@gtowey I think it was basically a lack of ability to focus for myriad distractions in my life, suboptimal upbringing, family obligations, I think I'm a little dyslexic, larger career obligations, top of everything else I had a career in the reserves also that's where a lot of my energy went primetime, also being a musician I found it a lot easier to play a musical instrument than spend the time needed develop chops programming wise. and then there's my family, lot of time spent focused on them. A lot of distractions on top of a pretty poor memory basically. I can say all that stuff now cuz I'm yes an entrepreneur but I'm also retired. It might actually boil down to a lack of discipline. But who knows, Tell you one thing for sure I am totally getting off on AI assisted programming. Any question I have, there's an answer that fits within my understanding of the way things work which is not minimal with all my experience in IT so whatever it is it's working.
Well for me, kind of a IT jack of all trades, a little programming, a little server management, a little DBA, HTML, Network and domain shat, etc, yeah a little bit of everything under my belt. I am finding Cursor incredibly enabling. You have heard it here before I know but I really wish I had this when I was in the trenches. I am retired now. I use it for various little programs I am writing and one big project. I use Cursor with opus 4.5 mostly, and finding that none of my questions and none of my requests have hit a brick wall, some walls for sure but not the kind of brick walls I would run into in the past where I would have no one to turn to immediately and those that I could turn to were also busy very busy with their s**, sometimes taking hours to get through to them or maybe even days. All that's gone. With the help of AI I can usually work out any kind of problem I have. Now, as for the quality of the code, well that may be another story. It might be twice as much as any , more experienced programmer might write but so far, with my experience, I have not seen anything that looks untoward.
Bottom line is that I am extremely grateful for AI has a teammate. As a solopreneur even more so. I'm building an application that I know would have taken at least $10 to 20K to build but all I'm paying is $60 a month Cursor Pro+ and my public facing server. And only $60 because I ran into a Cursor Claude limit.
Buckle up guys and gals, the midwit you always feared has the keys to the tank now...
For me, mostly time, time to learn it, time it takes to complete these projects. We have so many other things to do, why bother learning the details of a specific language or tool if AI can do it in minutes. More time to learn about architecture/management/ux/design/guitar/etc.
But couldn't you then extend the argument to everything? Like why learn design if AI can do it in minutes? Or why learn guitar when AI can create music in minutes?
Its always worth learning something if you enjoy it, the same applies to code and languages. You can definitely create better apps knowing the details of a specific language than not knowing it and I think its still worth doing if you care about the ultimate quality of your work.
I think architecture and UX have more impact on the quality of the software you write for the end user than the details of a specific language. And when you're creating guitar training software, music and guitar playing knowledge has more impact on the quality of the software, than the details of a specific language.
When working with an LLM i care more about prompting it about software architecture, software UX, and the domain we're working on, than the details of the language it uses.
> I think architecture and UX have more impact on the quality of the software you write for the end user than the details of a specific language. And when you're creating guitar training software, music and guitar playing knowledge has more impact on the quality of the software, than the details of a specific language.
hard disagree on both points. You're talking about "impact" but surely you'll be a better coder if you can actually, you know, code? The other stuff is important sure but if you literally cannot read the code and just pleasure yourself with dreams of architecture and UX, what you're generating is 99% bad quality.
But prove me wrong, would love to see something you've made.
Best thing of Claude Code is that it's cheap to change your mind: you can try some idea, test it, and if you don't like it you simply have it refactor the code. No more big design up-front, "we need all the specs and requirements".
> Its always worth learning something if you enjoy it
This argument is repeated often but what I think you're missing is that if you want to listen to music you put on the radio, you don't record an album.
Sure if I want to enjoy playing guitar I'll do that, but that's not what I'm paid to do and you're not paid write code. Nobody but me wants to hear me play guitar and nobody but you wants to look at your beautiful code.
I can tell you from my perspective that it really is a different story when you're over 65, I'm 73 so it's even more different. It's obligations that distract keep coming. I'm just having fun with it at this point. I just can't imagine what you guys are facing right now. Some existential s**. It's like you were swinging through the trees and all the trees disappeared now you got to learn how to live on the desert. You can do it!
I'm such a noob for an OFG; I responded to you at the top of the post. TL;DR is so much stuff got in the way, mostly of my own creation. A lot of excuses but all seemed reasonable at the time.
I feel you man. Problem is that would be a major dollar infrastructure problem that would need federal dollars. With a deficit over 40T dollars and political wind blowing against more federal spending generally and Colorado not being a favored state at the moment I'd say the chances are slim of it happening in the next three years. It would be boffo if some liberal corporate billionaire put his shoulder against the project like that enough to inspire a combination of a Colorado bond issue, some state funding and support. The way California handled its high speed rail in Central valley here is not an inspiration I'll tell you that right now. What a fcuk-up and embarrassment that is. What were they thinking?
IF Colorado did this all alone they could potentially avoid a lot of the high costs that result from getting federal dollars. Maybe - Federally funded projects tend to cost 4-7x would they would elsewhere in the world - but nobody really knows why and so it is questionable if Colorado could figure out how to build cheap. Still the potential is there. Colorado's costs would be a lot higher at 7x the cost with federal funding vs doing it all themselves for reasonable costs - but only if they solve all the issues the drive costs up.
Note that I have no confidence Colorado will tackle the issues driving costs up. Several of the known factors are places where politically powerful people (from all sides so don't bring in class warfare) are increasing costs and they let you cut them off. There are a lot of unkonwen issues left after factoring the above, and it is likely they also have politically powerful people increasing costs.
I'm an OFG, born in 1952 (...an okay boomer...) hit the job market in 1971, bad but there were always openings for machinists. Tough craft with a long learning curve but they paid reasonably well in my view, at the time at least. Long story short, TL;DR, evolving myself into a CAD CAM CNC stabilized my career long term. I know there are nuances and differences here with you programmers and the AI revolution but I think you all will be best served embracing it fully or find another path.BTW, the only reason I'm reading HN
... is because I parlayed my CAD CAM and CNC knowledge into my follow on career as an web applications manager, server admin (of sorts), DBA and general web wonk midwitz.
I'll add that I am still, in my state of semi blissful retirement, clattering away on my several PCs and really having fun with AI, Cursor, HN and other geeky (can we say that anymore?) stuffs.
I guess I'll end by advising that to fight evolution is a bad bet.
What a wonderful story! So obscure. Considering the state of the world politically and otherwise these days I've pretty much retired from reading mainstream media and social media generally except when I'm pointed in that direction by Hacker News. I find HN diversions into obscure bits of human history and human doings very much of a stress reliever.
