As an older programmer being able to not waste my mental space with details and the churn of newer frameworks allows me to explore projects I wanted to build fo

As an older programmer being able to not waste my mental space with details and the churn of newer frameworks allows me to explore projects I wanted to build for years but lack the time and energy I had in my 20s. The goal was being able to make things and I've judged my abilities on how much faster I can do things year after year. This speeds things up on one side but creates this backlog of things that need testing. I still love programming but I always preferred the language and style I used 30 years ago. I've been forced to adapt to newer ways, frameworks and different methods to keep up with the times. Using AI is the new react/angularjs frontend pattern of 2015. All of these new patterns were less satisfying then what we had before. For me I'm doing things I couldn't find time before and polishing areas I could but weren't high quality enough. Paying for AI is a struggle mentally and trying to find a good balance is part of the newer challenge. A codex subscription gets used up too quickly or I can't find enough tasks to use up my subscription and both states cause mental burden. At work trying to maximum output while keeping within a reasonable token usage level is a struggle. Local models using cpu can do a lot for free but need to be carefully planned to limit scope. Using free opencode models works but code quality can fall apart so carefully balancing that can be hard. The code quality of top end models looks awful but can be better if you want to spend time on that aspect and trying to balance that with token usage is hard. My biggest wonder is if job interviews are testing that you can hand code still but forcing you to use llms when hired.