I also have been coding for over 40 years now, and I am going to take your example and expand it a bit: wiggling a baton and hearing nice music come out is fun in its own way, all the years of training allowed you to develop the "ear" so you know what sounds good, and to a certain extent to recognize errors the player you are directing is doing, and isn't it nice to be able to just wave your hands and music comes out without having to work on scales, or embochure, or finger dexterity and so on.

The downside is that of course the further you stay away from actually playing your instrument, the rustier you will get; this might or might not be an issue, but it is a significant downside, also being away from the technique side means that as the years go by, you might not be able anymore to have an intuitive understanding of "this sounds wrong" and why it does.

I don't want to stretch the metaphor too far, but it does feel that agentic coding is a bit like building skill tech debt, the more you do it, the more you'll have to work later to bring back the skills you lost. The meta could be that models will get so good so that only a small percentage of developers will ever need to sully their eyes again with looking at code (same as while when we started most people had at least a passing familiarity with assembly, nowadays nearly nobody does), jury's out on that.

Either way, what before needed a full orchestra of developers, now could be doable by a good conductor and maybe a couple of soloists: how many orchestras will be needed? and what will the section musicians not good enough to be soloists and that don't have an interest in becoming a conductor will do? and how are new conductors going to develop their technical chops if there are no more orchestral jobs?

This is my sense as well; I've been coding since the 90s and on HN since 2010.

I don't want to be a typist, I want to make things.

Been working for a little over 10 years, but coding for double that time.

Building things with LLMs is the closest I can get (perhaps even surpass?) the feeling I had as a kid, learning to code.

I feel rather sad that most (though luckily not all) of my friends despise AI, as I feel a (small, but relevant) part of the connective tissue we had is sort of gone. I'm in love with what I can do, I've re-gained the superpowers I had back in college (and even before that) and I can't really share that with them (and they can't really share their concerns and frustrations with me). In two weeks of vacation (actually: in 1 week of those) I finally got around to tackling 5 different projects I had in the back of my mind, mostly for fun (but one of them is genuinely generating some income as well) -- this is amazing, but I have actively avoided talking about this with them, bar sharing a link to some of the things (and even that I'm feeling some regret over)

It's so fun to tinker around with everything! Modding a game, revitalizing abandonware with custom patches, building a harness to know how it works or just...you know...building what is in my mind, whenever, wherever, without it taking foreeeveeeeeeer.

I used to think what I loved was coding, but I have really come to realize I liked both building and coding. The latter I haven't really done much of in more than a year and....it doesn't annoy me at all? I know for a fact I loved doing it, but I can't really say I _miss_ doing it? Maybe after 20 years it just wasn't the same? Maybe the rush from watching my mind materialize into real things so fast is camouflaging it? Who knows...

Not to mention that most everyone else in my surroundings outside of the tech bubble is doing amazing things with AI. Cool websites, music that moves me to tears, random fun games and just, in general, clearly managing to focus more on what they want, on their goals, on their imagination and less on their work. There are exceptions, but the trend is that AI has enabled them to do more of what they want and less of what they have to, and I love that.

I completely accept that, for some people, the fun is/was in coding by hand. And that it's terrible that they'll likely not be able to earn a living just doing that relatively soon. What I have difficulty accepting is the outright bashing and hating on everything AI-related (and, yes, I hate hype too, but have you LOOKED AROUND AND SEEN THIS NEW WORLD?!). I can sort of accept it based on ethical grounds, but very rarely is it actually that. I guess people are just venting and firing in all directions due to how much this has shaken their lives and livelihood (and that, indeed, I can understand).

Anyway, this world is AMAZING! I am 100% with you. Especially because I don't even type (to the agents) anymore. I just voice-to-text, with barely any filter. I've often described it as the closest I've ever felt to truly controlling the computer with my mind, because I don't have to slow down my thoughts to write them. Sort of incredibly liberating.