I’m not quite as old as you, but I am old enough to know what a COM component is and to have ready the Byte Magazine article that likely described this ancient stone tablet tech. Codex has me absolutely stoked again. I can finally have fun with the youngsters, knowing that the latest new hotness no longer has a learning curve.
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
#242As 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…
Really? I love LLMs because I can't stand the process of taking the model in my brain and putting it in a file. Flow State is so hard for me to hit these days. So now I spec it out, feed it to an LLM, and monitor it while having a cup of tea. If it goes off the rails (it usually does) I redirect it. Way better than banging it out by hand.
It's only going to get harder to achieve if you keep letting your skills and resoning abilities rot from LLM reliance.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#243I 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…
> It was so unfulfilling.
I'm going to say something people hate... you're probably holding it wrong. Why do I say that? Because I absolutely felt exactly the way you are feeling. In fact, it can be worse than unfulfilling, it can be even draining.
But I, over time, changed how I used LLMs and I actually now find it rewarding and I'm learning a huge amount. I've learned more technologies (and I do mean learn) in the last year than I have ever in the past.
I think my advice is that if it feels wrong then you shouldn't be doing it that way. But that isn't inherent in using LLMs to help you work. Everyone has different preferences for how they work (and what languages they like, etc). The people using 15 LLMs to build software probably love that but I don't think that's how I want to do it. And that's fine.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I don't have an answer for this, and won't pretend to. But my take on this is that accountability will still be a purely human factor. It still is. I recently let go of a contractor who was hired to run our projects as a Scrum/PM, and his tickets were so bad (there were tickets with 3 words in them, one ticket was in the current sprint, that was blocked by a ticket deep in the backlog, basic stuff). When I confronted…
What drives that behavior is what I like to call human slop :)
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#245As 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…
I know that your post has lots of comments, but I'd like to weigh in kindly too.
> I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued.
Listen to the comments that say that experience is more valuable than ever.
> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.
No they cannot. You and an LLM can build something together far more powerful and sophisticated than you ever could have dreamt, and you can do it because of your decades of experience. A newbie cannot recognize the patterns of a project gone bad without that experience.
> I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon.
Welcome to the industry. :) It happens. Why not take a break? Work on a side project, something you love to do.
> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.
Once upon a time painters and illustrators were not "artists", but archivists and documenters. They were hired to archive what something looked like, and they were largely evaluated on that metric alone. When photography took that role, painters and illustrators had to re-evaluate their social role, and they became artists and interpreters. Impressionism, surrealism, conceptualism, post-modernism are examples of art movements that, in my interpretation, were still attempting to grapple with that shift decades, even a century later.
Today, we SWE are grappling with a very similar shift. People using LLMs to create software are not poor coders any more (or less) than photographers were poor painters. Painters and illustrators became very valuable after the invention of photography, arguably more valuable socially than before.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I don't have an answer for this, and won't pretend to. But my take on this is that accountability will still be a purely human factor. It still is. I recently let go of a contractor who was hired to run our projects as a Scrum/PM, and his tickets were so bad (there were tickets with 3 words in them, one ticket was in the current sprint, that was blocked by a ticket deep in the backlog, basic stuff). When I confronted…
In general I agree. But it’s somehow very unlikely for the AI to generate a three word ticket. That’s what humans do. AI might generate an overly verbose and specific ticket instead.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean. Sounds like the guy had existing long term goals, needed to overcome an activation threshold, and used AI as a catalyst to just get started. Seems like, behaviorally, AI was pivotal for him to learn things, even if the things he learned came from elsewhere / his own effort.
I suppose, yes, AI was like a kickstart. But the point is - he didn't just stick to AI, he realized that in terms of skill and fulfillment it's a no-go direction. Because you neither learn anything, nor create anything yourself.
I feel the same way. But this is a new economy now, software is cheap, and regarding the skill and fulfillment you derive writing it yourself, to quote Chris Farley: "that and a nickel will get you a nice hot cup of JACK SQUAT!!!"
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder why people still believe in intellectual property, it's a concept that has long since lived past its usefulness, especially technologically.
Because IP democratizes returns on the creative process.
Maybe it used to but with companies like Disney lengthening copyright times way beyond the original intention, or corporations patenting absurd things, it seems to be more of a way to entrench power than any sort of democratization. I'm glad generative AI seem to be bypassing all this and actually democratizing returns on the creative process, by flagrantly violating the concept of IP.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
This is technically true in a lot of ways, but also intellectual and not identifying with what the comment was expressing. It's legitimately very frustrating to have something you enjoy democratized and feel like things are changing. It would be like if you put in all this time to get fit and skilled on mountain bikes and there was a whole community of people, quiet nature, yada yada, and then suddenly they just chan…
The change is indeed painful to many of us, including me. I, too, am a software engineer. LLMs and vibe coding create some insecurity in my mind as well.
However, our personal emotions need not turn into disparaging others' use of the same skills for their satisfaction / welfare / security.
Additionally, our personal emotions need not color the objective analysis of a social phenomenon.
Those two principles are the rationales behind my reply.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
My guesses are 1. We'll train the LLMs not to make sloppy code. 2. We'll come up with better techinques to make guardrails to help Making up examples: * right now, lots of people code with no tests. LLMs do better with tests. So, training LLMs to make new and better tests. * right now, many things are left untested because it's work to build the infrastructure to test them. Now we have LLMs to help us build that infr…
* better languages and formal verification. If an LLM codes in Rust, there’s a class of bugs that just can’t happen. I imagine we can develop languages with built-in guardrails that would’ve been too tedious for humans to use.