If I'm any example, I'm on the other side. I got into computers in the '70s: plotter art, BASIC, then Z-80s, forth, PDP11s, Amigas and so to now with GPUs and supercomputers and visualization. I'm recently retired and having enormous fun plowing through my lifetime backlog of "wouldn't that be a cool tool" (https://pcons.org) or a climate visualization (https://globe-viz.oberbrunner.com) or a travel packing list app (packzen) or a bunch of 3d printer tools... so on and so on. Totally co-engineered with Claude. What we're doing together, and getting out to the world as useful open source projects, is easily 10x what I could've done on my own, in the limited time available to me in this life.

I'm the same way. The "grind" makes the successes all the sweeter.

> Yeah, in my experience, the people that got into software engineering because of the money are absolutely thrilled with how LLMs are changing the industry. They mostly just liked getting results and LLMs are great for that.

Those people are in for the biggest shock and largest disappointment: when a bright teenager can replicate, with an LLM, what they produced with an LLM the pay is going to fall off a cliff.

At least those who really are into development to the point of writing their own OS, Language, etc can still enjoy it as a hobby.

Really hate this characterization, although to be fair I love the ops/infra side of things more. I've used to set up so many parts of my homelab manually, but now I can just get it all done. I've spent countless hours maintaining a Rpi server at the infancy of my interest in computing. Truly a lot of it is maintenance and busywork tasks. I am having more fun than ever. Perhaps some people like those busywork sysadmin tasks and gain enjoyment of the homelab hobby just from that...honestly I can't say I really understand it.