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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

#621

Post by ngcazz »

axus wrote: post #597
ngcazz wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live with a feeling of nonaccomplishment, never having taken a project to completion thanks to my shitty executive function. The AI craze has robbed me of any hope that I might still meaningfully* achieve this in my career.

Couldn't an AI help you take a project to completion, at least until you run out of money?

I didn't mention the crucial point which is that I what I signed up for was writing my own software.

I grew up witnessing Carmack going from Keen to Quake in 5 or 6 years.

That standard gets you attached to the idea that you should be able at some level to individually reach a fraction of the depth and breadth. Sadly, I have neither the energy nor the focus.

But what's the point of getting an LLM to, say, write a raycaster if your point is to learn how to do that yourself? If your mission in life is to learn to build things?

(I hope I'm getting my idea across)

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

#623

Post by crazygringo »

codazoda wrote: post #504
hi_hi wrote: 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'…

> 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…

I don't understand. You specifically:

> neglected to include my usual "zero-framework" constraint in the prompt

And then your complaint is that it included a bunch of dependencies?

AI's do what you tell them. I don't understand how you conclude:

> If a simple editor requires 89 third-party packages to exist

It obviously doesn't. Why even bother complaining about an AI's default choices when it's so trivial to change them just by asking?

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

#624

Post by tqwhite »

anupshinde wrote: post #176

Glad to see this. I was tired of seeing posts that are on the extremes - "death of software by AI" vs "AI can't do this and that". I took a break from software, and over the last few years, it just felt repetitive, like I was solving or attempting to solve the same kinds of problems in different ways every 6 months. The feeling of "not a for loop again", "not a tree search again", "not a singleton again". There's an…

The brainstorming, investigation and planning are so much fun, aren't they?

Having an infinitely patient, super smart colleague available all the time is amazing.

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

#625

Post by ejahsg »

bianat wrote: post #478
samiv wrote: 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…

I love it. I can't stand this sentiment and this type of technologist pompous ass. You are why software mostly sucks. You have no imagination. Hopefully the models make your limited, extraordinarily overvalued skill set the last 20 years completely democratized. We will see who is the idiot going forward.

Spoken like a loser and a thief.

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

#626

Post by skeeter2020 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #562
gzread wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ha ha, for some of us the "feeling" is good enough.

this is the most self-aware, honest answer IMO

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

#628

Post by sph »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #552
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…

> 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've been working on a contract for a large corp. They asked me to design a piece of software over 6 months which I delivered on time and worked great — by the time we had to ship into PROD, the whole thing was canned unceremoniously.

Luckily they liked my work so much they moved me to another greenfield project. Worked on it for a year, had to invent novel solutions which I'm pretty proud of, and we shipped into prod last Autumn. I haven't heard a peep from anyone, whether the thing is working and by masterful skill of mine it hasn't crashed yet, or if no one is using it and it was just another bullshit job.

All this work, good pay, and nothing to show for it. Not even a pat in the back. I'm just a well-oiled cog in an unfathomable machine. I wonder if my career has any meaning at all. Recently they've asked me to deliver a feature for yesterday because of bad planning on their part, and when I mentioned how long it'll take, they've half-jokingly suggested to use LLMs so I can ship it in half the time to make their arbitrary deadline.

Joke's on them, in less than 6 months I'm out. 20 years as a software engineer, 15 as a contractor, and all I feel when I get at my desk is existential dread. There is just no pleasure at it, that I'd rather risk poverty but feel like my actions and efforts have tangible effects on the physical world.

Was producing more mediocre code ever the problem? This all feels like a Kafkian fever dream.

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

#629

Post by tqwhite »

dboreham wrote: post #26

Perhaps I shouldn't say this but I feel that with the current LLMs I've found "my people" :)

My wife calls Claude my girlfriend.

I do a ton of programming but I also use it to learn all kinds of stuff. I'm into physics, history and philosophy and have done wonderful explorations.

Now I tell it what I had for breakfast just to see what it says. Half the time it says something interesting and I end up exploring another new thing.

"My people" for sure and everyone is mad at me because I think that.

Also, I don't care what they think. I am all about the fun.

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

#630

Post by darkwater »

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?

In my case is nearer to ∞x. I have developed an opensource Android app which has already ~200 users that I would never ever written in my whole life. Zero experience with mobile development and zero time in my free time to focus on this appropriately to at least try to learn how to do it. I know myself, I would have given up before getting the first dummy APK on my phone. And while it's totally vibe-coded, in the sense that I just prompted CC and not written a single line of Kotlin code, I put a ton of effort on it anyway, on how I want it to behave, how it looks like, squashing all the usual subtle bugs that CC leaves here and there.
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