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

211–220 of 1001 posts

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

#211

Post by ipaddr »

Ronsenshi wrote: post #123
atonse wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today every single software engineer has an extremely smart and experienced mentor available to them 24/7. They don't have to meet them for coffee once a month to ask basic questions. That said, I still feel strongly about mentorship though. It's just that you can spend your quality time with the busy person on higher-level things, like relationship building, rather than more basic questions.

How would this affect future generations of ... well anyone, when they have 24/7 access to extremely smart mentor who will find solution to pretty much any problem they might face? Can't just offload all the hard things to the AI and let your brain waste away. There's a reason brain is equated to a muscle - you have to actively use it to grow it (not physically in size, obviously).

Just because you have every instruction manual doesn't mean you can follow and perform the steps or have time to or can adapt to a real world situation.

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

#212

Post by ChrisArchitect »

ares623 wrote: post #34

I'm so excited to be able to continue build things when I'm living on the streets. I'm glad to know that drive to create will always be with me and keep me warm during winters.

Yeah this is some level of entitled selfish boomer talk here. Senior, stable, everything's fine for me, all of the ensuing impacts be damned.

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

#213

Post by [deleted] »

ramshanker wrote: post #181
dbdoug wrote: post #83

Hey, I'm nearly 80 years old. I haven't written a line of code in over 10 years. But I'm coding now, with the help of Claude & Gemini, and having a great time. Each block of Python or Applescript that they generate for me is a much better learning tool than a book - I'm going through the code line by line and researching everything. And I'm also learning how to deal with LLMs and their strengths & weaknesses. Correct…

>>>>Hey, I'm nearly 80 years old. You are an inspiration. I will remember this when I grow older. Just wanted to say this, I am 1/2 your age, and I am sure there are 1/3 or even 1/4 people here. ;)

[deleted]

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

#215

Post by JKCalhoun »

mmasu wrote: post #184
JKCalhoun wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I echo another reply here, if anything my experience coding feels even more valuable now. It was never about writing the code—anyone can do that, students in college, junior engineers… Experience is being able to recognize crap code when you see it, recognizing blind alleys long before days or weeks are invested heading down them. Creating an elegant API, a well structured (and well-organized) framework… Keeping it a…

how would you suggest someone who just started their career moves ahead to build that “taste” for lean and elegant solutions? I am onboarding fresh grads onto my team and I see a tendency towards blindly implementing LLM generated code. I always tell people they are responsible for the code they push, so they should always research every line of code, their imported frameworks and generated solutions. They should be…

My "taste" (like perhaps all other "tastes") comes from experience. Cliche, I know.

When you have had to tackle dozens of frameworks/libraries/API over the years, you get to where you find you like this one, dislike that one.

Get/Set, Get/Set… The symmetry is good…

Calling convention is to pass a dictionary: all the params are keys. Extensible, sure, but not very self-documenting, kind of baroque?

An API that is almost entirely call-backs. Hard to wrap your head around, but seems to be pretty flexible… How better to write a parser API anyway?

(You get the idea.)

And as you design apps/frameworks yourself, then have to go through several cycles of adding features, refactoring, you start to think differently about structuring apps/frameworks that make the inevitable future work easier. Perhaps you break the features of a monolithic app into libraries/services…

None of this is novel, it's just that doing enough of it, putting in the sweat and hours, screwing up a number of times) is where "taste" (insight?) comes from.

It's no different from anything else.

Perhaps the best way to accelerate the above though is to give a junior dev ownership of an app (or if that is too big of a bite, then a piece of a thing).

"We need an image cache," you say to them. And then it's theirs.

They whiteboard it, they prototype it, they write it, they fix the bugs, they maintain it, they extend it. If they have to rewrite it a few times over the course of its lifetime (until it moves into maintenance mode), that's fine. It's exactly how they'll learn.

But it takes time.

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

#217

Post by tkgally »

socalgal2 wrote: post #190
tkgally wrote: post #124

Very similar here. I am 68. While I have never developed software professionally, in the four decades I have been using computers I have often written scripts and done other simple programming for my own purposes. When I was in my thirties and forties especially, I would often get enjoyably immersed in my little projects. These days, I am feeling a new rush of drive and energy using Claude Code. At first, though, the…

This is neat that you had fun making this. What are some good examples of where your app excels? I've currently got https://jisho.org bookmarked.

Thanks! The strength of my dictionary, I hope, is how the information on each word is chosen and presented with the needs of English-speaking learners in mind, especially the explanations of meanings, usages, and nuances. Dictionaries that mainly give glosses can mislead learners, as it is rare for the meanings of words to map one-to-one between languages.

Compare the following pairs of entries from TKG and Jisho.org:

https://www.tkgje.jp/entries/03000/03495_chousen.html

https://www.tkgje.jp/entries/11000/11013_charenji.html

https://jisho.org/search/挑戦

https://jisho.org/search/チャレンジ

While the two from Jisho.org have more information, they do not make clear the important differences between challenge in English and the two Japanese words. Claude, meanwhile, added this note:

‘In English, "challenge" often implies confrontation or difficulty. In Japanese, チャレンジ carries a strongly positive connotation of bravely attempting something new or difficult. It is closer in meaning to "attempt" or "try" than to "confront." ’

The entries for my dictionary are being written one at a time by Claude based on guidelines for the explanations, the length and vocabulary of the example sentences, etc. Those guidelines (which you can see in the prompts and Claude skills in the GitHub repository) were developed by me and Claude with a particular purpose in mind: helping a learner encountering an unfamiliar word get a good basic understanding of what it means and how it is used. In my experience, at least, it is very helpful to get explanations, not just glosses.

The Jisho site does do a good job of linking together a lot of different databases. They are welcome to add links to entries in my dictionary, too, if they like.

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

#218

Post by schnebbau »

I had my real-deal moment recently.

I was getting Claude to implement a popular TS drag and drop library, and asked it to do something that, it turns out, wasn't supported by the library.

Claude read the minified code in node_modules and npm patched the library with the feature. It worked, too.

Obviously not ideal for future proofing but completely mind blowing that it can do that.

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

#219

Post by rapnie »

post-it wrote: post #188
samiv wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you bring to the table night be fine, but how long do you think you'll find emoloyers willing to still pay for this? One thing is for sure LLMs will bring down down the cost of software per some unit and increase the volume. But..cost = revenue. What is a cost to one party is a revenue to another party. The revenue is what pays salaries. So when software costs go down the revenues will go down too. When revenues…

If AI completely erases the profession of software developer, I'll find something else to do. Like I can't in good faith ever oppose a technology just because it's going to make my job redundant, that would be insane.

Take that to its extreme. Suppose there was a technology that you do not own that would make everyone's job redundant. Everyone out of a job. There is no need for education, for skills to be mastered, for expertise. Would it still be insane to complain?

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

#220

Post by ares623 »

lovelearning wrote: post #171
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…

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I must say I find this idea, and this wording, elitist in a negative way. I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping. Chances are, you were able to accumulate your expert knowledge only because: - book writing and authorship was democratized away from the church and academia - web content publication and p…

how is 2-3 centralized providers of this new technology "democratization"?
Post reply on HN