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

#671

Post by satvikpendem » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:47 PM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #648

satvikpendem wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why people still believe in intellectual property, it's a concept that has long since lived past its usefulness, especially technologically.

A free license, like the BSD, if followed, ensures that the unpaid creator of a free work is at least credited. Everyone using that work at the source code level sees the copyright notice with that author's name. The author has already given everyone the freedom to do anything with the code, except for plagiarism. AI is taking away the last thing from peoiple who have shared everything else.

Why is plagiarism an issue? In school it's an issue due to the effect that students won't learn well if they just copy everything, but outside of school and especially for personal use, why should I care if I "plagiarize" or not (and arguably AI doesn't even plagiarize as it's not a 1 to 1 copy paste of the code when making a new project)? The concept of plagiarism is as much a fiction as "intellectual" property. The only sort of property that actually exists is real and tangible.

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

#672

Post by bmurphy1976 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:48 PM UTC

Dumblydorr wrote: post #398

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'…

Glass half empty view? Their whole skill set built up over decades, digitized, and now they have to shift everything they do, and who knows humans will even be in the loop, if they’re not c-suite or brown nosers. Their whole magic and skill is now capable of being done by a PM in 5 minutes with some tokens. How is that supposed to make skillful coders feel? Massive job cuts, bad job market, AI tools everywhere, proba…

If a principal doesn't have the skills to mentor juniors, plan and define architecture, review work and follow a good process, they really shouldn't be considered a principal. A domain expert? Perhaps. A domain expert should fear for their job but a principal should be well rounded, flexible, and more than capable of guiding AI tooling to a good outcome.

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

#673

Post by rpdillon » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:48 PM UTC

latexr wrote: post #401

app134 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dismissing someone with a different opinion as astroturfing is not productive. There are loads of high performance open source LLMs on the market that compete with the big 3. I have not seen this level of community engagement and collaboration since the open-source boom 20 years ago.

If I believed it was a different opinion I wouldn’t even have written the first paragraph, or maybe the whole reply. The issue arises from it not being that person’s opinion but a talking point . People didn’t all individually arrive at this “democratisation” argument by themselves, they were sold what to say by the big players with vested interest in succeeding. I’m very much for discussing thoughts one has come up…

You're overthinking it.

Programming is a tricky skill and takes a long time to get good at. Lots of people aren't good at it. AI helps them program anyway, and allows them to sometimes produce useful programs. That's it.

It's not a talking point. It's just the reality of what the technology enables, and it's a simple enough observation that millions of people can independently arrive at that conclusion, and some of them might even refer to it as "democratization".

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

#674

Post by ygjb » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC

ngcazz wrote: post #621

axus wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ray…

You have conflated the joy of learning with the joy of building. I have been writing code since I was 6 years old and was left to my own devices with the vic-20, the manual, and BASIC instructions.

I have worked as a developer, security engineer, program manager and engineering manager through my career. Writing stuff to understand algorithms or hardware requires engaging with the math, science, and engineering of the software and hardware. Optimizing it or developing a novel algorithm requires deep comprehension.

Writing a service that shuffles a few things around between stuff on my home network so that I can build an automation to turn down the lights when I start playing a movie? Yeah, I could spend a day or two writing and testing it. Having done it a few times, the work of it is a bit of a chore, I'm not learning, just doing something. Using an Claude or some other agent to do that makes it go from 'do I want to spend my time off doing a chore?' to 'I can design this and have it built in an hour'.

Making the jump to using the tools in my day job has been a bitore challenging because as a security engineer I have seen some hairy stuff over the last two years as AI generated stuff wends it's way into production, but the tools and capabilities have expanded massively, and heck, my peers from Mozilla just published some awesome successes working with Anthropic to find new vulns :)

Don't let using tools take away the love of learning, use them to solve a problem and take care of the drudgery of building stuff.

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

#675

Post by BloondAndDoom » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC

empath75 wrote: post #498

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…

I have always had ADHD and as a consequence have a decades long backlog of things that I want to do “some day”, and Claude just removes all the friction from going from idea to execution. I am also a software engineer, so basically for me it is like having a team of developers available 24 hours a day to build anything I want to design. I have built and thrown away a half dozen projects ideas and gotten one into prod…

As a fellow ADHD’er who is also old and out of coding a decade, after decade and a half coding, wholeheartedly agreed. It’s great to just shit done and abandon if needed. Feels much better than spend 6 months and abandon

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

#676

Post by silh » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:50 PM UTC

jcelerier wrote: post #594

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. Think of it like being a project manager in a team. There's a lot you can do to help the project moving forward without touching one line of code

I would’ve become a project manager if I enjoyed that, right?

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

#677

Post by satvikpendem » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:51 PM UTC

xigoi wrote: post #379

atonse wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM. I've been a tech lead for years and have written business critical code many times. I don't ever want to go back to writing code. I am feeling supremely empowered to go 100x faster. My contribution is still judgement, taste, architecture, etc. And the models will keep getting better. And as…

> I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities. Programming was already “democratized” in the sense that anyone could learn to program for free, using only open-source software. Making everyone reliant on a few evil megacorporations is the opposite of democratization.

You know what they mean by that term, it's about building things without needing to put in the learning effort. I have bosses building small POCs via vibe coding, something they would not have done via learning to code and typing it manually.

It's the same sort of argument artists use when it comes to AI generated media, there obviously is a qualitative difference in the people now able to generate whatever they want versus needing to draw something by hand, so saying "they could've just learned to draw themselves" is not very convincing. People don't want to do that yet still get an output, and I see nothing wrong with that, and if you do, it's just another sort of gatekeeping, that the "proper" way is to learn it by hand.

Lastly, many, many open weight models exist.

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

#678

Post by barrkel » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:51 PM UTC

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 always tell Claude, choose your own stack but no node_modules.

What's missing is another LLM dialog between you and Claude. One that figures out your priorities, your non-functional requirements, and instructs Claude appropriately.

We'll get there.

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

#679

Post by ergonaught » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:52 PM UTC

A few years younger than OP, and started programming somewhere around 1982. The technology is obviously interesting, the capabilities are fascinating. I use LLMs a very large portion of every day.

The problems, as ever, are 1) what negative things are enabled by the technology, 2) do the positive things that are enabled by the technology outweigh those ("is the price worth paying?"), and 3) how much harm will "stupid" and/or "evil" cause as a result of the technology?

And so on.

The fact that a thing is exciting or interesting or stimulating is neat, for sure, but as always there is no relevant thought given to ramifications.

Humans lag well behind technological advancement, and this particular wave is moving faster than perhaps anything else (because prior technological advances enable it, etc).

It's cool that you enjoy it. Me, too. I might enjoy shooting heroin into my eyeballs, too, right up until I don't.

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

#680

Post by JKCalhoun » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 3:52 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #628

JKCalhoun wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I remember arriving at Apple Park to meet a friend/coworker a few years before I retired. Sitting there enjoying the food by one of the huge, curved glass walls, he was distractedly focused on one of the gardeners that Apple employs. This man was out in the center part of Apple Park trimming a plant or something similar.

It was clear that my friend was looking on somewhat enviously and when I asked, he admitted as much.

And I knew too immediately the draw. Before I was old enough for "gainful employment" there was a neighbor who hired my sister and I (I think I was 11, my sister 10) to ride along with him and his kids (our neighborhood friends) and help with his lawn services business.

I know. But this was the 1970's, a small working-class neighborhood in a Kansas suburb… And he paid us by the hour, helped load/unload the lawn mowers. We'd get a free lunch at a "Wiley's" fast-food hamburger joint.

But despite the physical labor of pushing a lawn mower all over someone's yard, there was a curious sense of satisfaction that came from having arrived at a tatty, overgrown lawn but then leaving it looking neat, tidy. It is the usual "sense of accomplishment" that physical labor often metes out that is often more elusive in the white-collar world.

To be sure there's no arguing about the differences in pay—I'm talking strictly about a sense of job satisfaction. (And, over the course of my three decade career as a programmer, the closest to that had been early on when I had full ownership of the code.)