I work in cloud consulting specializing in application development. But most of the time when an assignment is to produce code instead of leading a project or doing strategy assessments, it’s to turn around a quick proof of concept that requires a broad set of skills - infrastructure, “DevOps”, backend development and ETL type jobs where the goal is to teach the client or to get them to sign off on a larger project where we will need to bring in a team.

For my last two projects, I didn’t write a single line of code by hand. But I refuse to use agents and I build up an implementation piece by piece via prompting to make sure I have the abstractions I want and reusable libraries.

I take no joy in coding anymore and I’ve been doing it for fourty years. I like building systems and solving business problems.

I’m not however disagreeing with you that LLMs will make your development skill atrophy, I’m seeing it in real time at 51. But between my customer facing work and supporting sales and cat herding, I don’t have time to sit around and write for loops and I’m damn sure not going to do side projects outside of work. Besides, companies aren’t willing to pay my company’s bill rates for me as a staff consultant to spend a lot of time coding.

I hopefully can take solace in the fact that studies also show that learning a second language strengthens the brain and I’m learning Spanish and my wife and I plan to spend a couple of months in the winter every year in a Central American Spanish speaking country.

We have already done the digital nomad thing across the US for a year until late 2023 so we are experienced with it and spent a month in Mexico.