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

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

#441

Post by Kye » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 12:30 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #322

iExploder wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping. It was very democratized before, almost anyone could pick up a book or learn these skills on the internet. Opportunity was democratized for a very long time, all that was needed was the desire to put in the work. OP sounds frustrated but at the same time the societal promise that was working for longest time (spend per…

It goes past software though. That's just the common ground we share on here. A lifetime ago I was a souhd engineer, and knew how to mic up a rock band. I've since forgotten it all, but I was at a buddies practice space and the opportunity came up to mic their setup. so I dredged up decades old memories, only to take a photo and sent it to ChatGPT, which has read every book on sound engineering and mic placement, eve…

I remember the cosmetology department on the other side of the tech school I went to was a common target of mockery on the "tech" tech side. Life as a hairdresser isn't always easy, but it's real skill. And unlike computer touching, requires certification.

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

#442

Post by pajamasam » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 12:31 PM UTC

tasuki wrote: post #424

nly wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Also, they didn't say how accurate or secure it is.

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

#443

Post by mactavish88 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 12:31 PM UTC

Dumblydorr wrote: post #398

hi_hi wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Glass half empty view? Their whole skill set built up over decades, digitized, and now they have to shift everything they do, and who knows humans will even be in the loop, if they’re not c-suite or brown nosers. Their whole magic and skill is now capable of being done by a PM in 5 minutes with some tokens. How is that supposed to make skillful coders feel? Massive job cuts, bad job market, AI tools everywhere, proba…

> Their whole skill set

This is the fundamental problem with how so many people think about LLMs. By the time you get to Principal, you've usually developed a range of skills where actual coding represents like 10% of what you need to do to get your job done.

People very often underestimate the sheer amount of "soft" skills required to perform well at Staff+ levels that would require true AGI to automate.

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

#444

Post by Philip-J-Fry » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 12:31 PM UTC

lovelearning wrote: post #265

slopinthebag wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People actually value the effort and dedication required to master a craft. Imagine we invent a drug that allows everyone to achieve olympic level athletic performance, would you say that it "democratises" sports? No, that would be ridiculous.

It does technically democratize the exhilarating experiences of that level of performance. Likely also democratizes negative aspects like injuries, extreme dieting, jealousy, neglecting relationships. That said, if we zoom out and review such paradigm shifts over history, we find that they usually result in some new social contracts and value systems. Both good expert writers and poor novice writers have been able to…

>Some new value will be discovered in the code itself - maybe conceptual clarity, algorithmic novelty, structural cleanliness, readability, succinctness, etc. Those values will become the new foundations for future gatekeeping.

It's a nice idea, but I feel like that's only going to be the case for very small companies or open source projects. Or places that pride themselves on not using AI. Artisan code I call it.

At my company the prevailing thought is that code will only be written by AI in the future. Even if today that's not the case, they feel it's inevitable. I'm skeptical of this given the performance of AI currently. But their main point is, if the code solves the business requirements, passes tests and performs at an adequate level, it's as good as any hand written code. So the value of readable, succinct, novel code is completely lost on them. And I fear this will be the case all over the tech sector.

I'm hopeful for a bit of an anti-AI movement where people do value human created things more than AI created things. I'll never buy AI art, music, TV or film.

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

#445

Post by spotijk » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 12:32 PM UTC

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…

I don't understand this sentiment at all.

For me it, feels more like a way integrate search results immediately into my code. Did you also feel threatened by stack overflow?

If you actually try it you'll find it's a multiplier of insight and knowledge.

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

#446

Post by gr » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 12:33 PM UTC

nickjj wrote: post #431

Is it only possible to have success with paid versions of these LLMs? Google's "Ask AI" and ChatGPT's free models seem to be consistently bad to the point where I've mostly stopped using them. I've lost track of how many times it was like "yes, you're right, I've looked at the code you've linked and I see it is using a newer version than what I had access to. I've thoroughly scanned it and here's the final solution t…

Yes, unfortunately the free version of Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT coding models can't compare with the paid ones, and are just not that useful. But, there are alternatives like GLM and Grok that can be quite useful, depending on the task.

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

#447

Post by eej71 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 12:34 PM UTC

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…

I think you've got this backwards!

I've been working with computers since an Apple ][+ landed in our living room in the early 80s.

My perspective on what AI can do for me and for everyone has shifted dramatically in the last few weeks. The most recent models are amazing and are equipping me to take on tasks that I just didn't have the time or energy for. But I have the knowledge and experience to direct them.

I haven't been this enthused about the possibilities in a long time.

This is a huge adjustment, no doubt. But I think if I can learn to direct these tools better, I am going to get a lot done. Way more than I ever thought possible. And this is still early days!

Just incredible stuff.

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

#448

Post by mft_ » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 12:34 PM UTC

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…

It's not black/white. There's are scales of complexity and innovation, and at the moment, the LLMs are mostly good (with obvious caveats) at helping with the lower end of the complexity scale, and arguably almost nowhere on the innovation scale.

If, as a principal engineer, you were performing basic work that can easily be replicated by an LLM, then you were wasted and mistasked.

Firstly, high-end engineers should be working on the hard work underlying advances in operating systems, compilers, databases, etc. Claude currently couldn't write competitive versions of Linux, GCC (as recently demonstrated), BigQuery, or Postgres.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, LLMs are good at doing work in fields already discovered and demonstrated by humans, but there's little evidence of them being able to make intuitive or innovative leaps forwards. (You can't just prompt Claude to "create a super-intelligent general AI"). To see the need for advances (in almost any field) and to make the leaps of innovation or understanding needed to achieve those advances still takes smart (+/- experienced) humans in 2026. And it's humans, not LLMs, that will make LLMs (or whatever comes after) better.

Thought experiment: imagine training a version of Claude, only all information (history, myriad research, tutorials, YouTube takes and videos, code for v1, v2, etc.) related to LLMs is removed from the training data. Then take that version and prompt it to create an LLM. What would happen?

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

#449

Post by seba_dos1 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 12:34 PM UTC

Dumblydorr wrote: post #398

hi_hi wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Glass half empty view? Their whole skill set built up over decades, digitized, and now they have to shift everything they do, and who knows humans will even be in the loop, if they’re not c-suite or brown nosers. Their whole magic and skill is now capable of being done by a PM in 5 minutes with some tokens. How is that supposed to make skillful coders feel? Massive job cuts, bad job market, AI tools everywhere, proba…

> Their whole magic and skill is now capable of being done by a PM in 5 minutes with some tokens.

[citation needed]

It has just merely moved from "almost, but not entirely useless" to "sometimes useful". The models themselves may perhaps be capable already, but they will need much better tooling than what's available today to get more useful that that, and since it's AI enthusiasts who will happily let LLMs code them that work on these tools it will still take a while to get there :)

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

#450

Post by gr » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 12:35 PM UTC

gr wrote: post #446

nickjj wrote: post #431

Is it only possible to have success with paid versions of these LLMs? Google's "Ask AI" and ChatGPT's free models seem to be consistently bad to the point where I've mostly stopped using them. I've lost track of how many times it was like "yes, you're right, I've looked at the code you've linked and I see it is using a newer version than what I had access to. I've thoroughly scanned it and here's the final solution t…

Yes, unfortunately the free version of Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT coding models can't compare with the paid ones, and are just not that useful. But, there are alternatives like GLM and Grok that can be quite useful, depending on the task.

PS: The cheapest still very useful alternative I've found is GitHub's Copilot at €10/m base price, with multiple models included. If you pick manually between cheap models for low complexity and save Opus 4.6 for specific things, you can keep it under budget.