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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

#191

Post by suzzer99 »

atonse wrote: post #88
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…

> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM. I've been a tech lead for years and have written business critical code many times. I don't ever want to go back to writing code. I am feeling supremely empowered to go 100x faster. My contribution is still judgement, taste, architecture, etc. And the models will keep getting better. And as…

> I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities.

Here's the other edge of that sword. A couple back-end devs in my department vibe-coded up a standard AI-tailwind front-end of their vision of revamping our entire platform at once, which is completely at odds with the modular approach that most of the team wants to take, and would involve building out a whole system based around one concrete app and 4 vaporware future maybe apps.

And of course the higher-ups are like “But this is halfway done! With AI we can build things in 2 weeks that used to six months! Let’s just build everything now!” Nevermind that we don’t even have the requirements now, and nailing those down is the hardest part of the whole project. But the higher-ups never live through that grind.

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

#192

Post by tombert »

testbjjl wrote: post #158
tombert wrote: post #156

I have had the opposite experience. When it was just asking ChatGPT questions it was fine, I was having fun, I was able to unblock myself when I got non-trivial errors much quicker, and I still felt like I was learning stuff. With Codex or Claude Code, it feels like I'm stuck LARPing as a middle manager instead of actually solving problems. Sometimes I literally just copy stuff from my assigned ticket into Claude and…

Are you 60?

No, I'm in my mid 30's. Unless I win the lottery (which seems unlikely considering I don't buy lottery tickets), or I managed to get some obscenely lucky with shares at a startup, I realistically will need to work for at least twenty more years before retiring.

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

#193

Post by nurettin »

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…

Completely the opposite experience here! I am a tech lead with decades of experience with various programming languages.

When it comes to producing code with an llm, most noobs get stuck producing spaghetti and rolling over. It is so bad that I have to go prompt-fix their randomly generated architecture, de-duplicate, vectorize and simplify.

If they lack domain knowledge on top of being a noob it is a complete disaster. I saw llm code pick a bad default (0) for a denominator and then "fix" that by replacing with epsilon.

It isn't the end, it is a new beginning. And I'm excited.

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

#194

Post by ido »

vishnugupta wrote: post #79
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 car…

Me too, only I'm "only" 42! Got my first job as a programmer at 18 and (in retrospect) burnt out at some point and thought going into managment was the fix.

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

#195

Post by socalgal2 »

meebee wrote: post #46

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…

That's amazing!!

Can I ask, do you pay for any server service or run your own or are these standalone apps?

For me, many of your ideas, if I was to implement them, I'd want them to have a server. Habits Tracker, need to access from whatever device I'm on at that moment. Grocery List. Same thing, and multiple users so everyone in the same house can add things to one list.

Etc....

This is not really LLM related but I feel like I have a blindspot, or hurdle or something where I haven't done enough server work be comfortable making these solutions. Trying to be clearer, I've setup a few servers in the past so it's not like I can't do it. It's more a feeling for comfort, or maybe discomfort.

Example: If you ask me to make a static website, or a blog, I'd immediately make a new github repo, install certain tools (static site generator or whatever), setup the github actions, register a new domain if needed, setup the CNAME, check it it's working. If I think it's going to be popular put cloudflare in front of it. I'm 100% confident in that process. I'm not saying my process is perfect. Only that I'm confident of it. I also know what it costs, $10-$20 a year for the domain name and maybe a yearly subscription to github

Conversely, if I was to make anything that was NOT a static server but actually a server with users and accounts, then I just have to go read up on the latest and cross my fingers I'm not leaking user data, have an XSS, going to get a bill for $250k from a DOS attack, picking the right kind of database, ID service, logging, etc... I could expose a home server but then be worried it'll get hacked. Need to find a backup solution, etc....

I know someone will respond I'm worrying to much but I hoping for more example of what others are doing for these things. Is there some amazing saas that solves all of this that most of you use? Some high-level framework that solves all of this and I just pick "publish" don't have to worry about giant bills?

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

#196

Post by didip »

Claude Code is definitely stoking the tiny ember that’s almost went out completely.

I am only 43, but on the last year of my career, suddenly my level of care in big corporate politics nose dived to almost zero. To the point that I happily retired myself.

After messing around with some hard subjects, with the help of Claude Code, the little boy who used to love programming so much is waking up again.

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

#197

Post by bobanrocky »

notAnAIBot768 wrote: post #64
scottLobster wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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...

Compiler theory and implementation is based on mathematical and logic principles. And hence much more provable and trustworthy than a LLM thats stitching together pieces of text based on ‘training’

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

#198

Post by card_zero »

lovelearning wrote: post #171
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…

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I must say I find this idea, and this wording, elitist in a negative way. I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping. Chances are, you were able to accumulate your expert knowledge only because: - book writing and authorship was democratized away from the church and academia - web content publication and p…

So you put these all in the same category: gaining knowledge, gaining abilities, and just obtaining things.

I gatekeep my bike, I keep it behind a gate. If you break the gate open and democratize my bike, you're an idiot.

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

#199

Post by joeevans1000 »

bri3d wrote: post #119
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…

This is really interesting to me; I have the opposite belief. My worry is that any idiot can prompt themselves to _bad_ software, and the differentiator is in having the right experience to prompt to _good_ software (which I believe is also possible!). As a very seasoned engineer, I don't feel personally rugpulled by LLM generated code in any way; I feel that it's a huge force multiplier for me. Where my concern abou…

Good software, bad software, and working software.

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

#200

Post by jmalicki »

samiv wrote: post #113
atonse wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM. I've been a tech lead for years and have written business critical code many times. I don't ever want to go back to writing code. I am feeling supremely empowered to go 100x faster. My contribution is still judgement, taste, architecture, etc. And the models will keep getting better. And as…

What you bring to the table night be fine, but how long do you think you'll find emoloyers willing to still pay for this? One thing is for sure LLMs will bring down down the cost of software per some unit and increase the volume. But..cost = revenue. What is a cost to one party is a revenue to another party. The revenue is what pays salaries. So when software costs go down the revenues will go down too. When revenues…

"One thing is for sure LLMs will bring down down the cost of software per some unit and increase the volume.

But..cost = revenue."

That is Karl Marx's Labor theory of value that has been completely disproven.

You don't charge what it costs to build something, you charge the maximum the customer is willing to pay.

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