I know this is not really in the spirit of the room here, but before I ever dreamed of getting paid to code, I only learned to at all because I was cheap and/or poor cook/grad student that wanted to make little artsy musical things on the computer. I remember the first time I just downloaded pure data. No torrent, no cracks, it was just there for me and all it asked for was my patience.
The only reason I ever got into linux at all was because I ended up with some dinky acer chromebook for school but didn't want to stop making stuff. Crouton changed my life in a small way with that.
As I branched out and got more serious, learning web development, emacs, java, I never stopped feeling so irrationally lucky that it was all free, and always would be. Coming on here and other places to keep learning. It is to this day still the lovely forever hole I can excavate that costs only my sleep and electricity.
This is all not gone, but if I was just starting now, I'd find hn and so and coding twitter just like I did 10 years ago, but would be immediately turned off by this pervasive sense that "the way to do things now" is seemingly inseparable from a credit card number and monthly charge, however small. I just probably would not of gotten into it. It just wouldn't feel like its for me: "oh well I don't really know how to do this anyway, I can't justify spending money on it!" $0.76 for
50 loc is definitely nuts, but even $0.10 would of turned me way off. I had the same thoughts with all the web3 stuff too...
I know this speaks more to my money eccentricities than anything, and I know we dont really care on here about organic weirdo self teachers anymore (just productivity I guess). I am truly not even bemoaning the present situation, everyone has different priorities, and I am sure people are still having the exciting discovery of the computer like I did on their cursor ide or whatever. But I am personally just so so grateful the timeline lined up for me. I don't know if I'd have my passion for this stuff if I was born 10 years later than I was, or otherwise started learning now. But I guess we don't need the passion anymore anyway, its all been vectorized!
> But I am personally just so so grateful the timeline lined up for me.
I know the feeling. We still have access to the engineering thought processes responsible for some of the most amazing software feats ever accomplished (thru source repo history and mailing lists), just with access to the Internet. Of course there's a wealth of info available for free on the web for basically any profession, but for software engineering in particular it's almost direct access to world class teams/projects to learn from.
> but would be immediately turned off by this pervasive sense that "the way to do things now" is seemingly inseparable from a credit card number and monthly charge
To be effective you still need to understand and evaluate the quality of the output. There will always be a certain amount of time/effort required to get to that point (i.e., there's still no silver bullet).
> But I guess we don't need the passion anymore anyway, its all been vectorized!
We're not running out of things that can be improved. With or without these tools, the better you get, the more of the passion/energy that gets directed at higher levels of abstraction, i.e. thinking more about what to solve, tradeoffs in approaches, etc. instead of the minute details of specific solutions.
This doesn't make much sense to me. Is there some reason a kid today can't still learn to code? In the contrary, you have LLMs available that can answer your exact personalized questions. It's like having a free tutor. It's easier than it's ever been to learn for free.
I’m approaching middle age and have always wanted to learn to code and run servers, but would get caught up somewhere on tutorials and eventually give up in frustration.
Over the past year I have accomplished so much with the ever patient LLMs as my guide. It has been so much fun too. I imagine there are many others in my shoes and those that want to learn now have a much friendlier experience.
Yeah I'm middle aged and a competent programmer. But I hate learning new technologies these days. TypeScript was a huge hurdle to overcome. Working with ChatGPT made it so much more bearable. "Explain this to me. I need to do X, how? Why doesn't this work" etc.
This is definitely true in some ways. I was just talking around this point about spending money incrementally on aider, cursor, etc, and how it would have been a turnoff to me. But yes, all that I had back then people still have, and thats great.
Why learn if the computer can do it better than you and by the time you learn the roi on the market approaches 0? This wave of llm removed a lot of my interest in coding professionally
The sounds like the best way to get into coding. (For me it was wanting to realize game ideas to entertain myself.)
Money for a computer when I was getting into it was the credit-card part of it — there were no cheap Chromebooks then. (A student loan took care of the $1200 or so I needed for a Macintosh Plus.)
I suspect that's always the way of it though. There will be an easier way throwing money at a thing and there will be the "programming finds a way" way.
> this pervasive sense that "the way to do things now" is seemingly inseparable from a credit card number and monthly charge
…is true, but it only applies to experienced engineers who can sculpt the whole solution using these tools, not just random code. You need the whole learning effort to be able to ground the code the slop generators make. The passion absolutely helps here.
Note this is valid today. I have concerns that I’ll have different advice in 2027…
In 2028, the question will be who spent more money on lawsuits, and who spent more money on consultants to clean up their code base.
Jokes aside, code tools are best used in the hands of someone who is already trained and can verify bad code, and bad patterns at a glance.
AI code passes many tests. So does a lot of code written by us, for ourselves. When the code gets in front of users, especially the kind of genius users who learn how to fly by forgetting how to fall, then we learn many good habits.
In 2027 we'll have LLMs downloaded to our devices that are as good as Claude Code is today. (But as I have seen, as the leading edge of this stuff is always cooler than what you can run locally, we'll not be satisfied then with today's Claude Code.)
The only reason I ever got into linux at all was because I ended up with some dinky acer chromebook for school but didn't want to stop making stuff. Crouton changed my life in a small way with that.
As I branched out and got more serious, learning web development, emacs, java, I never stopped feeling so irrationally lucky that it was all free, and always would be. Coming on here and other places to keep learning. It is to this day still the lovely forever hole I can excavate that costs only my sleep and electricity.
This is all not gone, but if I was just starting now, I'd find hn and so and coding twitter just like I did 10 years ago, but would be immediately turned off by this pervasive sense that "the way to do things now" is seemingly inseparable from a credit card number and monthly charge, however small. I just probably would not of gotten into it. It just wouldn't feel like its for me: "oh well I don't really know how to do this anyway, I can't justify spending money on it!" $0.76 for 50 loc is definitely nuts, but even $0.10 would of turned me way off. I had the same thoughts with all the web3 stuff too...
I know this speaks more to my money eccentricities than anything, and I know we dont really care on here about organic weirdo self teachers anymore (just productivity I guess). I am truly not even bemoaning the present situation, everyone has different priorities, and I am sure people are still having the exciting discovery of the computer like I did on their cursor ide or whatever. But I am personally just so so grateful the timeline lined up for me. I don't know if I'd have my passion for this stuff if I was born 10 years later than I was, or otherwise started learning now. But I guess we don't need the passion anymore anyway, its all been vectorized!