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

#351

Post by rayxi271828 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 11:01 AM UTC

I'm about a decade behind you, but I also started my programming career during the "good" COM/DCOM/MFC/ATL/ActiveX/CORBA days. Java just came out. I slept little during that time because truly, there was nothing like programming. It was the thing that pulled me awake in the morning, and pulled me from falling asleep at night. I was so spellbound, calling it Csikszentmihalyi's flow felt like it didn't do it justice.

Fast forward 30 years later, I thought those days were gone forever. I'd accepted that I'd never experienced that kind of obsession again. Maybe because I got older. Maybe those feelings were something exclusively for the young. Maybe because my energy wasn't what it used to be. Yada yada, 1000s of reasons.

I was so shocked when I found out that I could experience that feeling again with Claude Code and Codex. I guess it was like experiencing your first love all over again? I slept late, I woke up early, I couldn't wait to go back to my Codex and Claude. It was to the point I created an orchestrator agent so I could continue chatting with my containerized agents via Telegram.

"What a time to be alive" <-- a trite, meaningless saying, that was infused by real meaning, by some basic maths that run really, really, really fast, on really, really expensive hardware. How about that!

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

#352

Post by guitarlimeo » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 11:01 AM UTC

mikkupikku wrote: post #338

iExploder wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping. It was very democratized before, almost anyone could pick up a book or learn these skills on the internet. Opportunity was democratized for a very long time, all that was needed was the desire to put in the work. OP sounds frustrated but at the same time the societal promise that was working for longest time (spend per…

I'm mad about Ozempic. For years I toiled, eating healthy foods while other people stuffed their faces with pizza and cheese burgers. Everybody had the opportunity to be thin like me, but they didn't take that and earn it like me. So now instead of being happy about their new good fortune and salvaged health, I'm bitter and think society has somehow betrayed me and canceled promises. /s, obviously I would hope except…

I would rather see regulations fixing incentives that create this problem (why does healthy food cost so much more than processed food?) than a bandaid like Ozempic that 2/3 of people can't quit (hello another hidden subscription service) without regaining their weight back.

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

#353

Post by InsideOutSanta » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 11:03 AM UTC

mikkupikku wrote: post #340

Tepix wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using this large financial application just for yourself? I think the difficult task is/will be to sell vibe coded software from the lone developer to anyone.

Hyper-individualized software is what LLMs are best for IMHO. They lower the bar so much that it's becoming perfectly feasible and reasonable to amase a large amount of software which is fit to your exact personal needs and preferences.

Yeah, I have a dozen random tools that do specific things I need that wouldn't be useful to anyone else, and that I wouldn't share in their current state anyway. But they're fine for me, and without LLMs, I wouldn't have spent the time to build them.

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

#354

Post by bluegatty » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 11:04 AM UTC

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…

CC is not nearly that good. It may never be. It's an amplifier not a replacer.

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

#355

Post by ValentineC » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 11:05 AM UTC

jodleif wrote: post #335

par wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's like programming with a couple of buddies. Occasionally they goof off and wreck everything, Nailed it :)

The sad part is the “buddy hackathon” is kind of redundant now

I think people can do "buddy vibecodeathons" now. :)

It's nice to be able to either just body double [1], or have some other people around to vent to when Claude goes off the rails.

[1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/body-doubling-for-adhd

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

#356

Post by nly » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 11:05 AM UTC

KellyCriterion wrote: post #324

++1 Was able to build a large financial application just with the 20 USD subscription in the last 12 month - without Claude, I would have required 5 - 6 people and at least 1 year of funding. This was by far my best investment in my whole life 12x20 USD vs. 750.000 salary :-) It is especially inspiring since it brings you usually a few new ideas into your context; also just joking around with it can yield new inspira…

I find this baffling tbh as I regularly ask Claude for basic components and they come out completely broken, wrong and buggy.

The last: I asked for a quick TCP server in C++ that handled just a single client (disconnecting the existing client when a new client connected), with a send() that I could call from another thread. It was holding mutexes over read(), and trying to set the SO_REUSEPORT port socket option on a socket that had already been bound. Subtley broken garbage.

It would literally be better to copy and paste a solution off Stack Overflow, because at least there's a chance it'd have been reviewed by someone who knows what they're doing.

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

#357

Post by discreteevent » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 11:07 AM UTC

You have never been on HN before and yet you feel the need to tell the community something vague and useless but which happens to align with LLM hype?

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

#358

Post by brabel » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 11:09 AM UTC

al_borland wrote: post #30

dllrr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For fun and education purposes, learning and satisfaction are understandable. For work, companies won't support it. Get it done. Fast. That's the new norm.

I disagree. I need to be able to support what I ship and answer to the details of what it does and why it does it. I can only truly do that if I write it myself. There should also be a symbiotic relationship at a job. Yes, they get something from me, but I should also get something… learning and some amount of satisfaction… in addition to the paycheck. I can get a paycheck anywhere. It’s not the “new norm” unless emp…

> I can only truly do that if I write it myself.

That's where you're wrong. AI can debug code better than humans. I put it on a task that I'd spent months on: debugging a distributed application which had random errors which required me to comb through MBs of logs. I gave Claude the task, a log parser (which it also wrote), and told it to find what each issue was. It did the job in a few minutes. This is a task that was, frankly, just a bit above my capacity with a human brain as it required associating lots of logs by timestamps trying to reconstruct what the heck was going on.

My new worry is that I need to make sure the code AI is writing is more comprehensible not to other humans, but to other AIs in the future, since there's very little chance humans will be doing the debugging by themselves given how bad we are at that compared to LLMs even now, let alone in a few years.

> but I should also get something

What do you want beyond a pay check? If you want to get better at your job, the most important technique you can improve right now is hands down how to interact with an AI to solve business problems. The learning you're thinking of, being able to fully understand code and actually debug it in your head, is already a thing of the past now. In a few years, no one will seriously consider building software that's not entirely AI-written except for enthusiasts, similar to the people currently participating in C obfuscated code competitions. I say this as someone who reluctantly started using AI in anger only a few months ago after hating on it before that for the laughable code it was producing just around 6 months ago (it probably was already good by then but I was not really giving it a chance yet).

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

#359

Post by InsideOutSanta » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 11:09 AM UTC

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've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued.

That remains to be seen. There's a huge difference between an experienced engineer using LLMs in a controlled way, reviewing their code, verifying security, and making sure the architecture makes sense, and a random person vibecoding a little app - at least for now.

Maybe that will change in a year or two or five or never, but today LLMs don't devalue expert knowledge. If anything, LLMs allow expert programmers to increase productivity at the same level of quality, which makes them even more valuable compared to entry-level programmers than they were before.

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

#360

Post by ValentineC » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 11:09 AM UTC

_zagj wrote: post #266

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 anyone want to fire me? Because they can hire some "prompt engineer" to "steer the AI" for $30-50k instead of $150-$250k.

Anyone that only costs $30k-50k would either be doing this part-time, or have some limit that prevented them from earning $150k-250k.