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.
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.
If it's the former, you hate AI agents. If it's the latter, you love AI agents.
Bear in mind also that the inputs to train LLMs on future languages and frameworks necessarily have to come from the hacker types. Somebody has to get their hands dirty, the "micro" of the parent post, to write a high quality corpus of code in the new tech so that LLMs have a basis to work from to emit their results.
What I want to do is create bespoke components that I can use to create a larger solution to solve a problem I have.
What I don't want to do is spend 45 minutes wrangling JSON to a struct so that I can get the damn component working =)
A quick example: I wanted a component that could see if I have new replies on HN using the Algol API. ~10 minutes of wall clock time with Claude, maybe a minute of my time. Just reading through the API spec is 15 minutes. Not my idea of fun.
I don't think you're a hacker. I think you enjoy writing code (good for you). Some of us just enjoy making the computer execute our ideas - like a digital magician. I've also gotten very good at the code writing and debugging part. I've even enjoyed it for long periods of time but there's times where I can't execute my ideas because they're bigger than what I can reasonably do by myself. Then my job becomes pitching, hiring, and managing humans. Now I write code to write code and no project seems too big.
But I'm looking forward to collapsing the many layers of abstraction we've created to move bits and control devices. It was always about what we could do with the computers for me.
The reason your login is slow is not because someone didn’t use the right algorithm.
Most game developers are just using other company’s engines.
While yes you need to learn how the architecture, the code isn’t the gating factor.
One example is the Amazon Prime Video team using AWS Step functions when they shouldn’t have and it led to inefficiencies. This was a public article that I can’t find right now.
(And before someone from Amazon Retail chimes in and says much of Amazon Retail doesn’t run on AWS and uses the legacy CDO infrastructure - yes I know. I am a former AWS employee).
But the important thing is getting solutions to users. Claude makes that easier.
These are not toys. I want to make money. The customers want feature after feature, in a steady stream. It's bad business if the third or fourth feature takes ages. The longer stream, the better financially.
That the code "works" on any level is elementary, Watson, what must "work" is that stream of new features/pivots/redesigns/fixes flowing.
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.
Their tag line: "Don't outsource your thinking to AI. Instead, use AI to become a better problem solver, clearer thinker, and more elegant coder."
I have followed the course myself and it reignited my passion. During the course I built a cool side project from scratch, small steps, no vibe coding using the course's principals. It was really satisfying, I felt in control again while learning new things.
The need for assembly programmers diminished over the decades. A similar thing will happen here.
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.
Obviously you should do whatever you want, however you want to do it, and not just do whatever some Internet rando tells you to do, but glorified autocomplete is so 1 year ago. Everyone knows the $20/month plans aren't going to last, time will tell if the $100/month ones do. The satisfaction is now in completing a component and getting to polish it in a way you never had time for before. And then totally crushing the next one in record time. To each their own, of course, but personally, what's been lost with agentic mode has been replaced by quantity and quality.
I think where agents genuinely help is the gap between "I have a clear vision" and "it exists". The design and judgment still have to come from you. What Claude Code can't replace is knowing what to build and why — which is actually the interesting part.
Congrats! I'm in that age where I'm envying more the ones like you than the 20-something :)
Its almost like it reignites novelty at things that were to administratively heavy to figure out. Im not sure if its fleeting or lasting.