I can relate to the feeling - this timing tracks for when most, if not all of my friends, all my co-workers (even the few who were resisting to adopt any AI toloing) flocked to just "Claude Code". Similar to how the masses gobbled VS Code a while back.

Company started doling out Claude Code configs, everything is now cli/agentic AI harnessed and news about "90% of this company's code is now AI Generated" pop up every other day.

It seems the last frontier to breach before this was nailing agentic black boxes to not crap out during the first hour of work. After that, it's really been much smoother for those tools.

Uh, don't come into it expecting to know exactly what you're going to be up to, might be the best advice I could give. Oh, do plan! But loosely: especially early on, as you get out from under the crushing burden of constant stress and misery, there will be surprises. I haven't been doing a lot of hobby programming, for example, not much more than a few faces for my Amazfit wristwatch - but my diary's grown by about a thousand pages, well above the usual rate, and I've begun a new series of crappy-camera snapshot albums, this latter especially being a real surprise despite that I have been a photographer for many years now. (My daily driver since 2021 has been a Nikon D850 with three SB-R200 flashes on a ring mount, mostly chasing wild wasps to get their portraits from six inches away. Shooting a total piece of shit for a change has been a hilarious revelation!)

Imagination operates more freely and foolishness is less heavily ballasted, and any kind of emotional crap you've been keeping shoved to the side with the force of pressing obligations is likely to come out and start rearranging the metaphorical furniture. If you've got stuff like that, this will be a good opportunity to get to grips with it, whether you mean to or not. Prepare accordingly.

And finally, there's not too many more appealing social presentations in my experience than that deriving from the confident knowledge that, within reason at least, one has earned and is now deploying the privilege to do more or less whatever the hell one likes: not the confidence contingent on a fat wallet, but that inherent in having only those scheduled obligations one chooses, and also in understanding precisely the difference underlying that distinction. Very few people in this world have the skill to behave as if their time were entirely their own to command, and this makes a difference in deportment that others will notice and attend without necessarily knowing why. It is more subtle and far less brash than the confidence in wielding the name of an employer that everyone knows, but for like reasons it also has worth and durability which the other does not. Whether or not you keep it, the experience of having had it is about as unforgettable and as indescribable as the trick to riding a bike.

Thanks for the info! My last direct exposure to a frontier model was now almost twelve months ago, so I suppose I'll have to dedicate a few hours pretty soon.

Well, sure. It isn't for everyone, and this isn't my first time. Lots of folks struggle without exogenously imposed routine and structure, and wouldn't it be a dull old world if we were all alike? My diary is nine years old and, as of today, thirty-one hundred and one pages long. But for what it's worth, I neither desire nor intend ever to return to "tech" as you construct it in your comment here, and as HN the appendage of YC (1) also does. I learned how to work for a living well before any of that stuff really came along, and I confide I will still know how once it's gone. (Also, reading the news versus distracting oneself with it is a distinction worth considering for the difference it describes. Can be hard to be very proactive or muster much motivation when all one's energy goes to either earning a livelihood or to recovering from same, eh?)

(1) Peace, Dan! I imply no substantial or material connection, only nascence within the same culture and enshrinement of the same desiderata, as you well know - and well know can't be gainsaid, or not in factual terms at least.

If you don't consider it "production quality" and I don't consider it "production quality" and the paying client does consider it "production quality," which two of these people are wrong?