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

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

#641

Post by overgard »

lovelearning wrote: post #171
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…

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I must say I find this idea, and this wording, elitist in a negative way. I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping. Chances are, you were able to accumulate your expert knowledge only because: - book writing and authorship was democratized away from the church and academia - web content publication and p…

Coding is one of the least gate kept things in history. Literally the only obstacle is "do I want to put in the time to learn it". All Claude is doing is remixing all the free stuff that was already a google search away.

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

#643

Post by shadowgovt »

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…

From my point of view, having the llm as co-pilot is like having the junior engineer that the team would never justify the budget to hire. I get quite a bit more done when I can assign the tool a task to work on, work on something else in the meantime, and come back in 5 or 10 minutes to check on its progress and make adjustments.

There are many aspects of software engineering that are fun, but the pure mechanical part gets sold quickly; there are only but so many times you can type "emplace" and feel fulfilled. I'm finding that co-pilot is extremely good at that part.

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

#644

Post by sph »

echelon wrote: post #506
KillerRAK wrote: post #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 e…

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…

> 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.

Adding this comment to favourites to revisit in half a decade.

I've already "made fun" of your exaggerated hype comments, so I'll use this opportunity to say that I hope you remain sane and grounded in your discoveries. You wouldn't be the first to go psychotic after interacting with these stochastic parrots.

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

#645

Post by rileymat2 »

burnstek wrote: post #614

50 here. Years ago I completely stopped coding, becoming tired of the never ending rat race of keeping up with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks for everything, node for this, npm for that, Angular, React, Vue, whatever - as if solving business problems just became too boring for software developers, so we decided to spend our cycles on the new hotness at every turn. Tools like Claude Code are the ultimate ch…

> Angular, React, Vue, whatever - as if solving business problems just became too boring for software developers, so we decided to spend our cycles on the new hotness at every turn.

They often do solve business problems around responsive design, security and ux.

Currently working maintenance with one foot in a real legacy system and the other foot in modern systems the difference is immense.

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

#646

Post by shadowgovt »

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…

I'm optimistic about people being able to build the things they always wanted to build but either didn't have the skills or resources to hire somebody who did.

If we truly value human creativity, then things that decrease the rote mechanical aspects of the job are enablers, not impediments.

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

#647

Post by sensanaty »

Karsteski wrote: post #501

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..?

It's such a blatant astroturf/shill post, but the comments are also all in the same vein so I guess anthropic is just running another one of their "organic" marketing campaigns

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

#648

Post by kazinator »

satvikpendem wrote: post #233
kazinator wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while retaining control of every line What I want when I'm coding, especially on open source side projects, is to retain copyright licensing over every line (cleanly, without lying about anything). Whoops!

I wonder why people still believe in intellectual property, it's a concept that has long since lived past its usefulness, especially technologically.

A free license, like the BSD, if followed, ensures that the unpaid creator of a free work is at least credited. Everyone using that work at the source code level sees the copyright notice with that author's name. The author has already given everyone the freedom to do anything with the code, except for plagiarism. AI is taking away the last thing from peoiple who have shared everything else.

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

#649

Post by sigseg1v »

suzzer99 wrote: post #191
atonse wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM. I've been a tech lead for years and have written business critical code many times. I don't ever want to go back to writing code. I am feeling supremely empowered to go 100x faster. My contribution is still judgement, taste, architecture, etc. And the models will keep getting better. And as…

> I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities. Here's the other edge of that sword. A couple back-end devs in my department vibe-coded up a standard AI-tailwind front-end of their vision of revamping our entire platform at once, which is completely at odds with the modular approach that most of the team wants to take, and woul…

This scenario is not new with AI at all though? 14 years ago I watched a group of 3 front-end devs spin up a proof of concept in ember.js that has a flashy front end, all fake data, and demo it to execs. They wowed the execs and every time the execs asked "how long would it take to fix (blank) to actually show (blank)?" the devs hit f12, inspect element, and typed in what they asked for and said "already done!".

It was missing years of backend and had maybe 1/20th feature parity with what we already had and it would have, in hindsight, been literally impossible to implement some of the things we would need in the future if we had went down that path. But they were amazed by this flashy new thing that devs made in a weekend that looked great but was actually a disaster.

I fail to see how this is any different than what people are complaining about with vibe coded LLM stuff a decade and a half later now? This was always being done and will continue to be done; it's not a new problem.

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

#650

Post by kazinator »

satvikpendem wrote: post #248
bitwize wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because IP democratizes returns on the creative process.

Maybe it used to but with companies like Disney lengthening copyright times way beyond the original intention, or corporations patenting absurd things, it seems to be more of a way to entrench power than any sort of democratization. I'm glad generative AI seem to be bypassing all this and actually democratizing returns on the creative process, by flagrantly violating the concept of IP.

In the case of BSD-like licenses, IP is applied in a way that discourages plagiarism, while giving all the practical freedoms to the users, including making proprietary products.

In the case of copyleft licenses like GPL, IP is applied in a way to ensure that users have the code.

These things are taken away when the code is laundered through AI.

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