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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

#421

Post by shireboy »

Similar story. I’m a bit younger, but Amiga BASIC/VB3/VB6/ASP/.NET was my path. There was a joy when “Visual Studio” meant “you can visually drag a component on and that is the app” instead of editing text files. But gradually we learned you need to be in the code. Sure you have figmas and low code tools today. But industry has gravitated back to editing curly brackets and markup in text files. And for good reasons I think.

I landed on GitHub Copilot. I now manage a team, but just last night snuck away to code some features. I find my experience and knowing how to review the output helps me adopt and know how much to prompt the agent for. Is software development changing? Absolutely. But it always has been. These tools help me get back to that first freedom I felt when I dragged a control onto a VB6 designer, but keep the benefits of code in text files. I can focus on feature, pay attention to UX detail, and pivot without taking hours.

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

#422

Post by duskdozer »

mchaver wrote: post #262
rapnie wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Then society needs to collectively decide how to allocate resources. Uh oh!

The owners of the AI companies will collectively decide how to allocate resources, rather.

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

#424

Post by tasuki »

nly wrote: post #356
KellyCriterion wrote: post #324

++1 Was able to build a large financial application just with the 20 USD subscription in the last 12 month - without Claude, I would have required 5 - 6 people and at least 1 year of funding. This was by far my best investment in my whole life 12x20 USD vs. 750.000 salary :-) It is especially inspiring since it brings you usually a few new ideas into your context; also just joking around with it can yield new inspira…

I find this baffling tbh as I regularly ask Claude for basic components and they come out completely broken, wrong and buggy. The last: I asked for a quick TCP server in C++ that handled just a single client (disconnecting the existing client when a new client connected), with a send() that I could call from another thread. It was holding mutexes over read(), and trying to set the SO_REUSEPORT port socket option on a…

> a large financial application

Those could mean anything. Some people think 5k likes is large. Others think 100k is small.

Oh well, at least they didn't say "complex".

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

#425

Post by Noaidi »

> I’m chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep.

I am saying this in all seriousness, what difference is this to addiction?

This is something already talked about [1]. You are getting the sugar (results) and none of the nutrients (learning).

[1]https://quasa.io/media/the-hidden-dangers-of-ai-coding-agent...

https://hils.substack.com/p/help-my-husband-is-addicted-to-c...

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

#426

Post by jbs789 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #400
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. No they can't. They think they can, but they will still need to put in the elbow grease to get it done right. But, in my case (also decades of experience), I have had to reconcile with the fact that I'll need to put down the quill pen, and learn to use a typewriter. The creativity, ideas, and obsession with Quality are still all mine, but the execution is som…

As an idiot, I am very aware that Claude can help me, but also very aware I am not an experienced SWE and continue to seek out their views.

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

#429

Post by elzbardico »

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.

No, it can't. I use claude code and AMP a lot, and yet, unless I pay attention, it easily generate bad code, introduces regressions while trying to fix bugs, get stuck in suboptimal ideas. Modularity is usually terrible, 50 year ideas like cohesion and coupling are, by the very nature of it, mostly ignored except in the most formal rigid ways of mimicry introduced by post-training.

Coding agents are wonderful tools, but people who think they can create and mantain complex systems by themselves are not using them in an optmal way. They are being lazy, or they lack software engineering knowledge and can't see the issues, and in that case they should be using the time saved by coding agents to read hard stuff and elevate their technique.

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