Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on some tangent) with this approach that I can't even be bothered to set up my Claude environment. I swear when this contract is over I'm opening a mobile food cart.
I'm similar ( turning 50 in a couple month, wife+2 kids etc) and was telling my wife this morning that the world of software development has definitely changed. I don't know what it will look like in the future but it won't look like the past. It seems producing the text that can be compiled into instructions for a computer is something they're particularly good at. Even if LLM progress stopped today there's already enough value to be very disruptive to the industry. Maybe a good analogy is going from a bare text editor to a modern IDE. It's happening very fast though, way faster than the evolution of IDEs.
You'd have to do even less copy-pasting. The switch to some agent that has access to your source code directory speed things up so much, the time spent pays for itself in the first day.
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