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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

#751

Post by gzread »

darkwater wrote: post #630
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?

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…

What does it do?

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

#752

Post by libraryatnight »

sph wrote: post #644
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…

> 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 interacti…

part of my adhd/bipolar is reacting like the guy you're replying to and I was thinking the same. Comment reminded me of when I'm in the "YES THIS IS IT" mode which usually isn't far off from hitting the wall. Hopefully just projection on my part, though, and this guy is really doing well. When I start talking like him though I usually have to take a step back and it'll be a topic in therapy next session.

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

#754

Post by szundi »

3rodents wrote: post #339
KellyCriterion wrote: post #324

++1 Was able to build a large financial application just with the 20 USD subscription in the last 12 month - without Claude, I would have required 5 - 6 people and at least 1 year of funding. This was by far my best investment in my whole life 12x20 USD vs. 750.000 salary :-) It is especially inspiring since it brings you usually a few new ideas into your context; also just joking around with it can yield new inspira…

Would you have needed 6 people? I find that Claude, Codex etc. are able to output so much because they do a lot of reinventing the wheel whereas a human, given constraints, would make much more pragmatic choices around which technology to use. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and regardless, you’ve been able to achieve something you’re happy with, which is what matters. But, I’d still like to hear more about what…

[dead]

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

#755

Post by fsloth »

dccoolgai wrote: post #438
fsloth wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sorry you feel that way but I feel professionally strongly insulted by your statement. Specifically the implication high LLM affinity implies low professional competence. "My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM." Strong disagree. I've earned my wings. 5 years realtime rendering in world class teams. 13 years in AEC CAD develop…

Why would I need this tool if I can just say "Claude, make me a CAD drawing of XYZ"? Not trying to be rude, just generating some empathy for the OP's situation, which I think was missed: Like them, there is something you are passionate about that there is no longer really a point to. You could argue "but people will need to use my tool to generate really _good_ CAD drawings" but how much marginal value does that crea…

No need to be sorry - you raise an excellent point!

Note my critique was labeling all of us LLM enthusiasts by association ”incompetents” which I believe is an incorrect assumption.

The point raised that more people can now code I think was a correct one though. I think that’s a net benefit.

Let me be brief. There are two topics here - CAD & AI and AI & society which I think the underlying point we are discussing.

I appreciate you made a domain specific example, but like _all_ AI workflows - it does not really hold up unless one is extremely specific what the workflow is.

First of all if someone is making a CAD tool for drawings that’s really not a segment. All 3D design tools target a specific content workflow, with specific domain model. Drawings are one possible output from this domain model - just like the on-screen 3D presentation or a 3MF file you get for export.

What ever LLM competency level is it does not come with it’s own domain model. Real people want to configure the models they create. This means there needs to be a domain model you hook up to the LLM to have stable model with specific editable components.

So if you are prompting a model, you are still better off if you prompt the domain model in a real cad package.

So I don’t think CAD packages will die.

Second - I’m mainly trying to serve _my_ need (which I believe is shared by others). My need is that I want to design 3D models with minimum effort, in an enviroment that has perfect undo, perfect boolean, versioning, snaphshotting and intuitive parametricity. This package did not exist in the market before.

Will it have traction? I would expect there are lot of human users that want to create models themselves. Computer chess did not kill chess etc.

To be super specific, there is a clear wedge in the market between Tinkercad and Fusion360 for an affordable desktop offering with the above features.

I do realize my market thesis is just a hypothesis at this point. Which is fine - it’s a passion project. I hope it will be usefull for others, but if not, at least I will have the tool I want.

I’m mainly excited about the possibility of being able to ship to test my market hypothesis.

Without LLM tools I would not be able to ship.

Regarding society:

I believe we are discussing a normal destructive phaze of innovation cycle. Machine looms, weavers, luddites, new forms of labour etc.

Regarding living standards the main worry is - can ”normal” people exist above poverty?

I guess the markets will want to have consumers in the future so either there will be new jobs or some form of basic income.

It’s possible I’m wrong as well.

I have no idea if democracies will survive.

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

#756

Post by meebee »

socalgal2 wrote: post #195
meebee wrote: post #46

So excited to be getting to my backlog of apps that I've wanted but couldn't take the time to develop on my own. I'm 66 and have been in the software field in various capacities (but programming mostly as a hobby). Here's a partial list of apps I've completed in the last few months: - Media Watch app to keep a list of movies and shows my wife and I want to watch - Grocery List with some tracking of frequent purchases…

That's amazing!! Can I ask, do you pay for any server service or run your own or are these standalone apps? For me, many of your ideas, if I was to implement them, I'd want them to have a server. Habits Tracker, need to access from whatever device I'm on at that moment. Grocery List. Same thing, and multiple users so everyone in the same house can add things to one list. Etc.... This is not really LLM related but I f…

Most all of the apps sync with iCloud so it syncs across all of my devices.

However the MediaWatch app syncs between me and my wife which iCloud does not support (as a sidenote, this is one of the hallucination traps that both Claude and ChatGPT led me down -- both said it was possible, and after a few weeks and many, many hours, I learned the major constraints. I was not wanting any of my apps on the Appstore, so that blew that option). Anyway, I ended up making a small simple SQLite database using python on my Pi and use that for my sync needs. The devices only sync while at home, which was not a problem for me. Also I'm not exposing the database to external security issues.

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

#757

Post by MachineBurning »

Bewelge wrote: post #742
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

IMO it was mostly that people didn't want to rewrite (and maintain) their code for a new proprietary programming model they were unfamiliar with. People also didn't want to invest in hardware that could only run code written in CUDA.

Lots of people wanted (and Intel tried to sell, somewhat succesfully) something they could just plug-and-play and just run the parallel implementations they'd already written for supercomputes using x86. It seemed easier. Why invest all of this effort into CUDA when Intel are going to come and make your current code work just as fast as this strange CUDA stuff in a year or two.

Deep learning is quite different from the earlier uses of CUDA. Those use cases were often massive, often old, FORTRAN programs where to get things running well you had to write many separate kernels targeting each bit. And it all had to be on there to avoid expensive copies between GPU and CPU, and early CUDA was a lot less programmable than it is now, with huge performance penalties for relatively small "mistakes". Also many of your key contributers are scientists rather than profressional programmers who see programming as getting in the way of doing what they acutally want to do. They don't want to spend time completely rewriting their applications and optimizing CUDA kernels, they want to keep on with their incremental modifications to existing codebases.

Then deep learning came along and researchers were already using frameworks (Lua Torch, Caffe, Theano). The framework authors only had to support the few operations required to get Convnets working very fast on GPUs, and it was minimal effort for researchers to run. It grew a lot from there, but going from "nothing" to "most people can run their Convnet research" on GPUs was much eaiser for these frameworks than it was for any large traditional HPC scientific application.

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

#758

Post by Cpoll »

matsemann wrote: post #682
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…

You know you could just choose a framework and stick with it? The way you look down on "the whole profession" for what's basically a straw man and your own decision is a bit bizarre. Especially coupled with the fact that tech has never moved so fast as right now, being on top of the AI-game is a target changing a hundred times faster than frontend frameworks back in the days.

You don't always have the option. AngularJS, for example, EOLed in 2021.

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

#760

Post by meebee »

rubidium wrote: post #95
meebee wrote: post #46

So excited to be getting to my backlog of apps that I've wanted but couldn't take the time to develop on my own. I'm 66 and have been in the software field in various capacities (but programming mostly as a hobby). Here's a partial list of apps I've completed in the last few months: - Media Watch app to keep a list of movies and shows my wife and I want to watch - Grocery List with some tracking of frequent purchases…

And the biggest thing is that: software the way we want is much easier. No ads. No monthly cost.

Exactly! One of the reasons I vibed my own Ulysses/Bear similar app for journaling and notetaking with the essential features I need and no subscription.
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