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I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion
171–180 of 206 posts
Re: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion
#172Yes, it changes the nature of the work. Back when you started coding there were people experiencing the same thing about shifting to higher level languages. What some of them liked was the efficency and aesthetic of using just the right assembly language trick and good compilers with high quality instruction selection took that away. I'm sure there were programmers who missed the days of punching in hex into memory.
We start to understand those old fogeys who we blew past we were young once we get to their age. It's the way of the world.
Re: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion
#173Honestly this is the end of a long path to losing my passion. As tech became more professional, and less experimental my passion has smothered. More code reviews and test writing less figure out novel solutions. More meetings and and security reviews fewer tech strategy planning meeting. More cloud platforms and api cloud solutions less built functionality. More rental plans less open-source. Ai just gets rid of the final experimentation stages
Re: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion
#17414 years ago hearing Dan Pink talk on motivation ( https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc ) catalyzed the decision to change jobs. One of the three motivators he mentions is mastery. And cites examples of why people waste hours with no pay learning to play instruments and other hobbies in their discretionary time. This has been very true for me as a coder. That said, I enjoy the pursuit of mastery as a programmer less than I u…
Great insightful comment !
Re: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion
#175I am also almost 60, and from my perspective, Claude Code solves a lifelong problem for me. I have always found coding to be quite tedious, requiring a savant level of syntax recall. It's not that I can't do it — I can — but I am better suited to managing the release, setting up the support, etc. With Claude Code, I am free to plan and create. I am able to envision a product and ship it all by myself, requiring 90% less time. Claude Code allows me to get to market. Working with Claude Code genuinely feels like having the creative partner I've waited 30 years for. Claude has made a dream come true for me.
Re: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion
#176I agree here. It certainly has burned me out as of recently. The expectation to deliver faster and faster results purely by the use of AI.
AI poses many challenges from security to ensuring code safety. When paired and met with the same expectations before the hype, you could consider it good enough to shave off 8 hours of work. But this is just the first 8 hours of getting some code ready.
A savvy dev could easily just grab an existing template they made prior and stitch things together in a degree better than AI.
Now it is just massage the prompt and hope it adheres.
Re: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
>AI has just exposed that many "engineers" are "temporarily embarrassed project managers", which is fine in the sense that it makes it clearer who actually enjoys making things and who just wants the end result regardless of how it's made. AI has also exposed that many "engineers" are just "people who like fiddling with code" and that's fine in the sense that it makes it clear who are the actual engineers who are eng…
> Like imagine slandering a civil engineer "you just want a bridge that is safe and lasts for a century, you don't care about enjoying the journey of construction". Would you currently trust a bridge designed by a civil engineer using AI for all of their calculations ?
>Would you currently trust a bridge designed by a civil engineer using AI for all of their calculations ?
Of course. I've seen how sloppy and lazy humans are, and I already use the bridge, and if the safety truly came down to the output of single person, then the risk is already significant.
I must say, I got a chuckle at "using AI to do their calculations". Oh no, my agent is going to write a python script to do basic maths, and check their work against a series of automated tests, the sky is falling!
Re: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
>AI has just exposed that many "engineers" are "temporarily embarrassed project managers", which is fine in the sense that it makes it clearer who actually enjoys making things and who just wants the end result regardless of how it's made. AI has also exposed that many "engineers" are just "people who like fiddling with code" and that's fine in the sense that it makes it clear who are the actual engineers who are eng…
Haha! Your analogy doesn't work on multiple levels. Firstly, if you're outsourcing your work to AI you're not the engineer anymore. A civil engineer is different from a manager of a civil engineering project. Just like I wouldn't call myself an artist if I got AI to generate me some art, I wouldn't call myself a software engineer if I got AI to write all the code for me. Secondly, it's not just about "enjoying the jo…
The analogy works fine! You're just being obtuse.
- Outsourcing
False. If you "outsource your code" to a compiler and just write higher level language, you're not an engineer. You literally don't own any of your own code, just an abstraction of it written in human language. See how that works? An engineer can delegate -- period.
- "I wouldn't call myself a software engineer if I got AI to write all the code for me"
If all you do is write code you're not an engineer. I think you fundamentally don't know what engineering is. In a very real sense engineering is what you do when you're not coding. The civil engineer doesn't construct the bridge personally.
- "Secondly, it's not just about "enjoying the journey of construction", it's also about caring about the quality of the end results".
Codemonkeys DON'T CARE about the quality of the end result. They only care about their little corner of the zen garden. Writing real software for real users is by far the worst part of a codemonkeys job.
- "Getting vibe coded software that is as stable as a "bridge that is safe and lasts for a century" is not a matter of careful engineering decisions, it's mostly a matter of luck"
Nonsense. The engineer who spends 90% of his time architecting systems and testing them at a high level is making safer and more stable software than the codemonkey who spends 90% of his time tinkering with the details. Forest for the trees.
- "unless you're doing extensive reviews of the generated code, at which point you greatly diminish the time you're supposedly saving."
Who said anything about "saving time"? We're engineering high quality systems. Some of us spend our time at a higher level, thinking holistically about the system, testing multiple concepts and rapidly iterating. Others demand bespoke handwritten code and in the time allowed can barely finish a single concept with a questionable amount of polish. Whatever their first idea is will ship, and they'll have no real ability to justify the architecture other than vibes.
Re: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion
#179I must agree on this. And it opened my eyes. I realize that I enjoy the destination more than the journey. I'm impacient, and have that destination in my minds eye all the time and my Ai agent is getting me there at a crazy pace.
Enjoyers of journey vs Enjoyers of journey destination! you gave me something to think about.
Re: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion
#180Enjoyers of journey vs enjoyers of destination! What a brilliant idea.
I realize i enjoy the destination. And i await impatiently to finish the journey to enjoy that place that was in my minds eye all along during the journey.
i like developing with my agent because it brings me there incredibly fast.