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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

#651

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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…

> "removal of gatekeeping"

Gates were put in place for lawyers, doctors, and engineers (real ones, not software "engineers") because the cost of their negligence and malpractice was ruined lives and death. Gatekeeping has value.

Software quality, reliability, and security was already lousy before the advent of LLMs, making it increasingly clear that the gate needed to be kept. Gripes about "gatekeeping" are a dogwhistle for "I would personally benefit from the bar being lowered even further".

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

#652

Post by chrisweekly »

game_the0ry wrote: post #632
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…

> It'll also be good to see leetcode die. Agreed. Leetcode caused more harm than good.

Still causing it!

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

#653

Post by dahart »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #552
Thanemate wrote: post #511

To 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…

Honestly, software engineering as a career only went down hill for me from when I began to when I retired. (And I hesitate to even air that view in front of others that are already in the field because I am a kind of Pollyanna and don't want to foment bad vibes.) But since I retired a few years ago it was clearly not LLMs that precipitated the decline of my enjoyment of the profession. Instead it was the slow erosion…

> Yeah, that's what happens to someone's code when they moves on—becomes someone else's sandbox and they are free to knock down the castle, build another—Chesterton's Fence not withstanding, ha ha.

As someone who references Chesterton’s fence often, I not only agree the code often gets rewritten when someone moves on, I even think it’s often the right thing to do - for medium to small projects where there is one or only a few people who own the code. The reason is because I’ve seen what happens when you don’t rewrite it - the new owner(s) don’t have intimate knowledge of the codebase, and as a result, they work at the speed of molasses regardless of their skill. I have left code behind to people who are better coders than me, and it took years for them to become productive.

To be fair, I have also seen large projects with many people get rewritten and have Chesterton bite back hard, having the projects go late, cost enormous sums of money, and end up as bad as the first time, so rewrites certainly aren’t always called for.

This is all changing dramatically with Claude, BTW, people can now get into a codebase and be productive without rewriting it. They might not understand it, but this is a positive development of some kind at some level.

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

#654

Post by bmurphy1976 »

I'm 50. I've been coding since the 6th grade. I'm a director for my org but still have to be hands on because of how small we are.

I only ever wanted to code.

I've spent decades developing mentorship, project management, and planning skills. I spent decades learning networking, databases, systems administration, testing, scrum, agile, waterfall, you name it. Every skill was necessary to build good software.

But I only ever wanted to code.

And I've spent decades burning out. I'm burt out on terrible documentation, tedious boiler plate and systems that don't interoperate well. I despise closed ecosystems, dependency management gone mad, terrible programming languages, over abstraction and I have fundamental and philosophical objections to modern software development practices.

I only ever wanted to code and I just couldn't do it anymore. And then AI happened.

This has been liberating for me.

The mountainous pile of terrible documentation written for somebody that has 36 years less experience? Ask the AI to find that one nugget I need.

That horrific mind numbingly tedious boilerplate? Doesn't matter if it's code, xml, yaml, or anything else. Have the AI do the busy work while I think about the bigger picture.

This nodejs npm dependency hell? Let the AI figure it out. Let the AI fix yet another breaking change and I'll review.

That hard to find bug? Let the AI comb through the logs and find the evidence. Present it to me with recommendations for a fix. I'll decide the path forward.

That legacy system nobody remembers? Let the AI reverse engineer it and generate docs and architectural diagrams. Use that to build the replacement strategy.

I've found a passion for active development that I've been missing for a very long time. The AI tools put power back in my hands that this bloated and sloppy industry took from me. Best of all it leverages the skills I've spent decades honing.

I can use the tools to engineer high quality solutions in an environment that has not been conducive to doing so on an individual level for a very long time. That is powerful and very motivating for somebody like me.

But I still fear the future. I fear a future where careless individuals vibe code a giant pile of garbage 10,000x the size of the pile of muck we have today. And those of us who actually try and follow good engineering practices will be right back to where we started: not able to get anything done because we're drowning in a sea of bullshit.

At least until that happens I'm going to be hyper productive and try to build the well engineered future I want to see. I've found my spark again. I hope others can do the same.

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

#655

Post by petercooper »

Thanemate wrote: post #511

To 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…

As for you, OP, I have no idea why age is a factor to consider to this.

This is one only data point but my dad was a programmer and frequently complained about cognitive decline once he hit his mid 50s. From talking to him, he remained sharp at a conceptual and high level, knowing what he wanted to do and how it would be done, but struggled with the tooling, the logistical details, etc. He didn't make it to the AI era, alas, but AI could be a god send for people who have the proven technical chops and background but find juggling a lot of minutiae is becoming difficult.

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

#656

Post by INTPenis »

I'm only forty but ditto.

Been programming off and on since I was a kid, though I went into a career of systems architect instead, because I found the actual process of churning out code kinda tedious.

But I still had all these ideas in my head that I wanted to make reality, and now I finally can.

A project that would normally take weeks, and significantly affect the rest of my life, now only takes hours.

But remember that all those projects need to be maintained too, you can't just release a bunch of new code into the open source ecosystem without maintaining it.

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

#658

Post by g051051 »

I'm 62, and it's had the opposite effect on me. I've never stopped loving writing code, learning new things, trying random stuff, etc. I code all day, and spend more time playing with stuff in the evenings (the main difference is I'm sipping some scotch while I do it). Having to use LLM's at work has sucked most of the joy out of my work. Fighting with them, keeping them on track, catching hallucinations before they go too far, wasted effort...it's exhausting me like nothing else in my 40+ year career.

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

#659

Post by reedlaw »

gzread wrote: post #545
echelon wrote: post #506

Earlier 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?

How do you even begin to define objective measurements of software engineering productivity? You could use DORA metrics [1] which are about how effectively software is delivered. Or you could use the SPACE Framework [2] which is more about the developer experience.

1. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/using-the-...

2. https://space-framework.com/

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

#660

Post by eventmapx »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #251
eventmapx wrote: post #94

I’m a 13 year lurker, first time commenter (Not sure why this post compelled me). I don’t think this is a genuine take. I don’t see how a 60 year old has any kind of joy for actual software creation suddenly from llms. It might be a joy in seeing software automatically be created but it’s definitely not doing the work. (I may be biased, I left the field 5 years ago) I doubt he’s spending any time fixing the software…

He's probably getting a buzz from the novelty of it, just like that buzz you get when you buy a new car. It wears off though and it isn't long before you are back in the showroom again, looking at new models. I'm also in my sixties and retired and decided not to use these tools. I'm a year into my current project and I am enjoying the struggle. I've learnt a lot about the domain and the language I'm using. There is s…

You explained it better than I. The craft is the fun part. I also don’t want to just critique Claude needlessly, it’s probably the best out of all llms/coding agents I’ve used. My comment would apply to most of the lately posted news on HN. It just fees like an ad post is all I was trying to say.
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