> I also think that having to solve novel puzzles as part of my job helps preserve my brain plasticity as I age.

Yeah, this is a concern. I remember when I took a break from coding to work as a video game producer for a couple of years and I felt like my ability to code was atrophying and that drove me nuts.

Now I'm not so sure. There's just so much dumb garbage that's accumulated around coding nowadays, especially with web dev. So much time just gluing together or puzzling out how to get APIs or libraries to works and play nice together.

It's not like back in the days where it was relatively simple with PHP and HTML, when I first started. Much less you could do back then, sure, but expectations were a lot lower back then as well.

I might just content myself with doing Sudoku or playing/designing board games to help keep that brain plasticity going, and stop fighting so hard to understand all this junk. Or finally figure out how to get half-decent at shader math or something, at least that seems less trivial and ephemeral.

Everytime I've had to do any any webdev, I've usually just been frustrated by the fact that there's a vision of how powerful any particular architecture should be, and then all the confusion and boilerplate to try and get it there.

And then it changes every 6 months or goes in circles - and I suppose now we just gave up and are letting LLMs YOLO code out the door with whatever works.

Like I remember learning all about Redux Sagas, and then suddenly the whole concept is gone, but also I'm not actually particularly clear on what replaced it (might be time to go back to that well since I need to write a web interface soon again).