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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

#531
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Yes, I think this is reasonable. I have been consistently skeptical of LLM coding but the latest batch of models seems to have crossed some threshold. Just like everyone, I've been reading lots of news about LLMs. A week ago I decided to give Claude a serious try - use it as the main tool for my current work, with a thought out context file, planning etc. The results are impressive, it took about four hours to do a n…

> I have been consistently skeptical of LLM coding but the latest batch of models seems to have crossed some threshold.

It’s refreshing to hear I’m not the only one who feels this way. I went from using almost none of my copilot quota to burning through half of it in 3 days after switching to sonnet 4.6. I’m about to have to start lobbying for more tokens or buy my own subscription because it’s just that much more useful now.

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

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The produce aisle has the cheapest food in the whole store. Inb4 you cite the price of some fancy imported vegetable as your excuse for eating pizza every night.

And no lol, I eat very healthy and mainly cook my own vegetarian food, had junk food last time maybe a month ago.

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

#533

To those of you reading the comment section thinking something like the following: >"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 b…

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

#534

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.

Yes. I never really see people say wtf they're making. It's always "AI bot wrote 200k lines of code for me!" Alright, cool. Is the project something completely new? Useful? A rushed remake of a project that already exists in GitHub with actual human support behind it? I never see an answer.

I wrote SuperSecretCrypt.com, ScoreRummy.com. Other stuff, too.

I have integrated Claude Code with a graph database to support an assistant with structured memory and many helpful capabilities.

I have clients. I automated a complicated data ingestion pipeline into a desktop app with a bulletproof process queue, localhost control panel and many features.

For another, I am writing an AI-specific app that is so cool. I wish I could tell you about it but it's definitely not a rushed remake of anything.

I hope that helps.

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

#535
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. 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…

Elitism is good. Elitism is just. There is absolutely nothing wrong with elitism.

Skill based one of course.

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

#537
I too had the "ok, I better dive in", rather than ducking out epiphany. Similar story, 37 years of IT, many roles, top performer, yada yada yada. I bought a MacBook pro 3 weeks ago(all the cool kids are doing it). I've been developing various automated audit and compliance based projects with Claude and openai. Having been a developer for perhaps 20 of those years, I find this new experience amazing.

I've been leveraging a lay audience (one of my teams) to deep dive requirements, wants etc.

Anyway, I'm so torn. I like these people, I hate to see them lose their jobs. I'll retire soon, I want to find a better, "feel good role" than my current, yet very lucrative situation.

I want to leverage my years of good software design for good. Where, for who?

--old lost IT guy in FL

And I hear "why am I helping you code me out of a job". I scare them with "if you help, you'll stay", assuming they get that what I really mean is "if you duck away, bury you're head in the sand, you'll be out"

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

#538

To those of you reading the comment section thinking something like the following: >"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 b…

> LLM watch-six-agents-writing-and-you-proofreading gave me so much existential crisis and depression

this is extremely bizarre because I’m 53, been coding since 12, and it has had literally the exact opposite effect on me, I find it tremendously exciting, like riding a snowmobile instead of manually cross-country skiing

but I do think that if you’re not ready to work like this, you may need to consider a career pivot in the short term

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

#539
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The difference between having a non-technical person and someone who is capable of understanding the code being generated and the systems running it is immense, and will continue to be so over the foreseeable future.

Just because somebody has a bunch of power tools doesn't mean I'd ask them to build my house.

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

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am currently using a Claude skill that I have been building out over the last few days that runs through my Amazon PPC campaigns and does a full audit. Suggestions of bid adjustments, new search terms and products to advertise against and adjustment to campaign structures. It goes through all of the analytics Amazon provides, which are surprisingly extensive, to find every search term where my product shows up, get…

And it doesn't freak you out that you're relying on thousands of lines of code that you've never looked at? How do you verify the end result? I wouldn't trust thousands of lines of code from one of my co-workers without testing

Why wouldn't you test? That sounds like a bad thing.

Me? I use AI to write tests just as I use it to write everything else. I pay a lot of attention to what's being done including code quality but I am no more insecure about trusting those thousands of tested lines than I am about trusting the byte code generated from the 'strings of code'.

We have just moved up another level of abstraction, as we have done many times before. It will take time to perfect but it's already amazing.

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