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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

#71

Post by al_borland »

TimFogarty wrote: post #61
al_borland wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'd add a #4 to this list, and that's helping people. I like making things that people can use to make their life easier. That's probably my number one. The "creating something" idea... That's more complex. With agentic coding something can be created, but did I create it? Using agentic coding feels like hiring someone to do the work for me. For example, I just had all the windows in my house replaced. A crew…

Yes! Good points! I think what I meant for point 1 was more "outputting something" vs "creating something". In my mind that encompasses materializing something into the world to achieve whatever you wanted, whether you were aiming to help others, solve a problem you alone have, or scratch some other sort of itch. It's about achieving some end. And helping somebody can be achieved indirectly and still be satisfying. T…

It's kind of a weird thing. I spent 2 days working one some code, which in a way was the process of working out the requirements and functionality that was required. I then told Claude to look at it in and refactor it.

I did put in 2 days of work to come up with what Claude used to ultimately do what it did... but when I look at the resulting code, I feel nothing. Having the idea isn't the same as being the one who actually did the thing. I plan to delete the branch next week. I don't want to maintain what it did, and think it should be less complex than it made it.

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

#72

Post by jrnichols »

I'm over 50 now and feel like this as well. Haven't used Claude yet but used Codex a bunch, and it's been SO MUCH fun going over all the old perl & shell scripting stuff that I used to do years ago before I got into healthcare time and morphed to a hobby sysadmin.

Staying up and re-learning what I used to love long ago has given me a new found passion as well. Even if I do vibe code some scripts, at least I have the background now to go through them and make sure they make sense. They're things I'm using in my own homelab and not something that I'm trying to spin up a Github repo for. I'm not shipping anything. I'm refreshing my old skills and trying to bring some of them up to date. An unfortunate reality is that my healthcare career is going to be limited due to multiple injuries along the way, and I need to try to be as current as I can in case something happens. My safety net is limited.

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

#73

Post by fishingisfun »

btw how good are any of these tools for embedded programming? we need a new era for hardware enthusiasts. my dad made plenty of fun things in the 80s but it was at the tail end of the newess that came from radiokits and other gadgets that flooded the market due to the uchip

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

#74

Post by TimFogarty »

scottLobster wrote: post #66
TimFogarty wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'll add "craftsmanship". It isn't just delivering "A" finished product, you want to deliver a "good", if not "the best", finished product. I guess if you're in an iterative MVP mindset then this matters less, but that model has always made me a little queasy. I like testing and verifying the crap out of my stuff so that when I hand it off I know it's the best effort I could possibly give. Relying on AI code denies m…

That's a really good point. And I agree that kind of confidence in craftsmanship is something that's missing from agentic coding today... it does make slop if you're not careful with it. Even though I've learned how to guide agents, I still have some uneasiness about missing something sloppy they have done.

But then it makes me ask if the agents will get so good that craftsmanship is a given? Then that concern goes away. When I use Go I don't worry too much about craftsmanship of the language because it was written by a lot of smart people and has proven itself to be good in production for thousands of orgs. Is there a point at which agents prove themselves capable enough that we start trusting in their craftsmanship? There's a long way to go, but I don't think that's impossible.

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

#75

Post by ilc »

samiv wrote: post #51

As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull! My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" w…

As a Principal SWE, who has done his fair share of big stuff.

I'm excited to work with AI. Why? Because it magnifies the thing I do well: Make technical decisions. Coding is ONE place I do that, but architecture, debugging etc. All use that same skill. Making good technical decisions.

And if you can make good choices, AI is a MEGA force multiplier. You just have to be willing to let go of the reins a hair.

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

#76

Post by riquito »

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…

You're forgetting that (1) brings a sense of pride. "I built this". That's not true in many ways if you ask something else to do it

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

#77

Post by gopher_space »

scottLobster wrote: post #57
idopmstuff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am currently using a Claude skill that I have been building out over the last few days that runs through my Amazon PPC campaigns and does a full audit. Suggestions of bid adjustments, new search terms and products to advertise against and adjustment to campaign structures. It goes through all of the analytics Amazon provides, which are surprisingly extensive, to find every search term where my product shows up, get…

And it doesn't freak you out that you're relying on thousands of lines of code that you've never looked at? How do you verify the end result? I wouldn't trust thousands of lines of code from one of my co-workers without testing

It's thousands of lines of variation on my own hand-tooling, run through tests I designed, automated by the sort of onboarding docs I should have been writing years ago.

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

#78

Post by dwg »

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…

Your choices are not limited to one extreme or the other.

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

#79

Post by vishnugupta »

zhoujianfu wrote: post #68

This comment about the OpenClaw guy hits a little too close to home: “Peter Steinberger is a great example of how AI is catnip very specifically for middle-aged tech guys. they spend their 20s and 30s writing code, burn out or do management stuff for a decade, then come back in their late 40s/50s and want to try to throw that fastball again. Claude Code makes them feel like they still got it.”

> late 40s

This describes me nearly perfectly. Though I didn’t exactly burn out of coding, I accidentally stumbled upon being an EM while I was coding well and enjoying. But being EM stuck so I got into managing team(s) at biggish companies which means doing everything except one that I enjoy the most which is coding.

However now that I run my own startup I’m back to enjoying coding immensely because Claude takes care of grunt work of writing code while allowing me to focus on architecture, orchestration etc. Immense fun.

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

#80

Post by notAnAIBot768 »

scottLobster wrote: post #70
notAnAIBot768 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you trust the assembly your compiler puts out? The machine code your assembler puts out? The virtual machine it runs on? Thousands of lines of code you've never looked at...

None of that is generated by an LLM prone to hallucination and is perfectly deterministic unless there's a hardware problem. And yes, I have occasionally run into compiler bugs in my career. That's one reason we test.

> None of that is generated by an LLM

How did you verify that?

> prone to hallucination

You know humans can hallucinate?

> is perfectly deterministic

We agree then that you can verify, test, and trust the deterministic code an LLM produces without ever looking at it.

> That's one reason we test

That's one way we can trust and verify code produced by an LLM. You can't stop doing all the other things that aren't coding.

I get there's a difference. Shitty code can be produced by LLMs or humans. LLMs really can pump out the shitty code. I just think the argument that you cant trust code you haven't viewed is not a good argument. I very much trust a lot of code I've never seen, and yes I've been bitten by it too.

Not trying to be an ass, more trying to figure out how im going to deal for the next decade before retirement age. Uts going to be a lot of testing and verification I guess

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