Is HN dead? Why are people commenting on a vapid post by a brand new account, which reads like an ad, and they're not questioning anything..?
Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
501–510 of 1001 posts
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - What if Google that invented the core transformer architecture had kept the research paper to themselves instead of openly publishing it? I'm pretty sure that someone else would have come around the corner with a similar idea some time later, because the fundamentals of these stuff were already discussed decases before "Attention is all you need" paper, the novel thing they did was combining existing knowhow into…
> I'm pretty sure that someone else would have come around the corner with a similar idea some time later, because the fundamentals of these stuff were already discussed decases before I am not trying to be dismissive, but this could apply to all research ever
thats true! I meant "not somewhen accidentally in the future" but more of "relative close together on the timeline"
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#503[flagged]
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#504As 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…
Nah man. I understand the frustration, but this is a glass is half empty view. You have decades of expert knowledge, which you can use to drive the LLMs in an expert way. Thats where the value is. The industry or narrative might not have figured that out yet, but its inevitable. Garbage in, garbage out still very much applies in this new world. And just to add, the key metric to good software hasn't changed, and won'…
> What really matters is how well does the code performs 1 month after it goes live, 6 months, 5 years.
After 40 years in this industry—I started at 10 and hit 50 this year—I’ve developed a low tolerance for architectural decay.
Last night, I used Claude to spin up a website editor. My baseline for this project was a minimal JavaScript UI I’ve been running that clocks in at a lean 2.7KB (https://ponder.joeldare.com). It’s fast, it’s stable, and I understand every line. But for this session, I opted for Node and neglected to include my usual "zero-framework" constraint in the prompt.
The result is a functional, working piece of software that is also a total disaster. It’s a 48KB bundle with 5 direct dependencies—which exploded into 89 total dependencies. In a world where we prioritize "velocity" over maintenance, this is the status quo. For me, it’s unacceptable.
If a simple editor requires 89 third-party packages to exist, it won't survive the 5-year test. I'm going back to basics.
I'll try again but we NEED to expertly drive these tools, at least right now.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#505As 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…
Exactly. How ridiculous. The world doesn’t owe ‘principal engineers’ shit. I hate to work with people like this.
—- from a ‘principal engineer’
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#506Without experience, programming with AI (vibe coding, I guess) can be compared to being a rat in maze... You work your way through a project, but the dead-ends exact a high cost in terms time, attention, and ultimately cost. With experience, you see these dead ends before they have a chance to take hold and you know when and how to adjust course. It's literally like one poster said: coding with some buddies without e…
Claude Code has killed my ADHD and turned me into an always-on hyper-focused machine.
I am getting 20x done. This is a literal superpower.
I am not using it in agentic mode yet. I am telling it everything I want it to do. I will tell it where I want the files, what I want structs to be named, how I want the SQL queries to join, etc. I then review every line and make edits (typically with Claude first).
I haven't tried the agentic stuff yet, but I probably will at some point soon. I'm anxious about losing control over the architecture and data model, which is something I feel gives me my speed with Claude Code and that I know is important for my engineering work and quality.
I won't be writing code by hand ever again. This is the future. We'll look back at the old way as horse carriages.
Claude is also really freaking good at Rust, and the fact that it emits proper Rust with tests makes me even more confident of my changes.
We are literally living in the future now. Twenty years of SaaS and smartphone incrementalism and now we have jet packs.
Instead of engineers inventing 50 different frameworks and conventions for any given language or platform, maybe that energy will be directed to creating better AI tools.
Edit: I'll also reiterate what others are saying in that I think this is a tool best leveraged by engineers who know what they're doing and that care about code quality. The results you get back will also depend on your repo/project's code quality. If your project is poorly structured or has a lot of cruft, Claude will see that and spit it right back out. Keeping your code clean and low on tech debt is going to matter tremendously.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#507I'm 73 (all the way retired). I'm in love with creating software again.
I wrote my first computer program in 1967. Since, it's been one fascinating thing after another but, for me, the modern age had become dull. The thought of figuring out another API or framework makes me need a nap.
Now I can have an idea, negotiate with Milo (Claude Code integrated with a neo4j graph database because now I can!) and it's off to the races.
Did I learn CYPHER, the neo4j query language? Nope. Am I the master of Agent SDK? Nope. Milo is my cognitive partner. I am inspired.
Ideas I had years ago are off the back burner. More new ideas flood my brain. I am set free. It feels like love. I lay awake at night thinking of things to do.
I am so grateful that I lived to see this day and still have the intellectual flexibility to enjoy it.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#508As 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 am a principal engineer too. In the last 5 months I have been working on a project using the latest LLMs. 5 years ago that project would have required 30 engineers. Now I am alone but need at least 5 more months to have an MVP. You are just not working on projects that are complex and difficult enough.
There are so many projects that I have in mind that feel within reach and I would have never considered 5 years ago.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#509I think that I understand you. I started programming in the mid-1960s as a kid and now in my mid-70s I have been retired for two years (except for occasional small gigs for old friends). Nothing special about me but I have had the pleasure of working with or at least getting to know many of the famous people in neural networks and AI since the mid-1980s. My current passion is pushing small LLMs as far as I can using…
I had dinner with Marvin Minsky once. Learned to program a Symbolics machine. We share a little history, I think. I've been interested in AI for the last forty years.
I decided that applications of AI were where I am going. I feel the pull of small LLMs. The idea of local is very appealing. But, at our age (I also started in the sixties), I've learned that too many irons in the fire means I get nothing done.
Congratulations on retaining your spirit. Many of my age-appropriate friends cannot comprehend the idea of working so hard for fun.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#510I remember learning and writing Cobol with with the Microsoft Cobol compiler on my Tandy as I was training at the local VoTech and working as a night operator on an IBM mainframe flipping tapes. I can categorically say that writing code with Antigravity is worlds different than those early days. It is inspiring, but for me its more about understanding the models and how they do their magic. At 67 I'm refreshing my calculus, linear algebra, and statistics in an effort to be able to read the papers on the subject. In the future, I'm imagining the norm being an automated layer for coding, similar to compilers of today, that take natural language and produce trusted, reliable and performant code all the way down to the machine level. The real work will be developing the models and their layered and optimized machine level interfaces and implementation. It is all kind of amazing.