I'm also in my fifties, and sold my first software (6502 assemblewr) when I was 17!

My younger self was always excited when the latest tech came out, when the latest MSDN arrived, etc. But the last 15 or so years, I totally lost interest. I still love writing code but the desire for the latest and greatest had fade.

These LLMs were dogshit for a while, but I would keep returning to them.

Now I am excited again.

I work on a large web project with lots of legacy that is slowly being rewritten and copilot and codex are helping a lot by first writing tests for the old code, and then converting to the new.

I thought we'd never finish, but now I can see how we can do it.

It's brought a bit of the fun back into the game.