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

#551

Post by tqwhite » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

nly wrote: post #356

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…

You are simply doing it wrong.

I could do this TCP server in another time at all and it would be perfect. I have done stuff that complicated and more many times.

You need to rethink how you are using the tool because you absolutely could get excellent results like I do.

The biggest things I suggest are... Treat it as collaboration or pair programming. Make sure to work through a design before programming and have it written to a file for your review before execution.

You can do this.

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

#552

Post by JKCalhoun » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:19 PM UTC

Thanemate wrote: post #511

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…

Honestly, software engineering as a career only went down hill for me from when I began to when I retired.

(And I hesitate to even air that view in front of others that are already in the field because I am a kind of Pollyanna and don't want to foment bad vibes.)

But since I retired a few years ago it was clearly not LLMs that precipitated the decline of my enjoyment of the profession. Instead it was the slow erosion of agency and responsibility that did that.

I'll drop the euphemisms and just say outright that the inmates ran the asylum when I began in the 90's (at Apple, FWIW). The only one that really told me what to do was the tech-lead on the team. Not my manager—for sure not marketing or the CEO (ha ha — Jobs had not yet returned).

In effect, I and all other engineers were told, "Here's your sandbox, here's your shovel: you go make your sand castle however you want—so long as it does X, Y and Z. We'll ship it but you'll own it. You'll fix it, expand it…"

(A coworker whose sense of humor I always enjoyed said to me, perhaps seriously, "When someone drops code in my lap and says, 'It's yours now' the first thing I do is rewrite it." Yeah, that's what happens to someone's code when they moves on—becomes someone else's sandbox and they are free to knock down the castle, build another—Chesterton's Fence not withstanding, ha ha.)

To that end I feel a little bad for anyone that missed that era. I mean unless you enjoy writing unit tests, having code reviews, style guidelines, etc.—and I have certainly met younger engineers that have come on board that seem to enjoy those aspects of the these-days profession.

I admit that when I began it was in fact a bit intimidating when you realized that code you were writing, were responsible for, was going to ship on millions (in 1995? maybe?) of machines. The responsibility though also came with agency—the combination came to give me a sense of freedom, the power of using my discretion, and finally a sense that I was a valued contributor.

You can infer from the above what I disliked about the profession as I was aging out of it. My general sense is that the industry became too big though and too much money riding on it for management to entrust it to the "funny farm". But of course we cowboys who came up in that ward liked it the way it had been.

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

#553

Post by krd8ssb » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:20 PM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #538

Thanemate wrote: post #511

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 pivo…

I'm with you on this being incredibly exciting.

I'm 40 and have been doing this since I was 12 as well. Once I became a staff engineer at a large company and ended up being a less Hands-On with code and more on team leadership and system architecture, it set me up for this perfectly.

I missed writing code (or so I thought) but what I realized is that I actually missed bringing ideas to life. Coding was just a means to do that and the new tools with LLM and agents have allowed me to do the core of what I love way more than coding by hand could have ever allowed

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

#554

Post by tqwhite » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #462

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…

What is this app and what does it do? Can we see it? I find it very hard to believe anyone could code anything complicated with Claude that 5-6 competent developers could do. I am currently working on a relatively complicated UI on an internal tool and Claude constantly just breaks it. I tried asking it to build it step by step, adding each functionality I need piece by piece. But the code it eventually got was compl…

I had trouble in my early days with the quality of things I made.

One of the things I found helped a lot is building on top of a well-structured stack. Make yourself a scaffold. Make sure it is exactly how you like your code structured, etc. Work with Claude to document the things you like about it (I call mine polyArch2.md).

The scaffold will serve as a seed crystal. The document will serve as a contract. You will get much better results.

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

#555

Post by tndibona » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

I just had what you might probably describe as the opposite experience. I was sat at a very important all hands meeting by our senior tech leader with about 100 people or so .who was mandating an AI goal for every employee on workday, he basically says that “if we all do not learn to adapt to AI, we will all get left behind” , and he had presented how to utilise spec driven development. He opened up the room for Q&A at the end of the meeting. A lot of them had technical questions about the agentic framework itself but I had a philosophical one. I I felt uncomfortable asking him the question in the open, so I sent him a private note .

The note read something like as follows : I don’t exactly agree with the framing that we will all get left behind if we all don’t learn to adapt to AI. More accurately, I see it this way. While the company definitely stands to gain from all the hyper increase in productivity by the use of said AI tools, I stand to pay a personal price and that personal price is this - I’m may very slowly stop exercising my critical thinking muscles because I am accustomed passing that to AI for everything and this will render me less employable, it is this personal price that I feel reluctant to pay. There has always been a delicate balance between an employer and employee. We learn new technologies on the job and we’re more employable for transferring that to other companies. This equation is now unbalanced. The company trapped more value, but there is skill erosion on my side . For instance, our team actually has to perform a Cassandra DB migration this year . Usually, I’d have to take a small textbook and read about the internals of CassandraDB, and maybe learn a guide on how to write Cassandra queries. What do I put in my resume now? That I vibe coded Cassandra migration? How employable is that? And I’m not sure if others felt the same way. But I definitely felt like the odd one out here for asking that question because everyone else in the meeting was on board with AI adoption.

The leader did respond to me and he said that learning agentic AI actually will make me more employable. So there is a fundamental disagreement as to what constitutes skill. I think he just spoke past me. Oh well at least I tried.

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

#556

Post by amelius » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #538

Thanemate wrote: post #511

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 pivo…

Coding since 11. Using AI makes me completely lethargic. I really don't know how to fill the minutes that AI takes to write code. Maybe if AI gets faster I will be able to enjoy it.

That said, like many people here I have invested quite some time in becoming a skilled and experienced coder, so there is no denying that this whole AI craze makes me feel like something is taken away from me.

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

#557

Post by gzread » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

card_zero wrote: post #198

lovelearning wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So you put these all in the same category: gaining knowledge, gaining abilities, and just obtaining things. I gatekeep my bike, I keep it behind a gate. If you break the gate open and democratize my bike, you're an idiot.

Actually he would be very wise, for he then has a bike and can ride it or sell it for money. You have to learn capitalist thinking to succeed in this economy.

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

#558

Post by nemo44x » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #530

Thanemate wrote: post #511

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…

If you're "proofreading" the agents' work in detail, you're doing it wrong. You need to invest that time productively into planning out what the agents are going to do (with AI help, of course) then once the plan has gotten detailed enough you can set the agent to work and treat the result as something to just read through and quickly accept/revise/reject (upon which rejection you go back to an earlier stage of plann…

Yeah building acceptance criteria first is the way. An LLM is a goal machine. It uses probability over and over to advance towards the goal(s). That’s all it is and wants to do. So giving it well defined and granular goals and guardrails will get the best results.

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

#559

Post by jijji » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

i dont know, i'm in my 50's, and been doing software engineering work every day professionally since i was 15, and i can say claude code (max) has made me at least 20x more productive... Its definitely an improvement. I think what they've got is top notch, doesnt come close to what the competition are offering, at this point.

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

#560

Post by tqwhite » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

darkhorse13 wrote: post #474

tristramb wrote: post #383

I retired in 2024 after a four decade career, mostly programming avionics systems but with a decade of Ruby on Rails towards the end. I am now sitting here eating popcorn and watching the disaster unfold. I am happy to be out of it. So long as it doesn't affect my pensions and the local shops still have food...

I'm sorry, I know you mean well, but your comment reads like a typical boomer parody.

I agree darkhorse13. I am as boomer as can be and hereby disavow this guy.

You can rest assured that not all of us have lost our flexibility and ability to find joy. I love AI tech and am doing great work with it.