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Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
411–420 of 1001 posts
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right! And cars when they were invented didn't give increased mobility to millions of people, because they came from just a few manufacturers. Cell phones made communication easier for exactly zero people even though billions have been sold. Why? Because they come from just a few different companies.
Cars are a great analogy because they made mobility significantly worse for people who can’t afford them or refuse to use them for ethical reasons.
And cars now have become privacy nightmares, which we are now beholden to
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#413I feel this so, so much. It is a very exciting time. I have had a very specific goal in mind and I could work out large parts on my own. But there is a lot that I didn't have any basis or time to build expertise on. Using Claude Code to fill out those gaps and educate me along the way has meant I've gotten little sleep in the last two months. And I managed to make the thing I was envisioning: https://gridpaper.org/ex…
Opinions differ: hobby coders love it, but domain expert secretly despise it because it narrows the gap between the skills they spent years honing and the average Claude, I mean Joe, that just uses this mental exoskeleton.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of that is generated by an LLM prone to hallucination and is perfectly deterministic unless there's a hardware problem. And yes, I have occasionally run into compiler bugs in my career. That's one reason we test.
> None of that is generated by an LLM How did you verify that? > prone to hallucination You know humans can hallucinate? > is perfectly deterministic We agree then that you can verify, test, and trust the deterministic code an LLM produces without ever looking at it. > That's one reason we test That's one way we can trust and verify code produced by an LLM. You can't stop doing all the other things that aren't coding…
> How did you verify that?
The compiler works without an internet connection and requires too little resources to be secretly running a local model. (Also, you can’t inspect the source code.)
> You know humans can hallucinate?
We are talking about compilers…
> We agree then that you can verify, test, and trust the deterministic code an LLM produces without ever looking at it.
Unlike a compiler, an LLM does not produce code in a deterministic way, so it’s not guaranteed to do what the input tells it to.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#415This 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.”
What an ageist quote. I am in my 40s and never stopped coding even as I've become the principal engineer. Claude just frees me from the mundane tasks I'd done a million times before and never wanted to do again if possible, which it now is. I can still throw a fastball without AI, but why would I when I can throw it much faster, with much less effort now, while still enjoying what I am doing? It's still coding. If yo…
> Claude just frees me from the mundane tasks I'd done a million times before and never wanted to do again if possible, which it now is.
What kind of tasks?
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#416Bwahaha! I'm 55 and just started grad school at an R1 because I can't compete. Fucking scary as hell! My lab partner is 23, I get up as my peers are going to bed, and I work hard to not say, "In my day..." BUT, I love being enrolled. The resources are incredible and networking is in high gear again.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#417As 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.
My greatest frustration with AI tools is along a similar line. I’ve found that people I work with who are mediocre use it constantly to sub in for real work. A new project comes in? Great, let me feed it to Copilot and send the output to the team to review. Look, I contributed!
When it comes time to meet with customers let’s show them an AI generated application rather than take the time to understand what their existing processes are.
There’s a person on my team who is more senior than I am and should be able to operate at a higher level than I can who routinely starts things in an AI tool but then asks me to take over when things get too technical.
In general I feel it’s all allowed organizations to promote mediocrity. Just so many distortions right now but I do think those days are numbered and there will be a reversion to the mean and teams will require technical excellence again.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#418Same! 61, been at it since 18. I can't put the prompting stick down. I have way too many projects at one time to keep up with.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#419I'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. F…
I'm significantly younger but also programmer for two decades since my early teens and am experiencing something similar. CC is so freeing in that it makes those "nice but no time" ideas into reality by doing it next to your main project, almost feels like a drug.
It suddenly turns that dead time while you're waiting for CI, review or response into time where you can work on the fun or satisfying side projects by firing up a few prompts, check an iteration or 2, and then pause again until the next time or while the agent is doing its thing
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#420As 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 review PRs daily and people are pushing changes that have basic problems, not to talk about more serious flaws. The amount of code an engineer can produce is higher, but it's also less thought through.
There will be more code with lower quality. If you want to be valued for your expertise, you need to find niches where quality has to stay high. In a lot of the SaaS-world, most products do not require perfection, so more slop is acceptable.
Or you can accept the slop, grind out however more years you need to retire, and in the meanwhile find some new passion.