Its classic HN to dismiss the emotional cost of change as sunk cost stages of grief. A person is allowed to love their work and miss deep understanding, and allowed to be nostalgic for a preferred way of working. It's human and everything they have shared in this post is unequivocally true about software dev and moving into a career, arguably even before LLMs took over.

What I mean is that the thrilling buddy system coding starts to happen less frequently over a career, and the time for deep exploring and side projects is organically maximized early and during school.

While LLMs have forced that divide to be more stark, the human connection and sense of wonder has always required maintenance, and it's best to get into the habit of maintaining it before your 36th JIRA triage meeting in a week completely destroyed your love of the industry.

Well before LLMs I went through exactly what TFA describes when I had to adapt from grad school labs to industrial labs, then to project management or task leadership (even just filling in for my boss), and each new job has required me to say goodbye to great friends and colleagues and make new ones.

Its just inevitable to fall out of love of the craft, we all could probably write this post for our own reasons.