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

#611

Post by rprend » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:58 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…

I was in school when GPT came out and there is a strong generational divide. It reminds me of when i was young teachers said you couldn’t use Wikipedia because it isn’t guaranteed to be correct, but we did anyway. Same thing with LLMs. It’s a faster way to do things so eventually everything will be done that way.

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

#612

Post by zozbot234 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 2:59 PM UTC

63stack wrote: post #582

latexr wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping. This parroted argument is getting really tired. It signals either astroturfing or someone who just accepts what they are sold without thinking. LLMs aren’t “democratising” anything. There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at an…

I agree completely, the "democratizing programming" is being overplayed by AI vendors like they are doing community service, and HN commenters use it like a trump card in an argument. Everyone already had the option to write any code, fork any open source project, publish any of their code, run any of their code but suddenly AI appears and THAT is what makes it democratic? What was undemocratic about it? Is this demo…

> ...I haven't yet tried the big local ones, because how would that be better? I'm still paying to big tech to run it, just in a different way

Why blame big tech when they're just providing a service at a fair cost (3rd party inference is incredibly cheap)? I'm not sure how that makes sense.

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

#613

Post by frankohn » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC

guitarlimeo wrote: post #372

frankohn wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your feelings. You spent years working hard to learn and master a complex craft, and now seeing that work feel almost irrelevant because of AI can be deeply unsettling. However, this can also be an opportunity to gain some understanding about our nature and our minds. Through that understanding, we can free ourselves from suffering, find joy, and embrace life and the present moment as it is. I am just fi…

I'm reading The Compassionate Mind by Paul Gilbert and I find it shares many similar ideas. Also I've been interested by Buddhist concepts like impermanency for a while. While I think rationally what you said is good and makes sense, at the same time it feels like it says you should forget your roots and be this impermanent being existing in the present and only the present. I value everything about my life, the past…

I think that's right when you say: "What has been my path and values previously, and what makes sense now?" That is actually a sensible way to approach the present moment.

Disidentifying from your ego doesn't mean you have to act like a stateless robot with amnesia. Your past experiences, your role models, and your skills are still there for you to recall; they are tools that help guide your decisions. Disidentifying just means you don't let the mind-constructed image of those things define who you are. It means you don't have to constantly mull over the past, and you don't feel threatened when the things you valued in the past ends or changes.

However, I was really struck by your comment that disidentifying would feel horrifying because it would mean "devaluing your roots" to make more money. I am wondering if this is what you really think.

Imagine if letting go of that specific past identity led you to a truly marvelous opportunity in the present: not just more money, but working with wonderful people, doing engaging things, and being genuinely happy. Would that really be horrifying just because it didn't perfectly align with your roots? Probably not.

I suspect what you actually find horrifying isn't "devaluing your roots," but rather the idea of selling out. The real nightmare is getting a well-paid but completely soulless job where you are unhappy, working on things you don't care about, or being treated like a disposable cog who just takes orders.

Just my two cents, I am no spiritual guide!

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

#614

Post by burnstek » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC

50 here. Years ago I completely stopped coding, becoming tired of the never ending rat race of keeping up with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks for everything, node for this, npm for that, Angular, React, Vue, whatever - as if solving business problems just became too boring for software developers, so we decided to spend our cycles on the new hotness at every turn.

Tools like Claude Code are the ultimate cheat code for me and have breathed new life into my desire to create. I know more than enough about architecture and coding to understand the plumbing and effectively debug, yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details. It's almost an unfair unlock.

It'll also be good to see leetcode die.

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

#615

Post by ineedasername » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #600

amelius wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I really don't know how to fill the minutes that AI takes to write code. The AI should be spending most of its time helping you spec out new revisions to the codebase, the code-writing time is just the last step and if you've planned the work in depth, you'll understand what the AI is trying to do (and be able to stop and revise if anything is going off the rails). This is a healthier approach than "just spec out s…

"just spec out something else in the meantime"

Yeah, I've learned that if I do too much of that I'll spend more time catching up in terms of consolidating gains through review of code and functionality. That's just me, people are clearly developing a few different and not "wrong" ways of going about things.

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

#616

Post by dextrous » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

KillerRAK wrote: post #489

Without 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…

Fully agree: I believe my decades of software engineering experience definitely help me fly LLM tools better than less experienced folks.

But the much more interesting question to me: as LLM coding becomes the norm, does it drive the cost of self or small-company generated software to 0?

Like many SW architects/engineers my not-so-developed work-in-retirement plan is to assemble a small team of people I’ve loved working with over the years, start an LLC, and try to make a reasonable (not posh) living doing what we love: making software to solve problems.

On the one hand, it’s clear LLM coding can accelerate and amplify our efforts, but alternately there’s many people claiming there’s no possibility of a moat, your solution/innovation can be cloned in a matter of days … ie. the value of your software is exactly 0.

Not sure which future will be closer to reality. A backup plan that seems reasonable in the 0-value case is to focus our effort on creating actual physical gadgets and systems in the embedded realm, which conceivably can be designed and prototyped by a small team… It seems like these would still be valuable.

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

#617

Post by tqwhite » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:02 PM UTC

ferfumarma wrote: post #427

This sounds super cool. What does your dev stack look like?

I have been making web apps for years. A few year ago I converted my base stack into a scaffold that lets me spin up a full working project with API, CLI and UI.

I use NodeJS with a highly structured ExpressJS app for the API. It uses an npm module, tools-library-dot-d to implement a carefully scooped plugin structure for endpoints, data model and data mapping. It has built-in authentication and database (sqlite).

Nuxt/Vue/Vuetify/Pinia for the UI. It has a few components that implement things (like navigation) the way I like. It supports login and user editing.

The stack includes a utility that looks at a directory for executable CLI tools (usually NodeJS or BASH) and adds them to the session PATH. The API stack has boilerplate to treat CLI apps as data-model services.

Does that help?

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

#618

Post by infecto » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:02 PM UTC

gzread wrote: post #545

echelon wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trie…

Careful though: a lot of people are getting the feeling of getting 20x done. Do you have objective measurements?

For me the evidence is I have completed side projects I never would have before. I also recently started building a game that I had put off for years. At work I am closing more features than historically and at the end of the day not as fatigued. It’s only my experience and everyone’s is going to be different.

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

#619

Post by 63stack » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:03 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #612

63stack wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely, the "democratizing programming" is being overplayed by AI vendors like they are doing community service, and HN commenters use it like a trump card in an argument. Everyone already had the option to write any code, fork any open source project, publish any of their code, run any of their code but suddenly AI appears and THAT is what makes it democratic? What was undemocratic about it? Is this demo…

> ...I haven't yet tried the big local ones, because how would that be better? I'm still paying to big tech to run it, just in a different way Why blame big tech when they're just providing a service at a fair cost (3rd party inference is incredibly cheap)? I'm not sure how that makes sense.

I removed this line because people will get hung up on it and not see the forest from the tree.

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

#620

Post by skeeter2020 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:03 PM UTC

Can you explain why or how this works for you? I'm of a similar vintage, and what I did back in "our day" was essentially chase knowledge. With AI and CC, yes I could stay up all night but it feels a lot more like trying to finish a video game or binge-watch streaming video than discover the meaning of life.