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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

#781

Post by spyder »

card_zero wrote: post #198
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…

So you put these all in the same category: gaining knowledge, gaining abilities, and just obtaining things. I gatekeep my bike, I keep it behind a gate. If you break the gate open and democratize my bike, you're an idiot.

Using physical analogs for virtual things is not the best choice, for example: Would you give a copy of your bike, or copy of your food to your poor neighbor kid if you could copy it as easily and as cheaply as digital products?

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

#782

Post by arcanemachiner »

ACCount37 wrote: post #766
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…

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 do love the former, but it's been nice to take a break from that and work at a higher level of abstraction.

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

#783

Post by naomi_kynes »

Something that shifted for me: tools like Claude Code made it viable to actually run multiple agents on real long-running workflows, not just one-off scripts.

Which immediately surfaces the next problem: how do those agents communicate back to you while running?

Most setups default to tailing a log file, or a Slack/Telegram bot bolted on as an afterthought. Works for one agent. Falls apart when you have five running overnight and one hits an edge case at 2am that needs a human call.

The agent-to-human communication layer is still surprisingly ad-hoc. You can generate more ideas and actually implement them now — but the infrastructure for keeping humans in the loop as agents execute is still duct tape. Feels like the next interesting problem after the coding unlock.

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

#785

Post by malthaus »

samiv wrote: post #51

As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull! My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" w…

very hard to feel sorry of you when countless professions experienced the same in the past - only that they were poor / working class and not overpaid software engineers at FAANG.

also very egocentric & pessimist way to look at things. humankind is much better off when anyone can produce software and skilled experts will always be needed, just maybe with a slightly different skillset.

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

#786

Post by [deleted] »

tavavex wrote: post #761

This 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…

[deleted]

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

#788

Post by heresie-dabord »

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…

> as if solving business problems just became too boring

And yet, having customers and listening to them is the whole point.

Anything that re-ignites a person's zest for thinking and creating is a net gain.

That said, it is paradoxical that the catalyst in this case is a technology that replaces thinking.

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

#789

Post by Espressosaurus »

post-it wrote: post #704
rapnie wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take that to its extreme. Suppose there was a technology that you do not own that would make everyone's job redundant. Everyone out of a job. There is no need for education, for skills to be mastered, for expertise. Would it still be insane to complain?

A world where there is no need for work? Oh no, my steak is too juicy and my lobster is too buttery.

A world where there is no need for workers--not at all the same thing.

You may not end up with a seat at the table.

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

#790

Post by codazoda »

crazygringo wrote: post #623
codazoda wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What really matters is how well does the code performs 1 month after it goes live, 6 months, 5 years. After 40 years in this industry—I started at 10 and hit 50 this year—I’ve developed a low tolerance for architectural decay. Last night, I used Claude to spin up a website editor. My baseline for this project was a minimal JavaScript UI I’ve been running that clocks in at a lean 2.7KB ( https://ponder.joeldare.com…

I don't understand. You specifically: > neglected to include my usual "zero-framework" constraint in the prompt And then your complaint is that it included a bunch of dependencies? AI's do what you tell them. I don't understand how you conclude: > If a simple editor requires 89 third-party packages to exist It obviously doesn't. Why even bother complaining about an AI's default choices when it's so trivial to change…

My main point is that we need to expertly drive these tools. I forgot the trivial instruction and ended up with something that more closely resembles modern software instead of what I personally value. AI still requires our expertise to guide it. I'm not sure if that will be the case in a year, but it is today.
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