Shuffling through my 70's here. It's still mind blowing to be able to build stuff that would take orders of magnitude more time and effort otherwise but today's AI is still an idiot savant though the ratio of savant to idiot continues to improve. Since good prompting/specing is the key to success, the most disappointing aspect of today's AI is its inability to be a better brainstorming design partner where the limitation is how utterly pedestrian the AI's contributions typically are.
Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
771–780 of 1001 posts
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#772This thread doesn't resonate with me whatsoever. It's not that I don't get where these people are coming from. LLMs have allowed people to churn out projects (especially small, personal projects) faster than ever, skipping what a lot of people view as the boring or tedious parts. But these discussions feel like a kid playing with toys, while a nuclear explosion is going off in the background. Until I realized that no…
You’re right that LLMs are going to push out jobs at the low end of the market. “Code monkey” type jobs are going to be displaced the same way computers displaced a lot of basic clerical and computational jobs.
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be entry level jobs, they will just have a different set of qualifications and expectations. Just like it’s hard to get a job doing arithmetic today without some other knowledge of the application, future jobs in computing are going to require people to understand things outside of the realm of programming alone. They are going to need to know more about the application of the code they write. It’ll be bad for developers who “just close Jira tickets” but problem solvers in a specific field will be okay.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#773yup, I have to cutback now, started to get palpitations from too many all nighters.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#774Earlier 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…
The divide seems to come down to: do you enjoy the "micro" of getting bits of code to work and fit together neatly, or the "macro" of building systems that work? If it's the former, you hate AI agents. If it's the latter, you love AI agents.
I enjoy both. There’s still plenty of micro to do even in web dev if you have high standards. Read Claude’s output and you’ll find issues. Code organization, style, edge cases, etc.
But the important thing is getting solutions to users. Claude makes that easier.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#775Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 superco…
Thanks!
It seems funny though: The advantages of GPGPU are so obvious and unambiguous compared to AI. But then again, with every new technology you probably also had management pushing to use technology_a for .
Like in a few decades when the way we work with AI has matured and become completely normal it might be hard to imagine why people nowadays questioned its use. But they won't know about the million stupid uses of AI we're confronted with every day :)
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#776Going over the 50 bump, and I see myself selling toasts, as being an IC/Architect is no longer valued enough, everyone is expected to be a PM for their agents minions.
The teams get reduced, as now one can do effectively more with less, and in South Europe, in IT there is hardly a place to get a job above 50 years old, unless one goes consulting as the company owner, and even then the market cannot hold everyone.
As kid I have seen this happening, as factory automation replaced jobs in complete villages, the jobs that weren't offshored into Asia or Eastern Europe for clothing and shoes, got replaced with robots.
The few lucky ones were the ones pressing the buttons and unloading trucks.
Likewise a few ones will be lucky AI magicians, some will press buttons, and the large majority better get newer skills beyond computing.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#777Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
The reason, and the only reason, that leadership/owners want to get rid of devs is money.
If you’re wondering who the villain is, it’s capitalism. It’s always capitalism.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#778You are 60 and most likely retired. It’s fun and “ignited a passion” in you because are NOT doing this for a living.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#779Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It is a huge stretch to call transitioning from angularjs to angular learning a new framework.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#780Earlier 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…
The divide seems to come down to: do you enjoy the "micro" of getting bits of code to work and fit together neatly, or the "macro" of building systems that work? If it's the former, you hate AI agents. If it's the latter, you love AI agents.
That is an amazing summary. It might not seem that amazing, but I feel like I've read pages about this, but nothing has expressed as elegantly and succinctly.