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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

#721

Post by PaulHoule »

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 feeling that way is the world telling you you’re doing it wrong.

It is more fun to treat them as coding buddies, usually using them one at a time a time, it is fair to race them at debugging a bug or spend waiting time looking at docs or something.

The real bottleneck is how much you can hold in your head simultaneously to be sure about quality as a moral subject.

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

#722

Post by LogicFailsMe »

kitd wrote: post #709
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…

Tools like Claude Code are the ultimate cheat code for me and have breathed new life into my desire to create I'm in my 60s and retiring this summer. I feel the opposite. Agents have removed most of the satisfaction and fulfilment from designing, building, testing and completing a feature or component. And if frameworks are a problem, learning to create simply and efficiently without them has its own sense of satisfa…

OldAF. I have more ideas than I have time to code up prototypes. Claude code has changed all that, And given it cannot improve the performance of optimized code I've written so far, it's like having a never tiring eager junior engineer to work out how to make use of frameworks and APIs to deploy my code.

A year ago, cursor was flummoxed by simple things Claude code navigates with ease. But there are still corner cases where it hallucinates on the strangest seemingly obvious things. I'm working on getting it to write code to make what's going on in front of its face more visible to it currently.

I guess it's a question of where you find joy in life. I find no joy in frameworks and APIs. I find it entirely in doing the impossible out of sample things for which these agents are not competitive yet.

I will even say IMO AI coding agents are the coolest thing I've seen since I saw the first cut of cuda 20 years ago. And I expect the same level of belligerence and resistance to it that I saw deployed against cuda. People hate change by and large.

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

#723

Post by aklein »

newsoftheday wrote: post #716
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 Where do I even begin...yes, you should care about implementation details unless you're only going to write stuff you run locally for your own amusement.

until you learn to trust the system and free mental capacity for more useful thinking. at some point compilers became better at assembly instructions than humans. seems inevitable this will happen here. caring about the details and knowing the details are two different things.

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

#724

Post by bluefirebrand »

crazygringo wrote: post #639
guitarlimeo wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather see regulations fixing incentives that create this problem (why does healthy food cost so much more than processed food?) than a bandaid like Ozempic that 2/3 of people can't quit (hello another hidden subscription service) without regaining their weight back.

> why does healthy food cost so much more than processed food? It doesn't. Carbs like rice, potatoes, etc. are incredibly cheap. Protein like ground beef and basic cuts of chicken are not expensive. And broccoli, carrots, green peppers, apples -- these are not exactly breaking the bank. Product is seasonal, so you vary what you buy according to what is cheapest this week. Meanwhile, stuff like breakfast cereal and po…

> Carbs like rice, potatoes, etc. are incredibly cheap.

Eating too many carbs is not a healthy diet dude

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

#725

Post by munksbeer »

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…

> there's an extremely high survivorship bias because people who are into this LLM craze have a higher probability of browsing HN.

I've worked in professional software development for more than 20 years. I'm pretty well connected and well aware of what is going on in the industry. If you think that coding agents are not widely used and just a bubble on HN, you are very much mistaken. At this point I'd suggest more than 50% of professional developers are using them. Within a few years it will be 90%.

The reason is, they are actually good, despite what some people really want to believe.

Personally, I've been typing characters into a text editor or IDE for a long, long time. I'm very happy that I have a an automated junior programmer to do it for me now while I guide it and tell it when it is getting things wrong, and fix up mistakes. I did the manual way for a long time, I'm enjoying this new way. I understand this isn't for everyone though.

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

#726

Post by Kerrick »

roland35 wrote: post #486
tkel wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're wrong because you are making the wrong comparison. In this analogy, The guy down the street didn't cook his own steak. He told someone else to cook the steak. And then claimed that he himself cooked it. Telling himself, "wow, I'm a great chef!". When In fact, he did not cook the steak. Your greatness as a chef isn't measured by how well you manage restaurant kitchens. That would be a great manager. Your greatn…

If we want to stretch this analogy a bit - I believe all world-level chefs have a team of sous-chefs working for them. Doing things like chopping ingredients, prepping things, in fact probably doing a lot of th cooking. I think building with ai is pretty similar.

This is the exact analogy that Gene Kim and Steve Yegge used throughout their book Vibe Coding: Building Production-Grade Software With GenAI, Chat, Agents, and Beyond.

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

#728

Post by ingatorp »

al_borland wrote: post #10

I spent the last 2 days primarily using Claude instead of coding things myself at work. I felt the exact opposite way. It was so unfulfilling. I’d equate it to the feeling of getting an A on a test, knowing I cheated. I didn’t accomplish anything. I didn’t learn anything. I got the end result with none of the satisfaction and learned nothing in the process. I’m probably going to go back and redo everything with my ow…

Then you haven't had any exciting idea and the need to actually build it. I personally like thinking of different projects and come up with ideas to make them unique. With Claude Code you can iterate like you're on steroids.

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

#729

Post by sensanaty »

tqwhite wrote: post #534
kdheiwns wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I never really see people say wtf they're making. It's always "AI bot wrote 200k lines of code for me!" Alright, cool. Is the project something completely new? Useful? A rushed remake of a project that already exists in GitHub with actual human support behind it? I never see an answer.

I wrote SuperSecretCrypt.com, ScoreRummy.com. Other stuff, too. I have integrated Claude Code with a graph database to support an assistant with structured memory and many helpful capabilities. I have clients. I automated a complicated data ingestion pipeline into a desktop app with a bulletproof process queue, localhost control panel and many features. For another, I am writing an AI-specific app that is so cool. I…

> SuperSecretCrypt.com

Is down. And the scoring one, no offense, seems like a project a junior would make to pad out their resume/portfolio. Nothing wrong with that of course, but I fail to see how this translates to all the hype being thrown around.

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

#730

Post by r_lee »

vitaflo wrote: post #669
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 the lead dev on our team told us "You will all have a different journey on this road". Not everyone is going to get along with allowing an LLM to write code for them, something they've probably spent their entire lives crafting a skill for. Others only saw code as a means to and end, so an LLM finally removes that silly barrier. I'm in the former camp. Every time I have an LLM write code it makes me entirely depre…

I fear that there will be a point where it won't be a choice, although a part of me wonders why there is such a hurry to get rid of devs in the first place, as these tech companies have insane margins

But I also like to work the way you described it, and also by using Claude Code for e.g. K8s stuff (kubectl, helm) where you'd otherwise have to use a TUI or do a lot of typing just to get logs/status/etc. and a bunch of yaml that is just incredibly tedious

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