Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

831–840 of 1001 posts

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

#831

Post by heddycrow »

ineedasername wrote: post #610
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.

"how to fill the minutes that AI takes to write code" I usually review the code that's been written. Sometimes directly, sometimes by telling claude to bring things up piece by piece to explain choices as I review. Or I kick off one of the various maintenance tasks, validate my assumptions and expectations on how things should function, note the things that don't to be addressed. I'm going to have to do this stuff an…

+1 review the code

Screw {some number}x. Such BS. Those who can, do. Those who can't, write and spread pseudo-intelligent brain worms. Reject!

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

#832

Post by zmmmmm »

fragmede wrote: post #827
zmmmmm wrote: post #823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agents have removed most of the satisfaction and fulfilment from designing, building, testing and completing a feature or component I highly recommend not using these tools in their "agentic" modes. Stay in control. Tell them exactly what to write, direct the architecture explicitly. You still get the tremendous benefit of being unlocked from learning tedious syntax and overcoming arcane infra bottlenecks that suck…

But then you don't get the same gains in output that agentic modes get you. It just goes off and does stuff, sometimes for hours if you get the loop tuned right. Obviously you should do whatever you want, however you want to do it, and not just do whatever some Internet rando tells you to do, but glorified autocomplete is so 1 year ago. Everyone knows the $20/month plans aren't going to last, time will tell if the $1…

Yes I'm not recommending "glorified autocomplete". Just shortening the cycle. Give it tasks that would involve maybe a couple of hundred lines of code at a time. I find this captures both the rewarding aspects and gets a lot of the productivity gain - and I'll argue a lot of the remainder of that "productivity gain" sits in somewhat debatable territory : how well all this code holds up that has been developed without oversight is going to be something we only really find out in a few years.

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

#833

Post by globnomulous »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #680
sph wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mu…

I fear this will be horribly self-indulgent, but I'll share it anyway:

I'd always been a computer person, but it wasn't until I'd reached my thirties that I realized I could make a career out of that interest. The joy of programming still gets me out of bed in the morning and sends me skipping happily to my desk in my home office. What I do wouldn't impress anybody at a technical level. I'm not an innovator. The world of software and tech would not suffer if I had never existed. But I like the guy I work for. I like the people I work with. I write stuff that lots of people use. I do it well enough that I can feel decently good about it.

And I'm watching all of what I enjoy in software as a career and craft gradually disappear. Upper management are now all True Believer AI zealots who know, just know, that AI is the future and therefore ensure that it is also the present. They've caused nothing but organizational chaos, shoved out knowledgeable people, in some misguided effort to remake the company in their image, and replaced them with, to me, obvious bullshit artists.

Engineering time and effort that might a few years ago have produced value and good experiences for users now produce mediocre "MCPs," used only internally, that turn out even more mediocre code and tests that don't test anything.

I don't have nearly the chops or talent you and your peers have. I never could have run with you guys or made the mark on the world that you did. What I do, and the processes I follow, are probably the exact stuff that drove you to retirement. Still, I enjoy what I do and hate that it's being taken from me and replaced with something I hate, overseen, in my company's case, by vapor merchants pretending to be visionaries/cutting-edge 'thought leaders.'

I'm glad some of us got to build things when the inmates ran the asylum, and I regret the money and 'progress' that strangled the life and joy out of it for you.

Just an aside: I've really enjoyed everything you've posted on HN and look forward to your comments. Thanks, and cheers.

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

#834

Post by ilc »

herdymerzbow wrote: post #154
ilc wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Principal SWE, who has done his fair share of big stuff. I'm excited to work with AI. Why? Because it magnifies the thing I do well: Make technical decisions. Coding is ONE place I do that, but architecture, debugging etc. All use that same skill. Making good technical decisions. And if you can make good choices, AI is a MEGA force multiplier. You just have to be willing to let go of the reins a hair.

As a self teaching beginner* this is where I find AI a bit limiting. When I ask ChatGPT questions about code it is always about to offer up a solution, but it often provides inappropriate responses that don't take into account the full context of a project/task. While it understands what good structure and architecture are, it's missing the awareness of good design and architecture and applying to the questions I hav…

I can't summarize 40~ YOE of programming easily. (30+ professional)

I can tell you: Your problems are a layer higher than you think.

Coding, Architecture, etc. Those get the face time. Process, and Discipline, and where the money is made and lost in AI.

To give a minor example: My first attempt at a major project with AI failed HORRIBLY. But I stepped back and figured out why. What short-comings did my approach have, what short-comings did the AI have. Root Cause Analysis.

Next day I sat down with the AI and developed a PLAN of what to do. Yes, a day spent on a plan.

Then we executed the plan. (or it did and I kept it on track, and fixed problems in the plan as things happened.) On the third day I'd completed a VERY complex task. I mean STUPIDLY complex, something I knew WHAT I wanted to do, and roughly how, but not the exact details, and not at the level to implement it. I'm sure 1-2 weeks of research could have taught me. Or I could let the AI do it.

... And that formed my style of working with AI.

If you need a mentor pop in the Svalboard discord, and join #sval-dev. You should be able to figure out who I am.

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

#835

Post by LogicFailsMe »

Bewelge wrote: post #742
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OldAF. I have more ideas than I have time to code up prototypes. Claude code has changed all that, And given it cannot improve the performance of optimized code I've written so far, it's like having a never tiring eager junior engineer to work out how to make use of frameworks and APIs to deploy my code. A year ago, cursor was flummoxed by simple things Claude code navigates with ease. But there are still corner case…

Can you elaborate on "resistance against cuda"? What were people clinging to instead?

In the beginning, valid claims of 100x to 1,000x for genuine workloads due to HW level advances enabled by CUDA were denied stating that this ignored CPU and memory copy overhead, or it was only being measure relative to single core code etc. No amount of evidence to the contrary was sufficient for a lot of people who should have known better. And even if they believed the speedups, they were the same ones saying Intel would destroy them with their roadmap. I was there. I rolled my eyes every single time but then AI happened and most of them (but not all of them) denied ever spouting such gibberish.

Won't name names anymore, it really doesn't matter. But I feel the same way about people still characterizing LLMs as stochastic parrots and glorified autocomplete as I feel about certain CPU luminaries (won't name names) continuing to state that GPUs are bad because they were designed for gaming. Neither sorts are keeping up with how fast things change.

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

#836

Post by heddycrow »

r_lee wrote: post #730
vitaflo wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the lead dev on our team told us "You will all have a different journey on this road". Not everyone is going to get along with allowing an LLM to write code for them, something they've probably spent their entire lives crafting a skill for. Others only saw code as a means to and end, so an LLM finally removes that silly barrier. I'm in the former camp. Every time I have an LLM write code it makes me entirely depre…

I fear that there will be a point where it won't be a choice, although a part of me wonders why there is such a hurry to get rid of devs in the first place, as these tech companies have insane margins But I also like to work the way you described it, and also by using Claude Code for e.g. K8s stuff (kubectl, helm) where you'd otherwise have to use a TUI or do a lot of typing just to get logs/status/etc. and a bunch o…

Fear is the mind killer.

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

#837

Post by LogicFailsMe »

Bewelge wrote: post #775
MachineBurning wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it was mostly that people didn't want to rewrite (and maintain) their code for a new proprietary programming model they were unfamiliar with. People also didn't want to invest in hardware that could only run code written in CUDA. Lots of people wanted (and Intel tried to sell, somewhat succesfully) something they could just plug-and-play and just run the parallel implementations they'd already written for superco…

Thanks! It seems funny though: The advantages of GPGPU are so obvious and unambiguous compared to AI. But then again, with every new technology you probably also had management pushing to use technology_a for . Like in a few decades when the way we work with AI has matured and become completely normal it might be hard to imagine why people nowadays questioned its use. But they won't know about the million stupid uses…

I'm dealing with someone in 2026 insisting that everything has to be written in Python and rely on entirely torch.compile for acceleration rather than any bespoke GPU kernels. Times change, people don't.

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

#838

Post by kzzzznot »

taejavu wrote: post #806
NewsaHackO wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a huge stretch to call transitioning from angularjs to angular learning a new framework.

At the time that’s precisely how it felt though. So much so that I personally felt it wasn’t worth it relearning everything. Had shipped several projects with AngularJS at my very first dev job, and have never written a line of Angular v2+

It confuses me when people talk about frameworks as being totally different. They solve the same problems, slightly differently. It’s not a big lift to learn a new one if you are familiar with one or two already.

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

#839

Post by rahimnathwani »

midtake wrote: post #824
brabel wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an ageist quote. I am in my 40s and never stopped coding even as I've become the principal engineer. Claude just frees me from the mundane tasks I'd done a million times before and never wanted to do again if possible, which it now is. I can still throw a fastball without AI, but why would I when I can throw it much faster, with much less effort now, while still enjoying what I am doing? It's still coding. If yo…

Do you really think you are as eager, inquisitive, and open to learning new ideas in your 40s compared to your 20s?

I am 50 and the answer is 'yes'.

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

#840

Post by throwaway12345t »

kitd wrote: post #709
burnstek wrote: post #614

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 ch…

Tools like Claude Code are the ultimate cheat code for me and have breathed new life into my desire to create I'm in my 60s and retiring this summer. I feel the opposite. Agents have removed most of the satisfaction and fulfilment from designing, building, testing and completing a feature or component. And if frameworks are a problem, learning to create simply and efficiently without them has its own sense of satisfa…

Scale the Lego pieces more and it’s the same. Bigger projects have more moving parts and require the same thinking.
Post reply on HN