Do you think it's doing the same thing for younger generations? How are they inspired by tech? I'm an old man too, but old man stories don't really matter. What matters is what we leave behind, how well understood it will be by who comes after.
Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
851–860 of 1001 posts
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#852Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dismissing someone with a different opinion as astroturfing is not productive. There are loads of high performance open source LLMs on the market that compete with the big 3. I have not seen this level of community engagement and collaboration since the open-source boom 20 years ago.
If I believed it was a different opinion I wouldn’t even have written the first paragraph, or maybe the whole reply. The issue arises from it not being that person’s opinion but a talking point . People didn’t all individually arrive at this “democratisation” argument by themselves, they were sold what to say by the big players with vested interest in succeeding. I’m very much for discussing thoughts one has come up…
> It signals either astroturfing or someone who just accepts what they are sold without thinking.
> Nor this level of spam and bad submissions.
Your comments seem pretty aggressive for what you’re replying to. Maybe take a beat to assess your biases? I thought the main comment was pretty fair and sensible, yet somehow you landed on calling them a spammer/bad submitter/astroturfer/non-thinker. Maybe they are? I could be wrong, but that's quite a strong reaction for what they asserted at face value. Not really trying to police anything here, I just thought the initial comment had merit and this devolved quite quickly.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#853Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I believed it was a different opinion I wouldn’t even have written the first paragraph, or maybe the whole reply. The issue arises from it not being that person’s opinion but a talking point . People didn’t all individually arrive at this “democratisation” argument by themselves, they were sold what to say by the big players with vested interest in succeeding. I’m very much for discussing thoughts one has come up…
You're overthinking it. Programming is a tricky skill and takes a long time to get good at. Lots of people aren't good at it. AI helps them program anyway, and allows them to sometimes produce useful programs. That's it. It's not a talking point. It's just the reality of what the technology enables, and it's a simple enough observation that millions of people can independently arrive at that conclusion, and some of t…
> Programming is a tricky skill and takes a long time to get good at. Lots of people aren't good at it.
This is a good thing. It's a filter for the careless, lazy, and incompetent. LLMs are to programming what a microwave is to food. I'm not a chef because I can nuke a hot pocket. "Vibe coders" (not AI-assisted coding) are the programming equivalent of the people on Kitchen Nightmares. Go figure, it's a community rife with narcissism, too.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#854Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember arriving at Apple Park to meet a friend/coworker a few years before I retired. Sitting there enjoying the food by one of the huge, curved glass walls, he was distractedly focused on one of the gardeners that Apple employs. This man was out in the center part of Apple Park trimming a plant or something similar. It was clear that my friend was looking on somewhat enviously and when I asked, he admitted as mu…
I fear this will be horribly self-indulgent, but I'll share it anyway: I'd always been a computer person, but it wasn't until I'd reached my thirties that I realized I could make a career out of that interest. The joy of programming still gets me out of bed in the morning and sends me skipping happily to my desk in my home office. What I do wouldn't impress anybody at a technical level. I'm not an innovator. The worl…
I have to call you out a bit on the: "I don't have nearly the chops or talent you and your peers have".
Trust me, when I started at Apple in 1995 I was way in over my head. Or so I thought.
After a couple months on the job I asked a coworker down the hall (who seemed particularly chill—Hi, Brian!), "How long until I feel like I know what I'm doing?"
"6 months."
I liked the unambiguity of his answer even if it seemed kind of off the cuff.
He was more or less right. It was somewhere about 6 months that I more or less knew what I was headed in each morning to work to accomplish. And I felt like I, with a little help perhaps, could even contribute in a small way.
Still, I was always surrounded by some of the most amazing programmers I had ever met. One guy (hi, Cam!) could walk through a "backtrace" in machine code, look at the registers, addresses and data on the stack, and then declare, "You're accessing memory after you've already released it. Do you know what could be 24 bytes in size?"
And who was I? Some kid from Kansas with no degree in software engineering.
It may have in fact taken closer to two decades before I was able to shake off the imposter syndrome. At some point I had to admit that I wasn't so dense to have not learned anything in my 20+ years of coding. I was still not on Cameron's level, never will be, but I might have made up for that shortcoming by leaning into being prolific, coding two or three prototypes quickly in order to finally determine The Best Path.
Just from your comment I would be willing to bet your enthusiasm alone would make you a valuable asset.
That is kind of how it worked: there were some people that could hold multiple threads in their head and rattle off a semaphore strategy that was performant, skirt a deadlock.
There was the "math guy". We all knew who they were and would cycle by their office when we were wrestling with matrix inversions and the order of transforms.
And there were people that you could rely upon to take perhaps the most dreaded task of a project and work diligently at it. Trust me, no one split hairs over whether that individual could disassemble PPC code just by looking at it. The team appreciated the "tanks" that could do some of the drudge-work. (I was from time to time that person.)
I don't need to belabor a point, you get it, it took all types. It took me some time to see that though, and longer still to see where I fit in as well.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#855Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'd say that the divide seems to come down to whether you want to be a manager or a hacker. Skimming the posts in this submission, many of the most enamored with LLMs seem to be project managers, people managers, principal+ engineers who don't code much anymore, and other not hands-on people who are less concerned with quality or technical elegance than getting some kind of result. Bear in mind also that the inputs t…
I think it's pretty obvious what category you see yourself in.
I don't think you're a hacker. I think you enjoy writing code (good for you). Some of us just enjoy making the computer execute our ideas - like a digital magician. I've also gotten very good at the code writing and debugging part. I've even enjoyed it for long periods of time but there's times where I can't execute my ideas because they're bigger than what I can reasonably do by myself. Then my job becomes pitching, hiring, and managing humans. Now I write code to write code and no project seems too big.
But I'm looking forward to collapsing the many layers of abstraction we've created to move bits and control devices. It was always about what we could do with the computers for me.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#856I'm also in the about-to-retire camp, and I feel the same way. I wake up wanting to code again. It's like having superpowers and a team of helpers that won't get bored or give you lip. As I see it, there are two types of developers: those who want to build solutions and those who love writing code. I love building things. So I can do it without sweating every bug or architecture challenge. If you want Claude to craft great code, that's going to be a problem, for now at least
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#857I’m 47 and have been working for over 20 years also and programming for many many more. I see AI used a lot in industry amongst my peers and friends. Personally though I don’t use it. I like the thinking and planning phase and I like the typing phase.
I’m a programmer for life. My hobbies revolve around programming and hardware as well (demos for retro hardware: XTs up to Pentium, Sega Master System, custom built hardware). I stay up late working on this stuff and I still have the drive to do it with two young kids who take up a lot of my time.
I have zero interest in an AI doing any of it for me. I don’t think I’ll be replaced by an AI but I might be forced to use one by an employer at which point I think I’ll retire and just work on my hobby projects!
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#85850 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…
Turning 50 this year. Coding has never _stopped_ being a passion for me, but my increasingly limited time becomes an issue. And Claude code (and cursor) saves me So. Much. Time. I only have 10-20 active years ahead of me, so this is really, really important. Young ppl don’t get it.
Same same. When I was a young, single nerd I would happily spend a weekend coding in my cave.
Now I do fun code on a laptop on the sofa with my family. I’m only typing in tiny breaks between socializing and I’m still getting lots of fun stuff done.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#859From 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.
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Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#860Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
A lot. I often study software I use (mostly OSS) to find how a feature is implemented.
If something is cumbersome and I find myself needing it often (or I think I will need it), I write an alias, a script, an emacs function, etc,... That's the magic of reducing lot of steps to a single button press (or a short command).