Is HN dead? Why are people commenting on a vapid post by a brand new account, which reads like an ad, and they're not questioning anything..?
Because it is an interesting topic. The original post is not relevant. The conversations is. Lighten up.
Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
561–570 of 1001 posts
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claude Code has killed my ADHD and turned me into an always-on hyper-focused machine. I am getting 20x done. This is a literal superpower. I am not using it in agentic mode yet. I am telling it everything I want it to do. I will tell it where I want the files, what I want structs to be named, how I want the SQL queries to join, etc. I then review every line and make edits (typically with Claude first). I haven't trie…
Careful though: a lot of people are getting the feeling of getting 20x done. Do you have objective measurements?
Ha ha, for some of us the "feeling" is good enough.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#563Is 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…
It depends. Google's AI that gloms on to search is not particularly good for programming. I don't use any OpenAI stuff but talking to those that do, their models are not good for programming compared to equivalent ones from Anthropic or google. I have good success with free gemini used either via the web UI or with aider. That can handle some simple software dev. The new qwen3.5 is pretty good considering its size, t…
Set up mmap properly and you can evaluate small/medium MoE models (such as the recent A3B from Qwen) on most ordinary hardware, they'll just be very slow. But if you're willing to wait you can get a feel for their real capabilities, then invest in what it takes to make them usable. (Usually running them on OpenRouter will be cheaper than trying to invest in your own homelab: even if you're literally running them on a 24/7 basis, the break even point compared to a third-party service is too unrealistic.)
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you put these all in the same category: gaining knowledge, gaining abilities, and just obtaining things. I gatekeep my bike, I keep it behind a gate. If you break the gate open and democratize my bike, you're an idiot.
it is more like: You gatekeep your bike, you keep it behind a gate, you don't let anyone else ride it. Your neighbor got a nicer bike for Christmas, rode it by your house and now you are sad because you aren't the special kid with the bike any more, you are just regular kid like your neighbor.
No, both bikes are owned by a $trillion corporation who collects a monthly rent.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#565To those of you reading the comment section thinking something like the following: >"Wait a moment! Being forced to use AI gave me depression, and I'm really aware of the fact that it's only going to become better and better the more developers are using it, to the point where the 10 job openings of yesterday are 1 job opening tomorrow. Why are people so excited", remember this: You are reading HN, the survivorship b…
Been coding since 13, now 44 working in FAANG.
Love AI explaining code
Dislike AI for writing code (that was my fun part)
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#566> I’m ready to retire. ... Fast forward decades and Claude Code is giving me that same energy and drive. I love it. It feels like it did back then. I’m chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep. Of course you love it, you don't have to worry about retirement anymore. Give me your 401k, then tell you feel about Claude Code.
Oh, you are screwed. I feel badly about that. More about the environmental disaster and student loan screw job that AI than AI.
I am retired and am nearly equaling my salary with side jobs and only working a few hours a day. I don't see any reason you can't do that so stop whining and start learning.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
> LLM watch-six-agents-writing-and-you-proofreading gave me so much existential crisis and depression this is extremely bizarre because I’m 53, been coding since 12, and it has had literally the exact opposite effect on me, I find it tremendously exciting, like riding a snowmobile instead of manually cross-country skiing but I do think that if you’re not ready to work like this, you may need to consider a career pivo…
I'm with you on this being incredibly exciting. I'm 40 and have been doing this since I was 12 as well. Once I became a staff engineer at a large company and ended up being a less Hands-On with code and more on team leadership and system architecture, it set me up for this perfectly. I missed writing code (or so I thought) but what I realized is that I actually missed bringing ideas to life. Coding was just a means t…
Same boat (though 44M) - I don't think it has become less fun, on the contrary it can help with the stuff that was trivial but could still take time to get right. Now it can crank out that stuff often correctly on first try. Of course I have the same fear of job security as everyone else and it is sad to see something you were good at being taken over by machines, but it is not because I enjoy the work itself less, quite the contrary.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Claude just frees me from the mundane tasks I'd done a million times before and never wanted to do again if possible, which it now is. What kind of tasks?
writing any git command, ever, writing any documentation, ever. writing comments in issue trackers, resolving issues in issue trackers, doing pretty much anything in the terminal, ever… basically every imaginable thing which takes time away from the actual job
Why not say “using a computer”. gcl (my alias for git clone) is way faster to use than any prompting. Any use case I found for LLMs, I noticed that a good script or a DSL (as an abstraction) would be way more useful.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
These models making bad / tasteless decisions about what dependencies to pull in is one of the main reasons they work best in the hands of experienced developers. You've got to know what you want it to use and tell it, and anticipate what shortcuts it will want to take and tell it not to do those things. For these reasons we're not yet at the point where inexperienced non-programmers can get high quality software out…
You need to tell the model what to do and what not to do: The dependency thingy is an issue, yes, but you can tell the model not to do so - and you should always know which result the prompt should create: For sure you must be able to read/understand/judge the code - completely fire and forget is not possible (to my experience), though I see many people saying "I had one mega prompt and after 2 days the app was ready…
Absolutely. These models still need a lot of this sort of hand holding, so they work best in experienced hands. I'm also skeptical of those very long runs, letting it go so long without active oversight must surely produce at least some objectionable design or implementation details, right? So I guess the people claiming those sort of results have less care for these sort of qualities.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#570Yeah, completely understand that viewpoint. It’s bizarre how many people hate it. Everything I can do with LLM’s is amazing.