Do coding skills fade with age?

Logically we could assume that with age comes experience and adaptation into new ideas. The more experience, the better they are equipped to perform as a professional and productive coder.

However I think what happens once developers become more senior, is that time for studying and practicing diminishes due to requirements of the job, turning their previously acquired skills into habits. If the skills are fundamental enough then those habits are fine, however in environments where the leading ideas change every 3 to 5 years (most cases these days), those habits sometimes make skills obsolete. Newer developers and younger people do not have preconceived biases about techniques, skills or ideas making it easier for them to adapt and onboard into uncharted territory for new projects or even legacy ones.

On top of that, with less knowledge comes more opportunity for specialization. The 2 year experience developer that only works with typescript, will be more comfortable than the generalist that has worked with 20 different technologies and starts blending details together. This might make the junior developer seem more experienced, a faulty idea of course, because the more senior person has a much better understanding of the underlying systems that are required to build a complicated product, regardless of specialized technologies.

I wouldn’t say that coding skills fade with age, but that observation might be due to general mental deterioration that affects all parts of life. A senior developer will less frequently be excited to waste time on the cutting edge, and will have more responsibilities (with family for example) that will deter them from being naive and curious which is the qualities that make inexperienced developers seem more skilled, at least in practical problems of coding and implementation.