I'm too old
I’ve turned 52 years old, and today I woke up and felt too old.
I grew up writing Z80 assembler code during the 8bit era. I wrote some games. I wrote assembler 68000 during the Amiga demo scene days. I wrote IRC bots in C with the arrival of the internet. I wrote HTML by hand when the web was invented. I wrote CGI Perl scripts. I rode the Java hype. I founded some startups. I created successful open source projects. I dived into XP. I became a certified Scrum Master. I thought functional programming was the next big thing. I fought Rusts borrow a checker on the shoulder of Orion. I finished a book recently I write Go code daily, and I work on my next startup.
I’m too old for AI.
AI is amazing. I’ve trained an AI to detect model railroad locomotives and their types. I’m a daily user of AI to let it write code for me.
I feel that AI will change everything in coding. I ❤️ coding. I ❤️ the creativity of creating something out of nothing. The logical and puzzle challenges of coding. AI will blow all that away. The end of software engineering is near, and I feel too old to climb that hill. This hill is for others to climb. Perhaps it is their first hill.
This feeling is new to me. I was eager for every challenge and every change in our industry.
Perhaps that feeling goes away.
PS: If this sounds pessimistic, it’s not. If this sounds like I feel bad, I’m not.
