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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#61

Post by retired »

kensai wrote: post #48
wek wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But to push the analogy a bit. If you are rowing on a lake with motorboats, it is a totally different experience. Noisy, constant wake. We are part of an ecosystem, not isolated. Growing up, the lakes in New England were filled with sailboats. There were sailing races. Now, its entirely pontoon boats. Not a sailboat to be found.

The lake is not however yours to dictate how others will move along. Imagine if the horse owners decided in such an analogy not to allow cars on the road because they noisy and "totally different experience". You want a pre-AI experience? Feel free to code without it. It's definitely still doable.

In the town where I grew up in they banned cars and now you are only allowed to ride a horse. So your analogy is actually happening in real life.

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

#62

Post by vitriol83 »

In my field which involves large legacy codebases in C++ and complex numerical algorithms implemented by PhDs. LLMs have their place but improvements in productivity are not that great because current LLMs simply make too many mistakes in this context and mistakes are usually very costly.

Everyone `in the know' appreciates this, but equally in the current environment has to play along with the AI hype machine.

It is depressing, but the true value of the current wave of LLMs in coding will become more clear over time. I think it's going to take some serious advances in architecture to make the coding assistant reliable, rather than simply scaling what we have now.

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

antfarm wrote: post #57

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 ch…

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by krmboya »

What do you all think about the "Solve It" method by the Answer dot AI folks?

It's more like iterating on the REPL with AI in the loop, meaning the user stays in control while benefitting from AI, so real growth happens.

Interesting thing to consider, in a couple of years, will there be a differentiator between people who are good at driving company-specific AI tools and those who are generally better by having built skills the hard way ground up with benefit of AI?

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

#66

Post by retired »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #14

You do know you don't have to use AI, right? I don't use it for coding (or much at all outside of coding). I'm free to code just like I did before, and so are you.

The problem is that since AI employers now expect developers to write code faster.

Similar to when IDEs and autocomplete became common.

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

#67

Post by voxleone »

donatj wrote: post #22

> it depends on what you enjoy: the journey or the destination This has been 100% my experience. I enjoy the puzzle solving and the general joy of organizing and pulling things together. I could really care less about the end result to meet some business need. The fun part is in the building, it's in the understanding, the growth of me . I have coworkers who get itchy when they don't see their work on production, and…

I've been coding since I was about 15 and still love it. These days I mostly build tailored applications for small and medium companies, often alone and sometimes with small ad-hoc teams. I also do the sales myself, in person. For me, not using LLMs would mean giving up a lot of productivity. But the way I use them is very structured. Work on an application starts with requirements appraisal: identifying actors, defining use cases, and understanding the business constraints. Then I design the objects and flows. When possible, I formalize the system with fairly strict axioms and constraints.

Only after that do LLMs come in, mostly to help with the mechanical parts of implementation. In my experience it's still humans all the way down. The thinking, modeling, and responsibility for the system are human. The LLM just helps move the implementation faster.

I also suspect the segment I work in will be among the last affected by LLM-driven job displacement. My clients are small to medium companies that need tailored internal systems. They're not going to suddenly start vibe-coding their own software. What they actually need is someone to understand the business, define the model, and take responsibility for the system. LLMs help with the implementation, but that part was never the hard part of the job.

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

#69

Post by ZenoArrow »

retired wrote: post #66
ZenoArrow wrote: post #14

You do know you don't have to use AI, right? I don't use it for coding (or much at all outside of coding). I'm free to code just like I did before, and so are you.

The problem is that since AI employers now expect developers to write code faster. Similar to when IDEs and autocomplete became common.

It's not hard to pick holes in this approach by showing the code being generated is flawed. Also, code quality is different from code velocity, better to write 10 lines that more accurately describes functionality than 50.

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

#70

Post by dmm »

klinquist wrote: post #13
RALaBarge wrote: post #4

I'm 42 years old and it has re-ignited mine. I've spent my career troubleshooting and being a generalist, not really interested in writing code outside of for systems and networking usage. It's boring to type out (lots of fun to plan though!) and outdated as soon as it is written. I've made and continue to make things that I've been thinking about for a while, but the juice was never worth the squeeze. Bluetooth trou…

I agree with this. I recently wanted to monitor my vehicle batteries with a cheap BLE battery monitor from AliExpress (by getting the data into HomeAssistant). I could have spent days digging through BlueZ on a Raspberry Pi, or I could use AI and have a working solution an hour later. Yes, I gave up the chance to manually learn every layer of the stack. I’m fine with that. The goal was not to become a Bluetooth archa…

> I could use AI and have a working solution an hour later.

That sounds really cool. You should share what you used.

> The goal was not to become a Bluetooth archaeologist. The goal was to solve the problem.

I'm sympathetic to this view. It seems very pragmatic. After all, the reason we write software is not to move characters around a repo, but to solve problems, right?

But here's my concern. Like a lot of people, I starting programming to solve little problems my friends and I had. Stuff like manipulating game map files and scripting ftp servers. That lead me to a career that's meant building big systems that people depend on.

If everything bite-sized and self-contained is automated with llms, are people still going to make the jump to be able to build and maintain larger things?

To use your example of the BLE battery monitor, the AI built some automation on top of bluez, a 20+ year-old project representing thousands of hours of labor. If AI can replace 100% of programming, no-big-deal it can maintain bluez going forward, but what if it can't? In that case we've failed to nurture the cognitive skills we need to maintain the world we've built.

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