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

>"Wait a moment! Being forced to use AI gave me depression, and I'm really aware of the fact that it's only going to become better and better the more developers are using it, to the point where the 10 job openings of yesterday are 1 job opening tomorrow. Why are people so excited", remember this:

You are reading HN, the survivorship bias and groupthink is just as high as any other self-calibrating online community ("upvote if you agree" -> self-calibration of the popular opinion), and there's an extremely high survivorship bias because people who are into this LLM craze have a higher probability of browsing HN.

As for you, OP, I have no idea why age is a factor to consider to this. I'm 45, and while I programmed as a hobby since I was 16 I turned it into a career during COVID, and all the pressure cooking LLM watch-six-agents-writing-and-you-proofreading gave me so much existential crisis and depression that I seriously can't even get myself writing anything "over the weekend".

I hope to God the next generation of wonder kids that is the equivalent of the 12 year old discovering how to bent the computer to do what they want it to do enjoy arguing with multiple agents concurrently back and forth.

This is likely fake and an ad. In case it isn't, consider treatment for AI psychosis.

Where I find it struggles is when I prompt it with things like this:

> I'm using the latest version of Walker (app launcher on Linux) on Arch Linux from the AUR, here is a shell script I wrote to generate a dynamic dmenu based menu which gets sent in as input to walker. This is working perfectly but now I want to display this menu in 2 columns instead of 1. I want these to be real columns, not string padding single columns because I want to individually select them. Walker supports multi-column menus based on the symbol menu using multiple columns. What would I need to change to do this? For clarity, I only want this specific custom menu to be multi-column not all menus. Make the smallest change possible or if this strategy is not compatible with this feature, provide an example on how to do it in other ways.

This is something I tried hacking on for an hour yesterday and it led me down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of incorrect information, commands that didn't exist, flags that didn't exist and so on.

I also sometimes have oddball problems I want to solve where I know awk or jq can do it pretty cleanly but I don't really know the syntax off the top of my head. It fails so many times here. Once in a while it will work but it involves dozens of prompts and getting a lot of responses from it like "oh, you're right, I know xyz exists, sorry for not providing that earlier".

I get no value from it if I know the space of the problem at a very good level because then I'd write it unassisted. This is coming at things from the perspective of having ~20 years of general programming experience.

Most of the problems I give it are 1 off standalone scripts that are ~100-200 lines or less. I would have thought this is the best case scenario for it because it doesn't need to know anything beyond the scope of that. There's no elaborate project structure or context involving many files / abstractions.

I don't think I'm cut out for using AI because if I paid for it and it didn't provide me the solution I was asking for then I would expect a refund in the same way if I bought a hammer from the store and the hammer turned into spaghetti when I tried to use it, that's not what I bought it for.