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

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

#291

Post by desertrider12 »

bri3d wrote: post #119
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…

This is really interesting to me; I have the opposite belief. My worry is that any idiot can prompt themselves to _bad_ software, and the differentiator is in having the right experience to prompt to _good_ software (which I believe is also possible!). As a very seasoned engineer, I don't feel personally rugpulled by LLM generated code in any way; I feel that it's a huge force multiplier for me. Where my concern abou…

ChatGPT came out a little over 3 years ago. After 5-10 more years of similar progress I doubt any humans will be required to clean up the messes created by today’s agents.

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

#292

Post by schainks »

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.

You sound quite jaded. The people I see struggling _the most_ at prompting are people who have not learned to write elegantly. HOWEVER, a huge boon is that if you're a non-native English speaker and that got in your way before, you can now prompt in your native language. Chinese speakers in particular have an advantage since you use fewer tokens to say the same thing in a lot of situations.

> Talk about a rug pull!

Talk to product managers and people who write requirements for a living. A PM at MSFT spoke to me today about how panicked he and other PMs are right now. Smart senior engineers are absorbing the job responsibilities of multiple people around them since fewer layers of communication are needed to get the same results.

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

#293

Post by vb7132 »

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…

Same level of engineer here - I feel that the importance of expertise has only increased, just that the language has changed. Think about the engineer who was an expert in Cobol and Fortran but didn't catch the C++ / Java wave. What would you say to them?

LLMs goof up, hallucinate, make many mistakes - especially in design or architecting phase. That's where the experience truly shines.

Plus, it let's you integrate things that you aren't good at (UI for me).

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

#294

Post by jillesvangurp »

I'm 51. I use codex rather than claude code. But, I sure am using it a lot. It's more or less my default at this point. I lean heavily on my decades of experience to make sure things are done right and to correct the generation process. That seems critical. You can get anything you ask for but if you don't know how to ask for the right things, it will happily create a big stinking mess instead. There's some skill to this.

I'm now dealing with a lot of stuff via codex, including technical debt that I identified years ago but never had the time to deal with. And I'm doing new projects. I've created a few CLIs, created a websites on cloudflare in a spare half hour, landed several big features on our five year old backend and created a couple of new projects on Github. Including a few that are in languages I don't normally use. Because it's the better technical choice and my lack of skills with those languages no longer matters.

I also undertook a migration of our system from GCP to Hetzner and used codex to do the ansible automation, diagnosing all sorts of weirdness that came up during that process, and finding workarounds for that stuff. That also includes diagnosing failed builds, fixing github action automation, sshing into remote vms to diagnose issues, etc. Kind of scary to watch that happen but it definitely works. I've done stuff like this for the last 25 years or so using various technologies. I know how to do this and do it well. But there's no point in me doing this slowly by hand anymore.

All this is since the new codex desktop app came out. Before Christmas I was using the cli and web version of codex on and off. It kind of worked for small things. But with recent codex versions things started working a lot better and more reliably. I've compressed what should be well over half a year of work in a few weeks.

It's early days but as the saying goes, this is the worst and slowest its ever going to be. I still consider myself a software maker. But the whole frontend/backend/devops specialization just went out of the window. But I actually enjoy being this empowered. I hate getting bogged down in grinding away at stupid issues when I'm trying to get to the end state of having built this grand thing I have in my head. There definitely is this endorphin rush you get when stuff works. And it's cool to go from idea to working code in a few minutes.

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

#295

Post by jthrilly »

jmalicki wrote: post #200
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…

"One thing is for sure LLMs will bring down down the cost of software per some unit and increase the volume. But..cost = revenue." That is Karl Marx's Labor theory of value that has been completely disproven. You don't charge what it costs to build something, you charge the maximum the customer is willing to pay.

Congrats - you caused me to create an account to reply, due to the sheer density of your incorrectness.

- First, the LTV was not Marx's idea. Adam Smith held the same view, as did many many others during this era. Marx refined this idea, but there's nothing about your point that is unique to his version of it.

- Second, while LTV is not widely used today, this is not because it was "completely disproven" (can you cite anything to back this claim up?). It is because economics shifted to a different paradigm based on marginal utility. These two frameworks operate at different levels of abstraction and address different aspects of the price of goods. There is actually empirical evidence of a correlation between the cost of a good and the cost of the labour, at an aggregate level.

- Third, Marx explicitly differentiated between _value_ and _price_. LTV deals with value exclusively (in other words, what happens when externalities impacting price are accounted for). He would have had no issue accepting that externalities impacting supply and demand would impact price.

The final irony of your comment is that the commenter's claim that you are incorrectly analysing is actually also fully defensible under your (presumably) neoclassical view of economics. In competitive markets, reduced production costs lead to reduced equilibrium prices as competitors undercut each other. The proposition that in the long run, under competition, price tends toward cost is a standard result in microeconomics. The idea that "you charge the maximum the customer is willing to pay" only holds without qualification in monopoly or monopolistic competition with strong differentiation, which are precisely the conditions that increased software supply would erode.

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

#296

Post by monkeydust »

As a business/product person it's pretty addictive (gotta watch the token spend!). This week with a few workmates we had an idea in a pub, on train back I wrote a short spec and fired up some agents to start building. The next day, by evening, whist doing our day jobs we had a functional application working, not a poc. Few years ago this would be unthinkable.

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

#297

Post by jdmoreira »

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…

As a senior engineer if your value add was "accumulated expert knowledge". Then yes, you are in a bad place.

If instead it was building and delivering products / business value. Good judgement, coordination and communication skills, intuition, etc… then you are now way way more leveraged than you ever were and it has never been greater.

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

#298

Post by vmykyt »

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…

Short answer: use your expertise in complex project.

Story: I'm dev for about 20 years. First time I had totally the same felling when desktop ui fading away in favor of html. I missed beauty of c# winforms controls with all their alignment and properties. My experience felt irrelevant anymore. Asp.net (framework which were sold as "web for backed developers") looked like evil joke.

Next time it have happened with the raise of clouds. So were all my lovely crafted bash scripts and notes about unix command irrelevant? This time however that was not that personal for me.

Next time - fall of scala as a primary language in big data and its replacement with python. This time it was pretty routine.

Oh and data bases... how many times I heard that rdbms is obsolete and everybody should use mongo/redis/clickhouse?

So learn new things and carry on. Understanding how "obsolete" things works helps a lot to avoid silly mistake especially in situation when world literally reinvent bicycle

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

#299

Post by _zagj »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #222
card_zero wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you put these all in the same category: gaining knowledge, gaining abilities, and just obtaining things. I gatekeep my bike, I keep it behind a gate. If you break the gate open and democratize my bike, you're an idiot.

it is more like: You gatekeep your bike, you keep it behind a gate, you don't let anyone else ride it. Your neighbor got a nicer bike for Christmas, rode it by your house and now you are sad because you aren't the special kid with the bike any more, you are just regular kid like your neighbor.

Yeah, if you studied and mastered all of the various disciplines required for fabricating a bicycle, and then fabricated your own by hand and offered to do likewise for others, sometimes in exchange for compensation, sometimes for free (provided others could use the bike), only for some machine that mass produces bikes to (informal) spec that was built by studying all of the designs you used for the bikes you made to suddenly become widely and cheaply available.

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

#300

Post by card_zero »

ipdashc wrote: post #210
card_zero wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you put these all in the same category: gaining knowledge, gaining abilities, and just obtaining things. I gatekeep my bike, I keep it behind a gate. If you break the gate open and democratize my bike, you're an idiot.

I'm not sure how you're getting that from their post? None of the four things mentioned (book publishing, web publishing, open-source software, computer hardware) involve stealing someone's property, he's saying that the ability to produce those things widened and the cost went down massively, so more people were able to gain access to them. Nobody stole your bike, but the bike patents expired and a bunch of bike fac…

I did have misgivings about saying that because I'm from the old "information wants to be free" school. But the subject was idiocy, and the point isn't to say that the bike was stolen, but that the bike-taker didn't do anything clever, or have much of a learning experience.

Maybe it's of value that any idiot can do this, but we're still idiots.

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