I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion

I agree. I wanted a particular tool to support my development. The libraries are well known and understood by people who work in text editors, but this is not my area and I have a busy life. Simply working out what I needed to know produced enough inertia to stop it happening.

I finally made it with Claude. I've been writing code a while so I absolutely didn't let Claude loose and I still refactored stuff by hand as sometimes that was faster than trying to get Claude to do it. I also know what the whole thing does - I read all the diffs it presented.

I wouldn't fully trust it to go off and do its thing unsupervised especially in my areas of speciality. But the scaffolding work like command line arguments - typing all that out was never my passion and I had snippets in my editor for most of it.

Perhaps if your passion is the process of doing that kind of meticulously laying out of each file then I can understand. Although the journey for me is the problem solving. Nothing much excites me about any of the boilerplate parts.

Claude can certainly take a stab at the solution too and is best when it has some kind of test case to match or validation step. To me working out what those are was always the core of the job and without them Claude can make plenty of mistakes.

It's just a tool and I use it in ways to support what I enjoy.

My work situation is way more complicated. Bigcorp organizational dynamics nullify any marginal gain anywhere.

One hundred percent.

I came back into tech professionally over the last decade. Always been into computers, but the first decade or so of my career was in humanitarian amin. Super interesting sector, super boring day-to-day.

Getting back into code felt like coming home. I'm good at it, I really enjoy it, the problem-solving aspect totally lights up my brain in this amazing way.

I feel exactly the same way. Totally robbed of pleasure at work, with the added kicker of mass layoffs hanging over the sector.

At least OP is sixty, I've got 25 years of work left and I really don't know what to do. I hate it all so much.

I think this is really honest and the reason we see this big divide. On the one hand people that never enjoyed coding but enjoy to see their ideas realized are celebrating. But the group of people who enjoyed coding in itself and never saw it just as a means to a result feel cheated. I think a lot of the polarization you seen online is revolving around this difference in character. I am of two minds about this really. because I've certainly enjoyed the puzzle and the journey in the past. But I also enjoy to get to see ideas I've had for a while but never had the time for, realize quickly. I also don't think its just a distinction between enjoying the journey or the destination, but I think its enjoying a very specific type of journey, e.g. slow methodical etc. Whereas people with a different temperament find the speed and the ease of experimentation and the sometimes surprising results more appealing.

I found my peace with AI aided coding during the last three months. I started development of an environment for programming games and agent simulations that has its own S-expression based DSL, as a private project. Think somewhere between Processing and StarLogo, with a functional style and a unique programming model.

I am having long design sessions with Claude Code and let it implement the resulting features and changes in version controlled increments.

But I am the one who writes the example games and simulations in the DSL to get a feel for where its design needs to change to improve the user experience. This way I can work on the fun and creative parts and let Claude do the footwork.

I let Claude simultaneously write code, tests and documentation for each increment, and I read it and suggest changes or ask for clarification. I find it a lot easier to dismiss an earlier design for a better idea than when I would have implemented every detail of the system myself, and I think so far the resulting product has largely benefited from this.

To me, now more than ever it is important to keep the love for programming alive by having a side project as a creative outlet, with no time pressure and my own acceptance criteria (like beautiful code or clever solutions) that would not be acceptable in a commercial environment.

Oh wow, that's exactly the opposite of how I feel, and conversely, I am that developer who gets itchy when his work doesn't go to prod quickly enough and gets defensive on code reviews.

Sure, part of the fun of programming is understanding how things work, mentally taking them apart and rebuilding them in the particular way that meets your needs. But this is usually reserved for small parts of the code, self-contained libraries or architectural backbones. And at that level I think human input and direction are still important. Then there is the grunt work of glueing all the parts together, or writing some obvious logic, often for the umpteenth time- these are things I can happily delegate. And finally there are the choices you make because you think of the final product and of the experience of those who will use it- this is not a puzzle to solve at all, this is creative work and there is no predefined result to reach. I'm happy to have tools that allow me to get there faster.