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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

#691

Post by robofanatic »

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…

> 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

I kinda feel the same way when I visit Home Depot once a year

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

#692

Post by tarr11 »

amelius wrote: post #556
pmarreck wrote: post #538

Earlier 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…

Coding since 11. Using AI makes me completely lethargic. I really don't know how to fill the minutes that AI takes to write code. Maybe if AI gets faster I will be able to enjoy it. That said, like many people here I have invested quite some time in becoming a skilled and experienced coder, so there is no denying that this whole AI craze makes me feel like something is taken away from me.

52 here, been a full time people manager for about a decade now. Coding manually makes me tired just thinking about it. When I think about embark on a new project my mind goes back to all the times I worked 12 hour days trying to get some basic system to function. I’m too old for that now, my back hurts if I sit too long and occasionally get migraines if I look at a screen too much.

Using AI has been really perfect for me. I can build stuff while I do other things, walk the dog, make lunch, sit on the porch.

Sometimes i realize that my design was flawed and I just delete it all and start again, with no loss aversion.

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

#693

Post by anon84873628 »

dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #688
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…

>You are reading HN, the survivorship bias and groupthink is just as high as any other self-calibrating online community Agreed. To expand IMHO and somewhat tangentially: recognizing the importance of software/technology and using it as tool is the hallmark of a person with balanced mental makeup. Someone who has ever had 'passion' for software (or in general technology) extended beyond a few weeks can be considered…

There is a profession called "tool maker" and their 'passion' for making tools has been quite important. Even just for chisels.

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

#694

Post by signatoremo »

latexr wrote: post #377
lovelearning wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping. This parroted argument is getting really tired. It signals either astroturfing or someone who just accepts what they are sold without thinking. LLMs aren’t “democratising” anything. There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at an…

> here’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.

That would not happen, simply because those companies' interest will never be aligned entirely. There are at least three SOA models at the moment plus many open weight models. Anthropic vs. Pentagon is exactly what would play out.

And what is a precedence? Don't say Google, because search is well and alive.

> You know what’s truly “democratic” and without “gatekeeping”? Exactly what we had before, an internet run by collaboration filled with free resources for anyone keen enough to learn.

We have way more free resources at the moment. Name anything you'd like to learn, someone will be able to point you to a relevant resource. There are also better ways of surfacing that resource.

> This parroted argument

Most of arguments here on HN have been discussed ad nauseam, for or against AI. It's only parroted (or biased) if it's against your own beliefs.

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

#695

Post by HoldOnAMinute »

The primary reason I do programming is for me. I'm 51. It's always been that way for me.

First with LOGO on the Apple ][, making the turtle move around the screen and follow your commands. It was magic.

Then discovering BASIC, and the ability to turn the pixels on and off and make them any color you like.

Making my Amiga talk with the "SAY" command.

The first time I dialed a BBS in the dead of night with my Commodore 64 and my 300 baud modem, watching those colorful letters sloowly make their way across the TV screen...

Running my own BBS software and dialing in from my cousin's house at Thanksgiving...

Putting up my own web page and cgi-bin scripts....

It's all been magic, and it's all been just for me.

So when you remove everything else, all the cruft and crap,

I will still be programming just for me.

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

#696

Post by switchbak »

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…

“yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details”

Implementation details can very much matter though. I see this attitude from my managers that now submit huge PRs, and it is becoming a big problem.

I definitely agree that these tools allow one with an in-depth developer background to cover territory that was too much work previously. But plop me into a Haskell codebase, and I guarantee I’d cause all kinds of problems even with the best intentions and newest models. But the ramp up for learning these things has collapsed dramatically, and that’s very cool.

I still don’t want to have to learn all the pitfalls of those frameworks though. Hopefully we will converge on a smaller number, even if it’s on tooling that isn’t my favourite.

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

#697

Post by ay »

pmarreck wrote: post #538
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…

> 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 am 50, coding since ~12. Started with Apple II, during the uni times wrote my own editor in assembly for BK-0010 (a soviet computer), then 30 years in computer networking with some high performance dataplane stuff more recently;

The last years somehow it felt like there’s nothing new anymore, the same 10 ideas being regurgitated with slight modifications. I tinkered with AI for the past 2 years but it was mostly a “tool for writing boilerplate”. I have tried a few ideas for agents but didn’t see how it could work.

That changed with Opus 4.6 and the subsequent wave of local models - now I try 10 ideas a day and it’s like magic! And if something doesn’t work - jumping into the code and debugging it is huge fun!

Understanding that the era of the almost-free cloud tokens might come to an end, I run my own harness pointing to my own GPUs running Qwen3.5-27B, and the last few days it has been very busy! :)

My harness doesn’t “pressure cook” since it doesn’t make sense to do that with only one GPU (besides many other reasons), it runs everything in a linear fashion, including subagents, and logs everything - reading the logs as they go by is another cool thing - sometimes I pick up interesting things from it !

The distribution of people’s moods related to AI seems indeed bimodal. And I feel lucky somehow ending up in the “enthusiastic” rather than “depressed” part of it. To the folks in the other one: I am sorry. I don’t know why it is this way. If I knew I might have given unsolicited advice.

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

#698

Post by overgard »

mitchitized wrote: post #472
Dumblydorr wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The world changes. Time marches on, and the very skills you spend your time developing will inevitably expire in their usefulness. Things that were once marvelous talents are now campfire stories or punchlines. LLMs may be accelerating the process, but definitely not the cause. If you want a career in technology, a durable one, you learn to adapt. Your primary skill is NOT to master a given technology, it is the abil…

What exactly would people retrain into? The future these companies explicitly want is AI taking ALL the jobs, It's not like PMs are going to be any safer, or any other knowledge work. I see little evidence that AI is going to create new jobs other than a breathless assurance that it "always happens"

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

#699

Post by HoldOnAMinute »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #546
pmarreck wrote: post #538

Earlier 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 retired, so a career pivot isn’t in the cards for me. I’m also not really in the HN gestalt, so to speak. I have some views that are common, hereabouts, and some, not so much. I’m enjoying having an LLM “pair partner.”

Yes, it's a partner you can discuss things with, and it never belittles you or gets tired.

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

#700

Post by lhgkdj387 »

tqwhite wrote: post #507

I'm 73 (all the way retired). I'm in love with creating software again. I wrote my first computer program in 1967. Since, it's been one fascinating thing after another but, for me, the modern age had become dull. The thought of figuring out another API or framework makes me need a nap. Now I can have an idea, negotiate with Milo (Claude Code integrated with a neo4j graph database because now I can!) and it's off to t…

All that rhetoric and no output. Enjoy the hamster wheel.
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