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

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

#251

Post by tonyedgecombe » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 7:19 AM UTC

eventmapx wrote: post #94

I’m a 13 year lurker, first time commenter (Not sure why this post compelled me). I don’t think this is a genuine take. I don’t see how a 60 year old has any kind of joy for actual software creation suddenly from llms. It might be a joy in seeing software automatically be created but it’s definitely not doing the work. (I may be biased, I left the field 5 years ago) I doubt he’s spending any time fixing the software…

He's probably getting a buzz from the novelty of it, just like that buzz you get when you buy a new car. It wears off though and it isn't long before you are back in the showroom again, looking at new models.

I'm also in my sixties and retired and decided not to use these tools. I'm a year into my current project and I am enjoying the struggle. I've learnt a lot about the domain and the language I'm using. There is satisfaction coming from the fact that I do all of the work.

It's not that these tools aren't very good. They have come a long way in the last year and are impressive. It's just that I don't have any of the problems that they solve. I don't need to be more productive. I don't need to get features or fixes out quicker. I can spend the time to learn new things.

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

#252

Post by lovelearning » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 7:20 AM UTC

ares623 wrote: post #220

lovelearning wrote: post #171

Earlier 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…

how is 2-3 centralized providers of this new technology "democratization"?

It's _relatively_ democratic when compared to these counterfactual gatekeeping scenarios:

- What if these centralized providers had restricted their LLMs to a small set of corporations / nations / qualified individuals?

- What if Google that invented the core transformer architecture had kept the research paper to themselves instead of openly publishing it?

- What if the universities / corporations, who had worked on concepts like the attention mechanism so essential for Google's paper, had instead gatekept it to themselves?

- What if the base models, recipes, datasets, and frameworks for training our own LLMs had never been open-sourced and published by Meta/Alibaba/DeepSeek/Mistral/many more?

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

#253

Post by bmacho » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 7:21 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #165

dbdoug wrote: post #83

Hey, I'm nearly 80 years old. I haven't written a line of code in over 10 years. But I'm coding now, with the help of Claude & Gemini, and having a great time. Each block of Python or Applescript that they generate for me is a much better learning tool than a book - I'm going through the code line by line and researching everything. And I'm also learning how to deal with LLMs and their strengths & weaknesses. Correct…

> better learning tool than a book Learning for what? That day when you write it yourself, that will never come ... There is only so much you can learn by reading; it requires doing. The good thing about traditional sources like books, tutorials and other people's code bases is that they give you something, but don't write your project for you. Now you can be making a project, yet be indefinitely procrastinating the…

> Learning for what? That day when you write it yourself, that will never come ...

For the enjoyment, and producing better products, faster?

Why were you learning, before AI tools?

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

#254

Post by slopinthebag » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 7:22 AM UTC

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…

People actually value the effort and dedication required to master a craft. Imagine we invent a drug that allows everyone to achieve olympic level athletic performance, would you say that it "democratises" sports? No, that would be ridiculous.

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

#255

Post by faulander » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 7:24 AM UTC

53 here, coded in Assembler in late 80s, then C, Turbo Pascal - you know the route. 30 years later i am finishing all the products i started and never could finish because i for the love of god can not wrap my head around Frontend Design.

My first finished product: ZIB, a RSS Reader inspired by Innoreader, just free ;)

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

#256

Post by codebolt » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 7:25 AM UTC

kristiandupont wrote: post #224

codebolt wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any given system will still need people around to steer the AI and ensure the thing gets built and maintained responsibly. I'm working on a small team of in-house devs at a financial company, and not worried about my future at all. As an IC I'm providing more value than ever, and the backlog of potential projects is still basically endless- why would anyone want to fire me?

Why would it need people to steer the AI? I can easily see a future where companies that don't rely on the physical world (like manufacturing) are completely autonomous, just machines making money for their owner.

It's easy to imagine but there's still a vast amount of innovation and development that has to happen before something like that becomes realistic. At that point the whole system of capitalism would need to be reconsidered. Not going to happen in the foreseeable future.

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

#257

Post by slopinthebag » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 7:29 AM UTC

scottLobster wrote: post #42

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.

In my experience, I have "vibe coded" various tools and stuff that, while nice to have, isn't really something I need or brings a ton of value to me. Just nice-to-haves.

I think people enjoy writing code for various reasons. Some people really enjoy the craft of programming and thus dislike AI-centric coding. Some people don't really enjoy programming but enjoy making money or affecting some change on the world with it, and they use them as a tool. And then some people just like tinkering and building things for the sake of making stuff, and they get a kick out of vibe coding because it lets them add more things to their things-i-built collection.

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

#258

Post by slopinthebag » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 7:31 AM UTC

JSR_FDED wrote: post #116

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…

I urge you to actually try these tools. You will very quickly realize you have nothing to worry about. In the hands of a knowledgeable engineer these tools can save a lot of drudge work because you have the experience to spot when they’re going off the rails. Now imagine someone who doesn’t have the experience, and is not able to correct where necessary. Do you really think that’s going to end well?

Yeah, even just now I had to go and correct some issues with LLM output that I only knew were an issue because I have extensive experience with that domain. If I didn't have that I would not have caught it and it would have been a major issue down the line.

LLM's remove much of the drudgery of programming that we unfortunately sort of did to ourselves collectively.

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

#259

Post by OneMorePerson » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 7:35 AM UTC

lovelearning wrote: post #249

OneMorePerson wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

I appreciate that rationale, I also see the importance of those two principles and I think there's a lot of value there.

I suppose I see "any idiot" as a more general phrase, like "idiot proof", not directly meaning that anyone who uses a LLM is an idiot. However I can also see how it would be seen as disparaging.

Also, while there's a lot of examples of people entrenching into a certain behavior or status and causing problems, I also think society is a bit harsh on people who struggle with change. For people who are less predisposed to be ok with change feels like a lot of the time the response is "just deal with it and don't be selfish, this new XYZ is better for society overall".

Society is pretty much made up of personal emotions on some level. I don't think we should go around attacking people, but very few things can be considered truly objective in the world of societal analysis.

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

#260

Post by pulketo » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 7:39 AM UTC

It doesn’t matter where you get that passion for getting back into the swing of programming, I’m not far from your age, and truly everything becomes more monotonous over time in this life, and what was once a passion becomes something hard to achieve. In my case, AI helped me handle the tedious part of things and just kept the fun stuff of finding the solution and just tell it how to solve it, and it helps me achieve it much faster than ever before. Keep going and going! Who knows what you’ll achieve tomorrow. Keep the channel open with updates.