I'm 54 and started programming when I was 7 also. While I've enjoyed coding throughout my career, I'm loving this new phase of software dev, a lot of the hassle has now been removed and now you can concentrate on ACTUALLY building things without so many side tracks and hiccups from technical details. I guess I'm not as attached to coding as I thought I was, I actually really enjoy building software and now that has become a lot easier and I feel experienced devs are really well suited to working with AI to get it to build the right thing and to consider robustness, performance, approach/structure, architecture etc. I'm really enjoying myself at the moment!
I'm a year old than you. Recently, my father-in-law (an engineer in the '50s) was telling me about the transition from analog to digital electronics and how it changed his entire world.
I feel very fortunate that I was able to start out writing machine code and can now watch a machine write code on its own. I'm not even remotely claiming SOTA models can do what we do, but they are closer than ever before.
It's time to accept that the world has changed again.
