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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

#811

Post by Capricorn2481 »

tqwhite wrote: post #540
scottLobster wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it doesn't freak you out that you're relying on thousands of lines of code that you've never looked at? How do you verify the end result? I wouldn't trust thousands of lines of code from one of my co-workers without testing

Why wouldn't you test? That sounds like a bad thing. Me? I use AI to write tests just as I use it to write everything else. I pay a lot of attention to what's being done including code quality but I am no more insecure about trusting those thousands of tested lines than I am about trusting the byte code generated from the 'strings of code'. We have just moved up another level of abstraction, as we have done many time…

So people don't look at the code, or the tests.

So they don't know if it has the right behavior to begin with, or even if the tests are testing the right behavior.

This is what people are talking about. This is why nobody responsible wants to uberscale a serious app this way. It's ridiculous to see so much hype in this thread, people claiming they've built entire businesses without looking at any code. Keep your business away from me, then.

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

#812

Post by 0x20cowboy »

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…

Maybe have a play with them a bit more. LLMs are quite good at coding, but terrible at software engineering. You hear people talk about “guiding them” which is what I think they are getting at. You still need to know what you are doing or you’ll just drive off a cliff eventually.

At the moment I am trying to fix a vibe coded application and while each individual function is ok, the overall application is a dog’s breakfast of spaghetti which is causing many problems.

If you derive all your pleasure from actually typing the code then you’re probably toast, but if you like building whole systems (that run on production infrastructure) there is still heaps of work to do.

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

#813

Post by giancarlostoro »

I feel the same way but I am in my 30s. In my case I have had projects for years sitting in my brain, cooking up how I want them built. Well, Claude is amazing for brain dumping to. I have finally broken ground on my dream projects and they are better than I could have ever imagined. I get to instruct Claude to use the exact tools I wanted.

Hoping to start blogging about some of these projects in the future.

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

#814

Post by qnleigh »

matsemann wrote: post #689
pmarreck wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLM watch-six-agents-writing-and-you-proofreading gave me so much existential crisis and depression this is extremely bizarre because I’m 53, been coding since 12, and it has had literally the exact opposite effect on me, I find it tremendously exciting, like riding a snowmobile instead of manually cross-country skiing but I do think that if you’re not ready to work like this, you may need to consider a career pivo…

Your analogy is a bit weird to me. Snowmobile is exciting for a short while, but I'm much more fond of cross country skiing. The connection with nature, the silence. Or maybe your analogy is correct. AI is a bit as if everyone in the mountains drove around in a snowmobile, noisy and a smell of gasoline.

I think the analogy hits home on both sides. You go faster, but you miss the meditative experience of going slow.

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

#815

Post by ACS_Solver »

twodave wrote: post #531
ACS_Solver wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think this is reasonable. I have been consistently skeptical of LLM coding but the latest batch of models seems to have crossed some threshold. Just like everyone, I've been reading lots of news about LLMs. A week ago I decided to give Claude a serious try - use it as the main tool for my current work, with a thought out context file, planning etc. The results are impressive, it took about four hours to do a n…

> I have been consistently skeptical of LLM coding but the latest batch of models seems to have crossed some threshold. It’s refreshing to hear I’m not the only one who feels this way. I went from using almost none of my copilot quota to burning through half of it in 3 days after switching to sonnet 4.6. I’m about to have to start lobbying for more tokens or buy my own subscription because it’s just that much more us…

Yes, it's Sonnet 4.6 for me as well as the most impressive inflection point. I guess I find Anthropic's models to be the best, even before I found Sonnet 3.7 to be the only model that produced reasonable results, but now Sonnet 4.6 is genuinely useful. It seems to have resolved Claude's tendency to "fix" test failures by changing tests to expect the current output, it does a good job planning features, and I've been impressed by this model also telling me not to do things - like it would say, we can save 50 lines of code in this module but the resulting code would be much harder to read so it's better not to. Previous models in my experience all suffered from constantly wanting to make more changes, and more, and more.

I'm still not ready to sing praises about how awesome LLMs are, but after two years of incremental improvements since the first ChatGPT release, I feel these late-2025 models are the first substantial qualitative improvement.

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

#816

Post by cortesoft »

matsemann wrote: post #689
pmarreck wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLM watch-six-agents-writing-and-you-proofreading gave me so much existential crisis and depression this is extremely bizarre because I’m 53, been coding since 12, and it has had literally the exact opposite effect on me, I find it tremendously exciting, like riding a snowmobile instead of manually cross-country skiing but I do think that if you’re not ready to work like this, you may need to consider a career pivo…

Your analogy is a bit weird to me. Snowmobile is exciting for a short while, but I'm much more fond of cross country skiing. The connection with nature, the silence. Or maybe your analogy is correct. AI is a bit as if everyone in the mountains drove around in a snowmobile, noisy and a smell of gasoline.

The analogy makes sense. Some people love riding snowmobiles, some people love cross country skiing, and some people love both. It makes sense that some of the people who love snowmobiling think cross country skiing is boring and tedious, and some people who love cross country skiing think snow mobiles are loud and obnoxious.

I don't think people are confused why there are the different types of people who like different winter sports, but people seem shocked that opinions differ on the enjoyment of using an LLM

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

#817

Post by alsetmusic »

Bewelge wrote: post #775
MachineBurning wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The advantages of GPGPU are so obvious and unambiguous

I remember being a bit surprised when I started reading about GPUs being tasked with processes that weren't what we'd previously understood to be their role (way before I heard of CUDA). For some reason that I don't recall, I was thinking about that moment in tech just the other day.

It wasn't always obvious that the earth rotated around the sun. Or that using a mouse would be a standard for computing. Knowledge is built. We're pretty lucky to stand atop the giants who came before us.

I didn't know about CUDA until however many years ago. Definitely didn't know how early it began. Definitely didn't know there was pushback when it was introduced. Interesting stuff.

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

#818

Post by Frost1x »

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…

Not nearly your age but I agree with your sentiments entirely. I mainly focused on using computing not for business purposes but scientific purposes and how we can forward science using compute and technology and I’ve felt much the same way for some time. The new layers and layers of abstraction added little in the way of productivity to getting to the root problems I wanted to and there have always only been so many hours in the day and dollars in the sponsoring agency’s purse to pursue new innovative work.

Now a lot can be cast off to LLMs to focus on the problem space and the innovative computing use around them. It’s been exciting to not worry about arbitrary idiosyncrasies and machete through jungles of technical minutia to get to the clearing. I still have to deal with them but less of them. And I don’t have to commit nearly as much in the technical space to memory to address problems, I can often focus on higher level architectural decisions or new approaches to problems. It’s been quite enjoyable as well.

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

#819

Post by globnomulous »

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…

Thanks, I needed this.

There doesn't seem to be a place for me in the future of software/tech: I like sitting quietly, alone, solving problems, writing code, and reading it. I like in code much of what I like in art: the fruits of human labor and the results of human ingenuity. Being excited about AI/LLMs makes no sense to people like me. If you're excited because LLMs let you make something, great, good for you. Have fun.

If the tools become a mandatory part of the job, I'll change careers. Spending my days talking to chipper robots and describing what I want rather than making it myself sounds unbearable.

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

#820

Post by alsetmusic »

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 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.

I'm only in my forties. I've been nostalgic for the days when I'd stay up all night exploring new frontiers (for me) in tech for a number of years. I could not disagree more with your take on this.

Someone said they value their time before death and you're pretty dismissive. Priorities change. Values change. Conditions change.

> 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.

I mean, isn't that what people in this thread have been saying about frameworks? How many hours have been lost relearning how to solve a problem that has already been solved? It's like when I tried to fix a date-time issue on Windows as a Mac / Linux user. I knew NTP was the answer but I had to search the web to find out where to turn it on. Stuff like that is pretty frustrating and I didn't even have to do it every five to ten years.

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