This comment about the OpenClaw guy hits a little too close to home:

“Peter Steinberger is a great example of how AI is catnip very specifically for middle-aged tech guys. they spend their 20s and 30s writing code, burn out or do management stuff for a decade, then come back in their late 40s/50s and want to try to throw that fastball again. Claude Code makes them feel like they still got it.”

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wvenable an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I get it. Knowing good code and how to correctly build software that people actually want is experience that is consistently hampered by constantly having to learn yet another tech stack.

Using an LLM lets you quickly learn (or quickly avoid having to learn) yet another tech stack while you leverage your inherent software development knowledge.

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saulpw 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Same but for me it's 25 years of accumulated personal backlog that I'm finally burning through. Like I've been a project hoarder and now I have a house elf to tidy up and do all that widget fobbering business. I just need to figure out what the rules of the house are.

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larodi 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And why would they not? do they have to feel they ain’t got it anymore because age?

	▲	tkel an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Because they don't "got it". Asking the bot to program is the same as asking a junior engineer to write some code, and then claiming it as your own. It's not actually them programming. Just a misplaced sense of pride.

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vishnugupta 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> late 40s

This describes me nearly perfectly. Though I didn’t exactly burn out of coding, I accidentally stumbled upon being an EM while I was coding well and enjoying. But being EM stuck so I got into managing team(s) at biggish companies which means doing everything except one that I enjoy the most which is coding.

However now that I run my own startup I’m back to enjoying coding immensely because Claude takes care of grunt work of writing code while allowing me to focus on architecture, orchestration etc. Immense fun.

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ido 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Me too, only I'm "only" 42! Got my first job as a programmer at 18 and (in retrospect) burnt out at some point and thought going into managment was the fix.

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cebert 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you don’t mind sharing, what does your startup do?

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zabzonk 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What is an "EM"?

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supriyo-biswas 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Engineering Manager (as opposed to people who stick to programming, called Individual Contributor.)

	▲	zabzonk 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, how I hate these horrible job descriptions. But thanks for the info.

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satvikpendem an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

And what's the problem with that?