I feel like the rabid flamewars of the bygone era were as nothing compare to what's going on online now.

I am actually more excited about tech too in my 15 year career. Coding agents have allowed me to streamline things that were really frustrating to do, the senseless work of updating config files or terraform files etc. and allow me to focus on things that always had more meaning, like solving fun problems with code. At the same time, I can super-rubber-duck with AI around pieces of code or tools that Im unfamiliar with, so it's supercharged my learning (I still read 2-3 tech-focused books per year, try new languages, etc.).

So yeah, I only remember being this engaged when I was a junior developer and spending 90% of my time coding. Now I get to spend a lot more of my time coding because claude can handle most of the "meh" stuff for me--even stuff like cutting jira tickets, filling in reports, etc. (I still write post-mortem because those documents are all about education and communication, but in my org, jira tickets are just loose markers of effort and dont have anything to do with design and very little with planning.)