AI is bringing my friend out of retirement
I have a friend that is lucky enough to have retired at 40. A year ago he was adamant he'd never work again, having been burnt out from his time at big tech. Back then he was also an absolute AI hater and wouldn't listen to anyone who claimed LLMs were useful for programming.
He finally tried LLMs when Claude Opus 4.6 released and immediately changed his mind in the face of the overwhelming evidence that LLMs can in fact program pretty well. And now with the release of Fable 5 he's giddily creating all sorts of things that would have taken far too long to make prior to AI-accelerated software development. He actually plans to try and found his own business now. He's a very smart guy, so I hope he can make something interesting that people want.
There are a lot of AI doomers and haters. In person I mostly see people doing the same thing they've always done, but now saving time on various tasks. But this is the first time I've seen someone go from grumpy and checked out to giddy and optimistic thanks to LLMs.
Happy to see your friend thrive! I sorta relate to them as well. Last year I was pretty against using Claude Code and Codex and still did all my coding by hand. At the start of this year, my company gave us slightly formal training on using Claude Code in our day-to-day and it really changed my outlook on coding agents. There were always menial/annoying coding tasks that I'd have to do from time to time that I could now delegate to Claude Code instead. Since I was also a new joiner to the company, Claude Code really did help me onboard to the codebase. It not only used CLAUDE.md files that other engineers had left around, it went through the files in the sub-directory I was in and explained the purpose of each file and how they related to each other. It also helped me understand how the code I was working on would interface with our system at large and its various moving parts.
I think with the right guard-rails and usage patterns, coding agents can genuinely be helpful.