely touch any tech outside of work. Heck, I seldom ever bring my cell phone outside the home.

I long for the day, I can close my laptop lid and not open it again.

[rootusrootus]

Same age, but I gotta hang on a little longer. I'm a little too anxious about sequence risk in the market environment we're in now. But otherwise I'm with you, when I retire I may well dump nearly all of my technology and go back to stone tablets, metaphorically speaking. Sometimes I get so tired of it. Ironically, though, my work environment is pretty good, it's everything we're doing in tech outside my office work that gets me down.

[baggachipz]

Man I really want to retire. I've gotten a couple stark reminders recently that life is fragile and short. I'm trapped by the golden handcuffs of the software industry, but I console myself by saying it's a means to an end (early retirement). I really hope that becomes possible in the near future, because whatever this is now is not sustainable.

[sunsetSamurai]

I also can't wait for the day I retire, I got laid off recently, so that sets things back for me for now, but as soon as I get another job, it's all about saving to escape this damn rat race. I hope you can retire soon too.

[RHSeeger]

> battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted

I rubber duck with AI a lot, to go over my understand, my plan, etc. I get all the benefits of putting my thoughts to words, plus some feedback.

And sometimes, I let the AI write the code, too. It really depends on if I feel it understands the problem and solution well enough. And it's entirely possible that the answer is no, even if it helped me come up with the solution. But I always review the entire plan it puts forward and review the code it wrote. [1]

I don't "battle" with it, unless I'm experimenting with letting it do ALL The coding. And I've done that. And it sucks. It's downright painful. I don't do that for work.

[1] Unless it's a simple utility I'm doing for myself, like "write me a bookmarklet to find all the code in this page and open up a dialog with it formatted easy to read". Because, if it turns out it got that wrong, I can just change it later; it's for me anyways.

[retired]

Retired as well. Hated that dealing with AI was a big part of my job. Hated how half my time was spend clicking through portals, scrum boards, devops tooling. I just wanted to code.

Haven't touched code since I retired unfortunately. Just don't feel like it. Don't need it either.

[adamddev1]

Honest question: if you didn't enjoy using AI, why not just write code without using AI?

[gensym]

I can't speak for anyone else, but I find AI to be very effective. It can do nearly all coding tasks many OOMs faster than I can. And I'm able to get it to produce high-quality code in the process. Using AI, our codebase actually has less tech debt than any time I can remember. I would be less effective if I wasn't using AI and if I wasn't finding new ways to leverage it.

That doesn't mean I enjoy it using AI. I loved coding. I was really good at it! I spent decades honing my abilities, and while some of those skills are still applicable when working with AI, many are not.

I want my company to be successful, so I work as effectively as I can. Unfortunately, the most effective method of working no longer scratches the creative/craftsman itch that it used to.

Right now I'm mitigating it by taking up creative writing in the evenings. That's difficult and creative in a way that coding used to be. Identifying and solving character and story problems feels like debugging and designing used to. Learning to craft effective prose feels like it used to when I was picking up a new programming language and learning its idioms.

[yunwal]

At least in my work, this is sort of like asking "If you don't enjoy CI/CD or the cloud, why not do without it?" It's becoming integrated into every process at this point.

[retired]

And many employers now require you to code faster, which is only possible with AI tooling. They don't understand that coding faster isn't always better.

[amanaplanacanal]

Is this related to what business your employer is in? In other words, is their business producing code, or is code written to support some other business?

Or is this just everywhere now?

[retired]

Everywhere. Normally adding an extra endpoint to the REST API would take a sprint. Now PM expects you to do two. Only way to get that done is a lot of vibe-coding and delivering sub-par results.

[necovek]

I am amazed that anyone ever needed a "sprint" to "add an endpoint".

It usually speaks to the approach you are taking, but I also believe sprint-based planning leads development teams to make work fit into it instead of needing natural time to do it.

Let's remember that all of have probably built full systems over a weekend. What organizational dysfunction has led to us needing a sprint is what needs fixing.

[gonzalohm]

How is that enforced though? At any normal workplace they will ask you "how long is this going to take"?

[speff]

It depends on the management. Mine asks that, but others within my company get "this is going to be done by [DATE]".

[gonzalohm]

And no one argues about unrealistic deadlines?

[eudamoniac]

"How will you be leveraging AI for this task? Why can't the AI do it faster than that?"

These managers literally believe, or are made to pretend, that AI is better than you and faster than you. Any argument to the contrary is a CLM.

[Altern4tiveAcc]

While the tinkerer in me would love to, the pragmatic side of me cannot ignore the speed boost, specially for prototyping programs.

If I write everything by hand, I know I'm leaving velocity or quality on the table. If I use LLMs, I can eventually get good output from it, either by going faster with moderate quality, or by going slower and focusing on better code. But that makes me hate the whole development process. I enjoyed modeling a problem with types and, writing functions that work on these types. Automating that process (either the cognitive work itself, or the typing work to bring ideas to life) takes away most of my fun.

[kamaitachi]

It was being pushed hard by mgmt. Constant pushing, emails with “league tables” of most active users, “why is this taking so long?”.

Hard to not use it

[adamddev1]

That's so sad. Presumably they won't also be asking, "why is this breaking so often?"

[mikeyinternews]

As Eric Schluntz from Anthropic put it (not verbatim): If you're not using AI (I believe he was specifically referring to Vibe Coding), then you are the bottleneck.

[rootusrootus]

That sounds like a good reason not to listen to advice from someone who works for Anthropic.

[necovek]

That sounds like a good reason not to listen to Eric Schluntz, who both overestimates the ability of LLMs today, but also has a vested interest in it being so.

I am sure Anthropic is full of smart people who are making Claude work well for those who do not want to be vibe coding and who believe that's not productive either.

[boelboel]

But the boomer C-suites will listen with awe to these salesmen

[edu]

Token seller saying you should buy more tokens.

[nocman]

Yeah, because someone who is trying to sell you something would NEVER try to convince you that you can't possibly hope to compete without buying their product. /s

[righthand]

It’s both, IMO from your brief comment, LLMs made you think it’s all troublesome endeavor because it outputs spaghetti code. No one likes hunting through spaghetti code and fixing it. Nobody wants to fill their plate with seconds immediately.

Mess around with a poc and try not using the LLM to get started (use a project scaffolding tool/code generator instead if you must). Start with some appetizers and a first course. Stop working on it even if you feel satisfied.

I like to try and get my pocs to a publishable state someone else can download and compile even if it’s wonky. That helps me bookend my work even if I don’t accomplish all the goals.

I most recently made a poc with nuklear ui and libuvc make a small app that displays my camera feed. I pushed it up, the camera frames have some green flicker but it works. I did more research and found out there are better libraries than libuvc for this kind of thing. Now I have another prototype to make for my ideas. And a base to clone if I need some starter template.

[Devasta]

I have definitely found my enjoyment of coding in my spare time is lessened now that AI is on the scene. I know very few if any were going to use the code, but it felt like working on a classic car, the act of working on it was fun even if the final results seem like the effort could have been used more productively.

Now, I just feel like I am transcribing a phonebook.

[runjake]

> Is that AI? Or is it me?

It's you. And that's fine.

You can still code entirely without AI or AI influence, so that's primarily why I say it's you. It may also, in fact, be burnout. It sounds like it to me. And it's okay to get back into coding if you ever feel like it.

[SirMaster]

Yeah, I was going to say this too.

I write code in my spare time for fun and hobby and personal skill development and I don't use AI at all. AI isn't ruining anything for me.

[kamaitachi]

You’re right - it’s me.

I used to code at home - chess engines mostly.

Maybe once the novelty of retirement wears off (and the autumn approaches), I’ll start coding again

[cantalopes]

I feel you. I've been coding for about 20 years and the last 2 years were an absolute downer, draining all the joy of programming by offloading the actuall puzzles to an ai third party thst i just navigate and correct. I am 20 times more productive but 20 times less happy

[jjice]

I'm not near retirement, but I have found that the side projects I work on have diminished quite a bit since AI took over coding. It used to be that writing a library for something like parsing ICal files was something I could spend time on, write, build out, and then other people could use. But now anyone can throw together a working version of it in a little bit. That's a good thing, but also it removes the fun of spending the time implementing it and creating something for others.

[quinnjh]

This makes me think of how boxed cake recipes decided to leave out the eggs because people liked to still feel like they were "cooking" for people.

[add-sub-mul-div]

I made it 27 before I retired. I kind of wish I was older so I could have enjoyed more years of what was a fun career before it turned into... this.

[ryandrake]

More and more I'm finding myself saying: "I got into this career because I liked technology, computers, programming, and so on. Not whatever this is!"

[ian-g]

From the flip side, 10 years in, I've been getting really into art.

It's not cheap, but it's easier to do my job with the thought that I have art this week and next week and maybe I'll get to teach it someday too.

It feels healthy to not let your work control your life after retirement. There's so much else out there to do.

[ben_w]

> I haven’t even tried. I’m not burned out, but find I’ve lost the passion for coding I once had.

> Is that AI? Or is it me?

I had that shortly after ChatGPT came out, but as nobody was using it for work, I don't think it was caused by AI.

Personally, I blame all the CV-driven development.

Playing with AI coding models can even give me a bit of the good times back.

[qingcharles]

After 40+ years of coding, I couldn't be more happy about how AI has changed what I do. It got rid of the boring drudgery and grind and let me concentrate on the problem-solving, idea-generating parts.

Never been more productive and happy in my work than I am right now.

[CuriouslyC]

It's not AI or you, it's this late stage capitalist marketing firehose of bullshit and enforced productivity. Hype is out of control, nothing is real, it's exhausting.

[ryandrake]

I think you're getting unfairly downvoted. A lot of people, across all salary ranges, are just vaguely tired of constantly Providing Maximal Shareholder Value™ to their managers day in and day out, having that One Purpose dominate their lives, and at the end of each day looking up and seeing nothing tangible to show for what they've done.

[reactordev]

And being given an email and locked out of everything after a decade of doing so, on a whim, all because someone thought you were just an expense…

[XorNot]

Its also the absolute assurance that we're all going to get screwed by a big crash circa 2028.

[stavros]

Yep, this is the right answer. Everything is max money always, and you can't have nice things any more, you can only have things that extract all the value they can out of you.

[Weebs]

Shhh no class consciousness on HN allowed

[mekael]

Ive paraphrased it before and i’ll paraphrase it again

“If you’re looking for the villain, it’s capitalism. It’s always capitalism”

- Brennan Lee Mulligan (and everyone else who’s tired of this shit).

[kellogah]

I think part of the problem is that source code is always in flux. So to think of the satisfaction of completing a project seems difficult to imagine.

Big corporations invent new “features” and then axe them, even if the products are delightful; venture capitalists obsessed with building to exit on profit alone; open source developers trying to make a name for themselves by building something in Rust to improve performance by 5%.

Compare that to something like architecture or woodworking, gardening, baking, painting—creating real tangible things.

My recommendation is combine the two: use arduinos and/or raspberry PI to automate water delivery in your garden. Stuff like that that you can experience the value at first-hand. :)