As someone who has retired from a programming career…

The AI era is, so far, not a problem. Obviously, my having retired is significant.

Last night I spent an hour with Claude (free tier) setting up a "modern" 6502 build environment for MacOS. By the time I went to bed I had 1) 6502 assembly syntax highlighting in VSCode, 2) was compiling 6502 assembly for the KIM-1 to generate a "paper tape" format, 3) pasting this paper tape binary into CoolTerm to send over TTY (1200-N-8-1) to my KIM-1 clone (PAL-2).

(If I'm tired it's because I excitedly stayed up later than usual to get Claude to help get this workflow working.)

On the other side of the world… a friend who is still at Apple tells me how other engineers at Apple are using Claude to make changes, create pull-requests on code he maintains with a, "Hey, can you approve this change?"

Now he has to go through the code diff that Claude generated…

Oh!, there's some stupid shit in that diff. Did the engineer who submitted the pull request even look at the code before submitting? Who knows. Either they did not or they were not qualified (or well-versed enough with the code) to spot the AI-fluff/crap.

So, yeah, that would suck—keep me busier than I would have been Antediluvian (thanks Claude, for suggesting that made-up Latin).