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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

#741

Post by darkwater »

echelon wrote: post #735
darkwater wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case is nearer to ∞x. I have developed an opensource Android app which has already ~200 users that I would never ever written in my whole life. Zero experience with mobile development and zero time in my free time to focus on this appropriately to at least try to learn how to do it. I know myself, I would have given up before getting the first dummy APK on my phone. And while it's totally vibe-coded, in the sen…

Did you prompt it step by step or let it do its thing for a bit?

I've been working on it since December. The first working prototype was a oneshot of a biggish enough prompt (for Opus 4.5). After that well, I didn't save the prompts (my bad) but I have probably prompted what... 2-3k 80-columns lines of English in Claude Code? Yeah, I guess we are in that ballpark. Sometimes it nails the new feature at first attempt, sometimes it takes a few attempts and corrections (and in that case it can definitely be frustrating)

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

#742

Post by Bewelge »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #722
kitd wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 case…

Can you elaborate on "resistance against cuda"? What were people clinging to instead?

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

#743

Post by dplgk »

scottLobster wrote: post #42

Maybe the internet has made me too cynical, and I'm glad people seem to be having a good time, but at time of posting I can't help but notice that almost every comment here is suspiciously vague as to what, exactly, is being coded. Still better than the breathless announcements of the death of software engineering, but quite similar in tone.

Yes and they all mention Claude as if it's the only LLM that can code.

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

#744

Post by ChildOfChaos »

This is great to hear.

I am 43. I used to code as a kid and I've dabbled in it here and there, but I quickly realised I didn't want to code as a career, but now with these new tools I am building again and it's great, because I'm building the things that work for me.

To manage my life there was a todo app I used, now I've built my own, don't need to pay for it and it works exactly as I want it and now I also have a few ideas for other things I Want to do.

It's great, it feels like we might be able to start taking control of our tech back again now, when we can build the tools ourselves that work the way we want, we don't have to worry about the nonsense companies are sticking into there products, we can make things work exactly as we want it.

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

#746

Post by echelon »

reedlaw wrote: post #659
gzread wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I don't have time for that mysticism. I just know.

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

#747

Post by dplgk »

cube00 wrote: post #415
brabel wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an ageist quote. I am in my 40s and never stopped coding even as I've become the principal engineer. Claude just frees me from the mundane tasks I'd done a million times before and never wanted to do again if possible, which it now is. I can still throw a fastball without AI, but why would I when I can throw it much faster, with much less effort now, while still enjoying what I am doing? It's still coding. If yo…

> Claude just frees me from the mundane tasks I'd done a million times before and never wanted to do again if possible, which it now is. What kind of tasks?

Writing unit tests. Modifying existing unit tests to achieve desired code coverage.

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

#748

Post by SoftTalker »

bartread wrote: post #702
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…

Same age, same situation. I got completely fed up of continually having to learn new incantations to do the same shit I’ve been doing for decades without enough of a value add on top. I know what I want to build, and I know how to architect and structure it, but it’s simply not a good investment of my increasingly limited time to learn the umpteenth way to type code in simply to display text, data, and images on the…

Will be 60 this year, and have felt the same for years already. You get to a point where you look ahead and realize you've got maybe another 10-20 decent years left if you're lucky and for me, more and more, I don't want to spend it running on this treadmill.

Computers do not feature at all in my ideal retirement. Maybe a phone or tablet so I can do the minimal email and bill paying.

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

#749

Post by ear7h »

zhoujianfu wrote: post #68

This comment about the OpenClaw guy hits a little too close to home: “Peter Steinberger is a great example of how AI is catnip very specifically for middle-aged tech guys. they spend their 20s and 30s writing code, burn out or do management stuff for a decade, then come back in their late 40s/50s and want to try to throw that fastball again. Claude Code makes them feel like they still got it.”

This idea of LLMs a vehicle of midlife crisis is fascinating. I'm not sure if it's just about "throwing the fastball" though. Most of the usual midlife crisis things are a rejection of virtue. For example: buying a porsche, pickign up a frivolous hobby, or cheating on your wife, these are irresponsible uses of money, time, or attention that a smart, dedicated, family man wouldn't partake in.

In relation to LLM usage I think there's two interepretations. 1) This midlife crisis is a rejetion of empathy, understanding, and social obligation however minute. Writing a one-sentence update on an issue, understanding design decisions of another developer, reading documention are all boilerplate holding them back from their full potential in a perfectly objective experience. Of course, their personal satisfaction still relies on adoption of their products by customers (though decades of viewing customers through advertising surveillance has stripped away the customers' humanity from their perspective). Or 2) economic/political factors such as inflation, rising unemployment, supply chain issues, starvation of public services, and general instability means doing the usual midlife crisis activities are too expensive or risky, and LLMs present a local optmimum allowing them to reject societal virtues (eg. craftsmanship, collaboration, empathy) without endangering their financial position. Funny enough, I feel this latter point was also a factor of the NFT bubble (though, the finances were more clearly dubious).

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

#750

Post by waffletower »

switchbak wrote: post #696
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 ki…

Merges can become more fraught with multiple engineers vibe coding on the same codebase. However, LLMs will become delegates for that too.
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