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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

#841

Post by oxag3n »

A lot of comments from more grown up engineers who feel nostalgia like it's COM/CORBA/MFC again and they are excited how they can be productive again.

I'm really sorry (and accept down-vote storm) to disappoint you but you won't be young again and burning midnight oil may remind old days and bring excitement, but in the end it will harm your health.

Learning like crazy, late night hacking and other attributes of fresh engineers is sometimes a necessity to build a career, knowledge base, equity to comfortably start a family. Some people enjoy it and many hate, but most of us did it at some point.

I wouldn't oppose it if it wasn't harmful for the industry. What all those engineers who are excited again would think of a startup that stole all free land, building material and doubled housing? I bet all youngsters would be excited to have their own place for $20 monthly mortgage payment, telling everyone who has paid most of their salary over last 30 years how energizing is feeling you don't need to work for your house your whole life and ignoring equity crash for those folks.

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

#842

Post by [deleted] »

tqwhite wrote: post #596
999900000999 wrote: post #43

From what I've seen, and of course the models get better everyday, if you have very simple grunt work that needs to be done. Coding agents are basically magic. The moment something gets either difficult or subjective, coding agents love to add completely incorrect solutions. Try to tell Claude Code to refactor some code and see if it doesn't just delete the entire file and rewrite it. Sure that's cute, but it's absol…

I am a professional for forty five years. Your description of the experience tells me that you have not figured out how to do it correctly. I NEVER have bad experiences like that. I absolutely DO create production grade software reliably every day. Treat it as collaborator instead of as a servant. You will get much better results.

[deleted]

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

#843

Post by dsiegel2275 »

oxag3n wrote: post #841

A lot of comments from more grown up engineers who feel nostalgia like it's COM/CORBA/MFC again and they are excited how they can be productive again. I'm really sorry (and accept down-vote storm) to disappoint you but you won't be young again and burning midnight oil may remind old days and bring excitement, but in the end it will harm your health. Learning like crazy, late night hacking and other attributes of fres…

This might just be the single most worthless, non-sensical post that I've read in my twelve years of using HN.

Congratulations.

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

#844

Post by kpgalligan2 »

50. Started coding at 7. I never stopped coding. In fact, the past decade saw heavy open source contribution, public speaking, etc.

I love coding with agents. Claude Code now almost exclusively. The 20x max subscription is endless until you start writing custom multi-agent processes, and even then. Still takes quite a bit of effort to burn through.

I get so much more done, and can be productive with languages/frameworks I'm not familiar with.

To everybody worried that AI will kill jobs. There have been many points in the evolution of software dev where some new efficiency was predicted to kill off jobs. The opposite happens. Dev becomes more economical, and all of the places where dev was previously too expensive open up. Maybe this time won't work out that way, but history isn't on the side of that prediction.

An experienced software dev can get multiples of efficiency out of AI coding tools compared to non-devs, and can use them in scaled projects, where non-devs are only going to compound a mess. Some of those non-devs will learn how to be more efficient and work with scaled projects. How? They'll learn to be devs.

I'd be building several side projects for myself if I wasn't super busy with the primary work I'm doing. The AI tools take over the tedious work, and remove a lot of work that would just add mental load. Love it.

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

#845

Post by taejavu »

kzzzznot wrote: post #838
taejavu wrote: post #806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time that’s precisely how it felt though. So much so that I personally felt it wasn’t worth it relearning everything. Had shipped several projects with AngularJS at my very first dev job, and have never written a line of Angular v2+

It confuses me when people talk about frameworks as being totally different. They solve the same problems, slightly differently. It’s not a big lift to learn a new one if you are familiar with one or two already.

That might be generally true for frontend frameworks these days, because they’ve all converged around the same ideas. But in the mid 2010s, Backbone was very different from jQuery, which was very different from Knockout, Ember, ReactJS etc. certain frameworks embraced certain programming paradigms, others embraced others.

Some of my colleagues didn’t make the jump. Those that were the most into AngularJS back then are still writing Angular apps today.

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

#846

Post by switchbak »

waffletower wrote: post #750
switchbak wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

Conflicts are the least of our worries, and yes llms can handle that well. I’m taking about the things you can’t easily handle, the complexity that slowly overwhelms a codebase with no easy way out except a rewrite.

And a rewrite of a non-trivial application, even with the AI goodness, is still a big proposition and full of all kinds of risk. If you have a trivial application, you probably don’t have much protecting you from someone else vibing up a competing replacement either.

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

#847

Post by bdangubic »

skydhash wrote: post #568
bdangubic wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

writing any git command, ever, writing any documentation, ever. writing comments in issue trackers, resolving issues in issue trackers, doing pretty much anything in the terminal, ever… basically every imaginable thing which takes time away from the actual job

Why not say “using a computer”. gcl (my alias for git clone) is way faster to use than any prompting. Any use case I found for LLMs, I noticed that a good script or a DSL (as an abstraction) would be way more useful.

you often gcl?

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

#848

Post by ay »

techpression wrote: post #713
ay wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am 50, coding since ~12. Started with Apple II, during the uni times wrote my own editor in assembly for BK-0010 (a soviet computer), then 30 years in computer networking with some high performance dataplane stuff more recently; The last years somehow it felt like there’s nothing new anymore, the same 10 ideas being regurgitated with slight modifications. I tinkered with AI for the past 2 years but it was mostly a…

So you’ve tried at least a hundred ideas by now, care to share fifty of them? I’m very curious as to what they are. Opus is too slow to even complete one idea per day for me, and that’s fine, I don’t have hundreds of them :)

I dont have big ideas. Some of the more interesting ones that I ended up using but can’t share: a streaming radio for my MP3 collection (runs behind the vpn); a lightweight and self contained webrtc conference server for talking with my family; a process-level virtualization based on KVM.

Of the ones I can share:

Browser-based network tester using webrtc unreliable data https://netpoke.com - use magic code “DEMO” to see what’s it about - the source is at https://github.com/ayourtch/netpoke

A port of the SOTA speech generation model from Python to Rust:

https://github.com/ayourtch/fish-audio-experiment

A study on LLM prompting techniques:

https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/kindness

My own coding agent that i use with my locally hosted LLM for experiments:

https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/apchat

Also LLM helped with a lot of code for my packet mangling library: https://github.com/ayourtch/oside - which, among other things, includes a now battle tested SNMPv3 stack.

A true “stochastic parrot” using hash tables: https://github.com/ayourtch/hashmem

These are the ones I remember. Feel free to scout my GitHub for more. Edit: And of course it doesn’t need to be said that out of ideas I try all of them make it to github. Many end up thrown away.

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

#850

Post by TheDong »

tqwhite wrote: post #578
TheDong wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally didn't get good results until I got the $100/mo claude plan (and still often hit $180/mo from spending extra credits) It's not that the model is better than the cheaper plans, but experimenting with and revising prompts takes dozens of iterations for me, and I'm often multiple dollars in when I realize I need to restart with a better plan. It also takes time and experimentation to get a good feel for con…

I bought the $200 plan so after my extras started routinely exceeding that. Harsh. But, let me suggest that you stop thinking about planning and design as "prompts". I work with it to figure out what I want to do and have it write a spec.md. Then I work with it to figure out the implementation strategy and have it write implementation.md. Then I tell it I am going to give those docs to a new instance and ask it to wr…

plan.md / implementation.md is just a prompt.

You're not telling me to do anything different.

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