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Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion

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Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion

#41

Post by bayarearefugee »

ares623 wrote: post #34

I'm so excited to be able to continue build things when I'm living on the streets. I'm glad to know that drive to create will always be with me and keep me warm during winters.

You can't speak this kind of truth on hacker news!

But, uh, yeah... I've been noticing a growing divide between people like OP who are either already retired or are wealthy enough that they could if they wanted to who absolutely love the new world of LLMs, and people who aren't currently financially secure and realize that LLMs are going to snatch their career away. Maybe not this year, but not too far out either.

Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion

#42

Post by scottLobster »

Maybe the internet has made me too cynical, and I'm glad people seem to be having a good time, but at time of posting I can't help but notice that almost every comment here is suspiciously vague as to what, exactly, is being coded. Still better than the breathless announcements of the death of software engineering, but quite similar in tone.

Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion

#43

Post by 999900000999 »

From what I've seen, and of course the models get better everyday, if you have very simple grunt work that needs to be done. Coding agents are basically magic. The moment something gets either difficult or subjective, coding agents love to add completely incorrect solutions.

Try to tell Claude Code to refactor some code and see if it doesn't just delete the entire file and rewrite it. Sure that's cute, but it's absolutely not okay in a real software environment.

I do find this stuff great for hobbyist projects. I don't know if I'd be willing to put money on the line yet

Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion

#44

Post by libraryofbabel »

TimFogarty wrote: post #27
al_borland wrote: post #10

I spent the last 2 days primarily using Claude instead of coding things myself at work. I felt the exact opposite way. It was so unfulfilling. I’d equate it to the feeling of getting an A on a test, knowing I cheated. I didn’t accomplish anything. I didn’t learn anything. I got the end result with none of the satisfaction and learned nothing in the process. I’m probably going to go back and redo everything with my ow…

That's interesting. I have been thinking about how the vastly different reactions people seem to have to agentic coding could be influenced by what they value about coding. To me it seems like there are three joys in coding: 1. Creating something 2. Solving puzzles 3. Learning new things If you are primarily motivated by seeing a finished product of some sort, then I think agentic coding is transcendent. You can get…

I think your comment really captures some of the reasons behind the differences between people’s reactions to Claude pretty well.

I will add though, on 2 and 3, during most of the coding I do in my day job as a staff engineer, it’s pretty rare for me to encounter deeply interesting puzzles and really interesting things to learn. It’s not like I’m writing a compiler or and OS kernel or something; this is web dev and infra at a mid sized company. For 95% of coding tasks I do I’ve seen some variation already before and they are boring. It’s nice to have Claude power through them.

On system design and architecture, the problems still tend to be a bit more novel. I still learn things there. Claude is helpful, but not as helpful as it is for the code.

I do get the sense that some folks enjoy solving variations of familiar programming puzzles over and over again, and Claude kills that for them. That’s not me at all. I like novelty and I hate solving the same thing twice. Different tastes, I guess.

Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion

#46

Post by meebee » 

  So excited to be getting to my backlog of apps that I've wanted but couldn't take the time to develop on my own.  I'm 66 and have been in the software field in various capacities (but programming mostly as a hobby).  Here's a partial list of apps I've completed in the last few months:
- Media Watch app to keep a list of movies and shows my wife and I want to watch

- Grocery List with some tracking of frequent purchases

- Health Log for medical history, doc appointments and past visits

- Habits Tracker with trends I’m interested

- Daily Wisdom Reader instead of having multiple ebooks to keep track of where I'm at

- A task manager similar to the old LifeBalance app

- A Home Inventory app so that I can track what I have, warranty, and maintenance

- An ios watch app to see when I'm asleep so that it can turn off my music or audiobook

- An ios watch chess tactics trainer app

- some games

Many of these are similar to paid offerings, but those didn't check off all the features I really wanted, so I vibe-coded my own. They all do what I want, the way I want it to.

Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion

#48

Post by random3 »

al_borland wrote: post #10

I spent the last 2 days primarily using Claude instead of coding things myself at work. I felt the exact opposite way. It was so unfulfilling. I’d equate it to the feeling of getting an A on a test, knowing I cheated. I didn’t accomplish anything. I didn’t learn anything. I got the end result with none of the satisfaction and learned nothing in the process. I’m probably going to go back and redo everything with my ow…

I think it depends what you're building. I find it fun, once in a while, an engineer to "not go shoeless" and get some of things I need done.

Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion

#50

Post by drivingmenuts »

My main worry is: what is the license on the code produced by Claude (or any other coding agent)? It seems like, if it was trained using open-source software, then the resulting code needs to be open-source as well and it should be compatible with the original source. Artwork produced by an AI cannot be copyrighted, but apparently code can be?

If the software produced is for internal use, the point is probably moot. But if it isn't, this seems like a question that needs to be answered ASAP.

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