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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

#271

Post by _zagj »

lovelearning wrote: post #268
_zagj wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> elitist in a negative way. It's funny you say that, because I've seen plenty of the reverse elitism from "AI bros" on HN, saying things like: > Now that I no longer write code, I can focus on the engineering or > In my experience, it's the mediocre developers that are more attached to the physical act of writing code, instead of focusing on the engineering As if getting further and further away from the instruction…

Yes, both are forms of elitism.

Yeah, and one is at least plausibly justifiable (though still potentially unfounded), while the other is absurd on its face.

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

#272

Post by ministryofwarp »

suzzer99 wrote: post #191
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…

> 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 woul…

It reemphasizes the question of importance. Would a user accept their data needing a AI implementation of a ("manual") migration and their flow completely changing? Does reliability to existing users even matter in the companies plans?

If it isn't a product that needs to solve problems reliably over time then it was kind of silly to use a DBA that cost twice the Backend engineer and only handled the data niche. We progressed from there or regressed from there depending on why we are developing software.

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

#273

Post by slopinthebag »

lovelearning wrote: post #265
slopinthebag wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It does technically democratize the exhilarating experiences of that level of performance. Likely also democratizes negative aspects like injuries, extreme dieting, jealousy, neglecting relationships. That said, if we zoom out and review such paradigm shifts over history, we find that they usually result in some new social contracts and value systems. Both good expert writers and poor novice writers have been able to…

The exhilarating experience is a byproduct of the effort it took to obtain. Replace drug with exoskeleton or machine, my point is the same. The way you democratise stuff like this is removing barriers to skill development so that everyone can learn a craft, skill, train their bodies etc.

But I do agree, if everyone can build software then the allure of it along with the value will be lost. Vibe coding is only a superpower as long as you're one of the select few doing it. Although I imagine it will continue to become a niche thing, anyone who thinks everyone and their grandma will be vibing bespoke software is out to lunch.

Personally I think there is a certain je ne sais quoi about creating software that cannot be distilled to some mechanical construct, in the same way it exists for art, music, etc. So beyond assembly line programming, there will always be a human involved in the loop and that will be a differentiating factor.

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

#274

Post by probably_wrong »

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.

> almost every comment here is suspiciously vague as to what, exactly, is being coded

Why? You don't trust a newly-created account that has not engaged with any of the comments to be anything but truthful?

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

#275

Post by pembrook »

tkel wrote: post #236
larodi wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why would they not? do they have to feel they ain’t got it anymore because age?

Because they don't "got it". Asking the bot to program is the same as asking a junior engineer to write some code, and then claiming it as your own. It's not actually them programming. Just a misplaced sense of pride.

More gatekeeping, more no true Scotsman fallacies, more bitter cope.

You can absolutely take pride in having raised your own cows. But the guy down the street can also take pride in having cooked his own steak. In fact, the guy down the street might actually be a better chef than you, even though you know how to breed cattle.

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

#277

Post by antirez »

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.

Not only it would be good if true, but it is also not true. Good programmers learn how to build things, for the most part, since they know what to build, and have a general architectural idea of what they are going to build. Without that, you are like the average person in the 90s with Corel Draw in their hands, or the average person with an image diffusion model today: the output will be terrible because of lack of taste and ideas.

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

#278

Post by tiew9Vii »

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…

You don't know what you don't know.

Playing with Claude, if you tell it to do something, it'll produce something. Sometimes it's output is ok, sometimes it's not.

I find I need to iterate with Claude, tell it no, tell it how to improve it's solution or do something in a different way. It's kind of like speed running iterating over my ideas without spending a few hours doing it manually, writing lots of code then deleting it to end with my final solution.

If I had no prior coding knowledge i'd go with what ever the LLM gave me and end up with poor quality applications.

Knowing how to code gives you the advantage still using an LLM. Saying that, i'm pessimistic what my future holds as an older software engineer starting to find age/experince is an issue when an employer can pay someone less with less experience to churn out code with prompts when a lot of time the industry lives by "it's good enough".

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

#279

Post by shifto »

jrnichols wrote: post #72

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…

Having never touched Perl in my life, Claude has enabled me to create a plugin for this ancient Perl software a lot of people are still using to this day. This felt different from just creating some new code with some LLM. This felt like ancient gods we're whispering their knowledge into me.

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

#280

Post by yuriksan »

Great timing on this post. I’ve been working on NeoNetrek, bringing Netrek into the browser with a modernized server and 3D web client. It’s the kind of project I’d started and abandoned a few times over the years because the complexity always piled up faster than the fun. Claude changed that. The gap between “idea” and “working thing” collapsed in a way I haven’t felt since the early days. I stopped fighting infrastructure and started just building. Three decades of accumulated complexity just faded away.
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