I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own (and no, I won't vibe-code it, what's the fun in that?)
I don't even code for work anymore since I moved to a project/service management role.
Basically, the spark I felt some 25 years ago seems to be completely gone.
Any suggestion on getting it back?
"I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own (and no, I won't vibe-code it, what's the fun in that?)"
I'm not sure if you mean "code gen without a plan/expertise" or just code gen. If you found joy because you enjoyed building things, now be the best time to explore and prototype something you've always dreamt of.
If you found joy because of the craft itself, low-level hands-on stuff (breadboards, esp32s, soldering, ..) can scratch that itch too.
I can't speak for the poster, but to me, there's no joy in either because, plan or not, it doesn't feel like I am the one building it. If I got someone (AI or human) to build a castle in Minecraft to my specifications, regardless of how detailed those specs are, it wouldn't feel like I built anything. The sense of accomplishment is just gone.
Honestly, I think I'd rather be the one getting specs and figuring out how to implement them than the other way around.
I've been a developer for 45 years and I still actually like it most days.
Soldering is very relaxing as well.
You can't pinpoint when the fun stopped and it's subjective. I personally became conscious that the party was fully over around 2023, after a few years of feeling it subconsciously.
2023 was when Twitter and Reddit changed their respective APIs and became openly user hostile, which was the symbolic turning point for me.
Not saying that's what is going on here, but maybe it is helpful.
Alongside the purpose they serve, all of them can be trivially broken into and re-tooled however you like — and for me at least, that’s where a lot of fun lies in computers. When it comes to mainline desktops now, everything is incredibly expensive and deflating.
Every industry has a regression to the mean such that a normal workforce can support it. This is, good thing, but it makes the commercial side very boring (which is also a good thing).
With AI, I think makes it more permissible to do odd and unique things that see fun. Like, why not?
To me a more important question is: where can people 10-30 years old bootstrap themselves on interesting and useful problems? They have intelligence and energy but not resources or connections (mostly), and all that potential human capital will all be wasted if they don't have any tractable and fruitful domains. (We don't have to worry about those with resources, connections, or luck, but they're a small minority already tethered to value flows, in little danger of being under-developed.)
My concern in particular is that tech companies spent big on building free languages and tools (yes, you used to have to pay for compilers, IDE's, databases...) in order to reduce input costs of them and their customers. If AI already minimizes labor costs (both the work and the discovery and training of residual human talent), there's no reason to subsidize that self-training, and likely fewer portable skills (across more isolated tech stacks), further locking employees in, reducing cross-pollination (formerly within the valley).
Individual opportunity is shrinking. Young people feel it. Old people feel it too, even if they have bagfuls of tech stocks.
99% of everything is crap, but if you want to find that 1% that makes you so happy you found it, you have to deal with trudging through that 99%.
Also it helps to try and socialize with people who have similar values and notions of fun as you so they can point you to the things they find fun. You won’t agree a lot of the time, but it’s still interesting directions to have on your radar.
Linux kep it fun. Even during a time when I worked with windows professionally I always had a Linux distribution installed somewhere.
As a short history of fun in no particular order:
First time I got XFree86 working after having to endlessly configure display settings.
Using Yggdrasil to do remote support for Sun systems.
Hacking on a cd-rom driver to get mine to work.
Building a media server on an NSLU2. My media server is still called “the slug” despite being on an RPi now. At one point my kids had repurposed PS2s in their rooms with all their favourite shows at their fingertips. Sounds lame now but back then it was magic.
Moving all my dev tools to Linux after finally realising they all ran worse on windows, including .NET core
Endless fiddling with wine to get games to start, now completely solved but it was educational at the time.
Wacky shenanigans with wifi drivers and binary blobs back when wifi was still emerging.
I don’t know how you get the spark back once it’s lost though, I’d only suggest that the reward centre in your dome doesn’t fire properly unless you’ve been challenged and worked hard to solve whatever you’re faced with.
I called it "losing my immortality"; I no longer felt like I had infinite time to just code for the fun of it. I just wanted to produce things. I wanted the result, not the journey.
I was just talking about it with my son yesterday, he's 17 and I'm 55. We were talking about the new Commodore 64 and how it was trying to bring the joy back to computing. He love programming and I'm trying to support that. But it looks very different for me than him.
He is loving th craft of programming, which is great! I remember that, and I think that will serve him well. I'm feeling the same joy in the results I get through using AI.
As a reminder, this was the era of the early iPhones and the first MacBook Air [2] — tech was mature enough, but not yet overcrowded with VCs.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20080223071127/http://www.apple....
You just need to find the right application for your skills to reignite it, e. g. a side project. There are also plenty of awesome books out there to dive into new topics (I like O'Reilly and No Starch Press books).
Suddenly it's an always on resource that needs value extracting.
It's even worse nowadays, post COVID, with the insane hustle culture. I mean, yeah, these strats worked when it was the odd person doing it. But now.. nah thanks, you're trying to play on my basic human nature.
You want fun? Build shit. Stop being precious about vibe coding, it's a spectrum, nothing is too complex now.. learn from the LLM if you don't want to just let it run with the code.
Shit.. it's fun to finally build out a good portion of the never ending ideas list (and to realise half of those ideas just aren't worth the effort)
All this to say.. it was fun because it wasn't easy. We were learning.
After that it is all servers and corporations. Although I have switched one of my laptops to Linux, I perhaps have never been a true Linux guy.
Being able to plug a little intelligence into software with little effort makes many things a lot more convenient. One of my favorites is having an LLM monitoring a long running task and doing something about it if something goes off the rails.
The hurdle to seeing what an idea what look like in implementation has also decreased a lot, so I don't have to worry about picking something small enough to finish over a weekend or two.
Perhaps we need a new frontier?
As for me, really enjoying the wide diversity of bespoke well considered creature comforts people are building with Home Assistant. I love the various casting technologies & how it finally gave us a networked ubiquitous & pervasive cross device opening (very excited for Open Screen protocol).
My local area has a pretty active group of people doing LoRa and now wifi halow meshing, which is so cool to see: actual person to person connectivity.
I love seeing the huge variety of apps being built around atmospheric computing. Having one ur-connected Personal Data Server that we are sovereign over that atproto hosts (some technical quibles about use of "hosts" allows here) all kinds of different online apps is incredible, and it's wild what people are cooking up. The pace, the care, the community, now that we have a omni-purpose social networking software that respects the users is amazing, breathtaking. https://atstore.fyi
The whole agent era is amazing, with incredible agentic and/or vibe coding things on demand. We can learn and see so much more than before. People are going wild building systems they access remotely by phone, by ssh, by voice, that have so much on tap, that run such incredible and affordable models (deepseek flash rocking the house). Computing's form is in total review.
> I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own (and no, I won't vibe-code it, what's the fun in that?)
Hahaha. Ok. You destroyed your spark a long time ago & are never ever ever getting it back with an attitude like that. You've grey bearded every drop of glamor out from the world if that's what you've let yourself think. That is the corporatized atittude you just decried! Dry and cut.
> Any suggestion on getting it back?
You have built all manners of walls and inhibitions that keep you from being involved, from considering possibility, from seeing progress. I have technical things I think are amazing that I've shared. But you need to work on tearing down the walls that you have walled yourself into, and finding a will within yourself that is able and interested in engaging the world.
Now you are older, AI is the new thing, young people[0] are having a blast, pushing it to it's limits, what can it do?! they're hacking. But you're older so you're not interested in shiny new thing.
[0] and some older people to be clear, I admire them most, they keep their mind and curiosity young
Or any of the trending variants.
Little computers are still fun.
I know what you mean, I think that happened when Corporations took over the internet.
Plus, when Smart Phones came out, most were locked down. If they were not locked down I think it would have been lots of fun for the young hacking them. Now, almost all devices are in the process of following the Cell Phone Trend.
But some fun can be had with the *BSDs and some Linux Distros, hopefully that can continue in spite of these new Age Verification Laws.
Seems the young of today cannot hack, break, fix computers now, they seem to be on a Assembly Line to Corporate boredom.
Of course, when Commodore went bankrupt, the fun ended. They didn't innovate or market like the Apple Macintosh or IBM PC Clones.
You can still program in BASIC with PC-BASIC: https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/ BASIC was always fun to use.
You got old. The thing you loved became work. That's when most things stop being fun. Don't know what to tell you. Maybe collect stamps or something.