Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

481–490 of 1001 posts

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

#481
Me too - I am 65 and coding all hours. At least half the time on tooling to encode the way I want to do things. I have ideas and implement them. I think it is fun as you make more progress. I do think it is a temporary phase and not sure if the next one will be as much fun or once I have drained the accumulated ideas that would be nice to do someday.

I feel selfish in that I am towards the end of my career rather than right at the start.

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

#482
post #331

++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…

Are you using this large financial application just for yourself? I think the difficult task is/will be to sell vibe coded software from the lone developer to anyone.

Yes, its for proprietary use among friends; its not for sale, instead I get a cut of their returns for providing support & maintenance.

It is not 100% vibe code, by far not! I use cloud for method-by-method or simple class instructions and integrate in the app manually, I do not use any of the API integrations, I just use the standrad WebUI for discussing, planing & implementation.

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

#483
post #315
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'…

I think the key metric to good software has really changed, the bar has noticeably dropped.

I see unreliable software like openclaw explode in popularity while a Director of Alignment at Meta publicly shares how it shredded her inbox while continuing to use openclaw [1], because that's still good enough innit? I see much buggier releases from macOS & Windows. The biggest military in the world is insisting on getting rid of any existing safeguards and limitations on its AI use and is reportedly using Claude to pick bombing targets [2] in a bombing campaign that we know has made mistakes hitting hospitals [3] and a school [4]. AI-generated slop now floods social networks with high popularity and engagement.

It's a known effect that economies of scale lowers average quality but creates massive abundance. There never really was a fundamental quality bar to software or creative work, it just has to be barely better than not existing, and that bar is lower than you might imagine.

[1] https://x.com/summeryue0/status/2025774069124399363

[2] https://archive.ph/bDTxE

[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/who-says-has-it-ha...

[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-school-strike-us-mil...

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

#484
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using this large financial application just for yourself? I think the difficult task is/will be to sell vibe coded software from the lone developer to anyone.

Hyper-individualized software is what LLMs are best for IMHO. They lower the bar so much that it's becoming perfectly feasible and reasonable to amase a large amount of software which is fit to your exact personal needs and preferences.

Exactly: The app can do only one thing, and does this one thing very well. Other approaches are not implemented or planned. Its like a specific dentist-tool that you need for one specific task.

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

#485

I feel this so, so much. It is a very exciting time. I have had a very specific goal in mind and I could work out large parts on my own. But there is a lot that I didn't have any basis or time to build expertise on. Using Claude Code to fill out those gaps and educate me along the way has meant I've gotten little sleep in the last two months. And I managed to make the thing I was envisioning: https://gridpaper.org/ex…

Opinions differ: hobby coders love it, but domain expert secretly despise it because it narrows the gap between the skills they spent years honing and the average Claude, I mean Joe, that just uses this mental exoskeleton.

I do understand this sentiment. But I wish these experts would see that they too are novices in literally every other field that they are not explicitly trained or experienced in. It is fun to explore curiosities even in spaces you don't know well.

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

#486
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More gatekeeping, more no true Scotsman fallacies, more bitter cope. You can absolutely take pride in having raised your own cows. But the guy down the street can also take pride in having cooked his own steak. In fact, the guy down the street might actually be a better chef than you, even though you know how to breed cattle.

You're wrong because you are making the wrong comparison. In this analogy, The guy down the street didn't cook his own steak. He told someone else to cook the steak. And then claimed that he himself cooked it. Telling himself, "wow, I'm a great chef!". When In fact, he did not cook the steak. Your greatness as a chef isn't measured by how well you manage restaurant kitchens. That would be a great manager. Your greatn…

If we want to stretch this analogy a bit - I believe all world-level chefs have a team of sous-chefs working for them. Doing things like chopping ingredients, prepping things, in fact probably doing a lot of th cooking. I think building with ai is pretty similar.

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

#487

I spent the last 2 days primarily using Claude instead of coding things myself at work. I felt the exact opposite way. It was so unfulfilling. I’d equate it to the feeling of getting an A on a test, knowing I cheated. I didn’t accomplish anything. I didn’t learn anything. I got the end result with none of the satisfaction and learned nothing in the process. I’m probably going to go back and redo everything with my ow…

You're paid by a company to create software, so they can use it to drive business value and make a profit. You did so effortlessly. But it didn't make you feel personally fulfilled. So you're going to go back and re-do it, so you feel better? How do you think your company's CEO is going to feel when you tell them you could be finishing the software much faster, but you'd rather not, because it feels better to do it b…

My CEO is fine as long as the project is profitable, which is part of my responsibility, and they are actually on board with us delivering the best quality we can under that constraint, not only because our clients do notice quality, but also as a matter of principle.

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

#488
For me, learning Elixir did this. I was going to change careers into commercial real estate about 9 years ago and then I binge read “Programming Phoenix” over a weekend.

Walked into work Monday morning, bleary eyed and told everybody, “This is the solution. This is how you build rapidly and bypass all of the long term maintenance issues that we always have to fix in every other codebase. It makes the hard things easy, it makes perfect sense and it’s FUN.”

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

#489
Without experience, programming with AI (vibe coding, I guess) can be compared to being a rat in maze... You work your way through a project, but the dead-ends exact a high cost in terms time, attention, and ultimately cost.

With experience, you see these dead ends before they have a chance to take hold and you know when and how to adjust course. It's literally like one poster said: coding with some buddies without ego and without the need to constantly talk people out of using the latest and greatest shiny objects/tools/frameworks.

I've really enjoyed going back a revisiting old ideas and projects with the help of AI. As the OP stated -- it has restored my energy and drive.

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

#490
post #333

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.

It's also usually from people who stopped coding and haven't kept their skills up.

Or have no more skin in the game, retirement.
Post reply on HN