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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

#311

Post by yieldcrv »

scottLobster wrote: post #42

Maybe the internet has made me too cynical, and I'm glad people seem to be having a good time, but at time of posting I can't help but notice that almost every comment here is suspiciously vague as to what, exactly, is being coded. Still better than the breathless announcements of the death of software engineering, but quite similar in tone.

think about why anybody would ever associate a production level product with slop when consumers are polarized towards generative AI

this site gets indexed

there are too many disincentives to cater specifically to your suspicion and cynicism

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

#312

Post by huflungdung »

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…

[dead]

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

#313

Post by socalgal2 »

coffeecoders wrote: post #100
meebee wrote: post #46

So excited to be getting to my backlog of apps that I've wanted but couldn't take the time to develop on my own. I'm 66 and have been in the software field in various capacities (but programming mostly as a hobby). Here's a partial list of apps I've completed in the last few months: - Media Watch app to keep a list of movies and shows my wife and I want to watch - Grocery List with some tracking of frequent purchases…

This is the reason. I have just been vibe-coding my way for a few months now, got almost all the tools (except Browser and Mail) that I use daily, designed by me (with the help of LLM).

I'm curious what you mean by that. Tools I use include git and jj. I don't think I want my own versions of those. I use VSCode and Sublime Merge and gg. I'd be curious how far I could LLM code those. It'd be certainly easy to pull up Electron with Monaco but I'd probably just LLM code extensions. And I use lots of software via the browser (maps, google docs, chat, slack, discord, ...), I don't I'd want to make those. iIterm2, XCode, zsh, I don't think I want to LLM code a shell but that might be cool.

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

#314

Post by yieldcrv »

scottLobster wrote: post #57
idopmstuff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am currently using a Claude skill that I have been building out over the last few days that runs through my Amazon PPC campaigns and does a full audit. Suggestions of bid adjustments, new search terms and products to advertise against and adjustment to campaign structures. It goes through all of the analytics Amazon provides, which are surprisingly extensive, to find every search term where my product shows up, get…

And it doesn't freak you out that you're relying on thousands of lines of code that you've never looked at? How do you verify the end result? I wouldn't trust thousands of lines of code from one of my co-workers without testing

I've been doing agentic work for companies for the past year and first of all, error rates have dropped to 1-2% with the leading Q3 and Q4 models... 2026's Q1 models blowing those out the water and being cheaper in some way

but second of all, even when error rates were 20%, the time savings still meant A Viable Business. a much more viable business actually, a scarily crazy viable business with many annoyed customers getting slop of some sort, with a human in the loop correcting things from the LLM before it went out to consumers

agentic LLM coders are better than your co-workers. they can also write tests. they can do stress testing, load testing, end to end testing, and in my experience that's not even what course corrects LLMs that well, so we shouldn't even be trying to replicate processes made for humans with them. like a human, the LLM is prone to just correct the test as the test uses a deprecated assumption as opposed to product changes breaking a test to reveal a regression.

in my experience, type errors, compiler errors, logs on deployment and database entries have made the LLM correct its approach more than tests. Devops and Data science, more than QA.

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

#315

Post by hi_hi »

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…

Nah man. I understand the frustration, but this is a glass is half empty view.

You have decades of expert knowledge, which you can use to drive the LLMs in an expert way. Thats where the value is. The industry or narrative might not have figured that out yet, but its inevitable.

Garbage in, garbage out still very much applies in this new world.

And just to add, the key metric to good software hasn't changed, and won't change. It's not even about writing the code, the language, the style, the clever tricks. What really matters is how well does the code performs 1 month after it goes live, 6 months, 5 years. This game is a long game. And not just how well does the computer run the code, but how well can the humans work with the code.

Use your experience to generate the value from the LLMs, cuase they aren't going to generate anything by themselves.

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

#316

Post by Kiro »

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…

The best programmers I know are the ones most excited about it.

The mediocre programmers who are toxic gate keepers seem to be the ones most upset by it.

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

#320

Post by wiz21c »

Kiro wrote: post #316
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…

The best programmers I know are the ones most excited about it. The mediocre programmers who are toxic gate keepers seem to be the ones most upset by it.

definitely. With AI I can stop working on the painful tasks and spend much more time on things that matter most to me: building the right abstractions, thinking about the maths, talking to the customer...

But TBH, I have been a bit "shocked" by AI as well. It's much more troubling that the coming of the internet. But my hope is that having worked with AI extensively for the past 1-2 years, I'm confident they miss the important things: how to build the abstractions to solve the non-code constraints (like ease of maintenance, explainability to others, etc.)

And the way it goes at the moment shows no sign of progress in that area (throwing more agents at a problem will not help).

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