> It is absolutely the greatest golden age in programming ever
It depends, because you now have to pay in order to be able to compete against other programmers who're also using AI tools, it wasn't like that in what I'd call the true "golden age", basically the '90s - early part of the 2000s, when the internet was already a thing and one could put together something very cool with just a "basic" text editor.
One could put something cool together without internet using Delphi. The Borland IDEs were ahead of their time - built-in debugger, profiler, and pretty good documentation. My 'internet' was the SWAG Pascal snippet collection (which could be used fully offline). Someone converted it to HTML:
It depends, because you now have to pay in order to be able to compete against other programmers who're also using AI tools, it wasn't like that in what I'd call the true "golden age", basically the '90s - early part of the 2000s, when the internet was already a thing and one could put together something very cool with just a "basic" text editor.