“I’m 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion":

I would argue it depends on what you enjoy: the journey or the destination. I have always enjoyed the journey, I think people having a blast nowadays are enjoying the destination. AI gave us more destinations, but less journey. It is not worse or better, just different.

I like the journey and the destination, thanks.

The journey now goes much faster and more efficiently for me, but that doesn’t actually mean less journey: It means I cover more ground in the same amount of journey time because I am not constrained by fumbling through the syntax to get there.

At the core, though, I am still thinking about a problem I am trying to solve or how to enable a kind of work I need to do and ideating toward a solution to that problem or a tool that better supports that kind of work.

I have a particular relationship with developers and software development:

I learned to code beyond rudimentary AppleScript because some dipshit in IT told me I didn’t need a particular tool I knew I needed, and he was happy to gatekeep tool creation. I learned to write Ruby because while I was looking for a solution to my problem, Ruby happened to be the language someone used in the first proof of concept I could find. Fine. Ruby it was.

Within a year, I was a Rails developer. I wasn’t getting paid to be a Rails developer, but I’d written an entire analytics framework and it was saving 10-15 people four or five hours of toil a month. It was meaningful enough that when I quit that job management dispatched someone from IT to learn how the tool worked.

I was good enough that I was getting technical interviews for Rails work, but I didn’t do too many before I realized I liked solving my own problems, not somebody else’s. If it was some hiring manager’s problem? Not interested. Didn’t want to spend my days that way. My problem? I’d throw myself at it on nights and weekends, too.

Now, I am not a good coder by any professional coder’s standards. I think I am an effective coder because when I make things with code to solve my problems, they always solve my problems.

“Oh, so that means you’re a ‘destination’ person!”

No, it doesn’t. I like the journey coding entails. It means thinking deeply about the problem. Considering the models one can apply to it. Challenging my conception of the problem. Following ideas to logical or illogical conclusions. Realizing there are better ways to think about it all. Realizing there are ways to get so much more leverage now that I have a fingernail under a corner.

But I’m not a good coder, or a particularly fluent coder, so the journey when it was just me and a new buffer in Emacs was long and slow.

Now? Coding with LLMs works for me because I know enough about how programming works generally to steer the LLM toward what I’m after, but I’m not burning all the time on scaffolding, boilerplate and syntax obscurities to get tools as effective as anything I ever wrote “by hand.”

I do spend some time re-specifying, backing out of blind alleys, and catching bugs during behavioral testing. It’s still faster. I still get more robust features. I still get good outcomes. Better outcomes. And once I get to that destination, I am probably going to start a new journey, because I like making tools for myself. It used to be slow and I couldn’t do as much. Now it is faster and my tools can do a lot more.

There is still plenty of space held open for the journey.