I have bipolar disorder. The more frustrating aspects of coding have historically affected me tenfold (sometimes to the point of severe mania). Using Claude Code has been more like an accessibility tool in that regard. I no longer have to do the frustrating bits. Or at the very least, that aspect of the job is thoroughly diminished. And yes - coding is "fun again".
Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
11–20 of 1001 posts
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#12This is the way. It's the most fun computers have been in decades.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#13Same! After years in engineering management I'm building so many small side projects thanks to Claude Code. I'm creating at a breakneck pace. Claude Code has mostly raised the level of abstraction so I can focus much more on the creative aspect of building which has been so much fun.
There are definitely a lot of limitations with Claude Code, but it's fun to work through the issues, figure out Claude's behavior, and create guardrails and workarounds. I do think that a lot of the poor behavior that agents exhibit can be fixed with more guardrails and scaffolding... so I'm looking forward to the future.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#14Curious, what are you building?
exactly need some goal here ;)
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#15I have bipolar disorder. The more frustrating aspects of coding have historically affected me tenfold (sometimes to the point of severe mania). Using Claude Code has been more like an accessibility tool in that regard. I no longer have to do the frustrating bits. Or at the very least, that aspect of the job is thoroughly diminished. And yes - coding is "fun again".
I think coding can be an endurance sport sometimes. There are a lot of points at which you have to bang your head against a wall for hours or days to figure out the smallest issue. Having an agent do that frustrating part definitely lowers the endurance needed to stay productive on a project.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#16“Hell-ya brother”
100% agree even with half your experience.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#17Older here, equally excited. It's like programming with a team of your best buddies who are smarter than you but humble and eager to collaborate.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#18The split seems to be of at least a couple mindsets.
AI haters trend towards affection for the jargon, languages, and falling down that rabbit hole. They love Ruby, web apps, SaaS... the ecosystem of syntaxes. They love their job.
Those that dig AI see code as a historically necessary tool to get a machine to do a thing. I fall in this category.
I find the syntax and made up semantics boring, and doing interesting things with the machine interesting.
Ymmv but both online and in the real world I have only encountered these two schools of thought, as they say, when AI comes up.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#19I have this idea that probably violates some law of computing but I am really stubborn to make it happen somehow.
I want a game that generates its own mechanics on the fly using AI. Generates itself live.
Infinite game with infinite content. Not like no mans sky where everything is painfully predictable and schematic to a fault. No. Something that generates a whole method of generating. Some kind of ultra flexible communication protocol between engine and AI generator that is trained to program that protocol.
Develop it into a framework.
Use that framework to create one game. A dwarf fortress adventure mode 2.0
I have no other desires, I have no other goals, I don’t care. I or better yet - someone else, must do it.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#20Same here - it's like programming with a couple of buddies. Occasionally they goof off and wreck everything, but we put it back together and end up with a finished project. I'm literally going through my backlog of projects from the early 80s! There are parts of each of these projects that were black holes for me - just didn't know enough to get a toe hold. With Karl (that's my agent) he explains everything I don't u…
> it's like programming with a couple of buddies. Occasionally they goof off and wreck everything,
Nailed it :)