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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

#871

Post by idopmstuff »

scottLobster wrote: post #57
idopmstuff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am currently using a Claude skill that I have been building out over the last few days that runs through my Amazon PPC campaigns and does a full audit. Suggestions of bid adjustments, new search terms and products to advertise against and adjustment to campaign structures. It goes through all of the analytics Amazon provides, which are surprisingly extensive, to find every search term where my product shows up, get…

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

> And it doesn't freak you out that you're relying on thousands of lines of code that you've never looked at?

I was a product manager for 15 years. I helped sell products to customers who paid thousands or millions of dollars for them. I never looked at the code. Customers never looked at the code. The overwhelming majority of people in the world are constantly relying on code they've never looked at. It's mostly fine.

> How do you verify the end result?

That's the better question, and the answer is a few things. First, when it makes changes to my ad accounts, I spot check them in the UI. Second, I look at ad reporting pretty often, since it's a core part of running my business. If there were suddenly some enormous spike in spend, it wouldn't take me long to catch it.

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

#872

Post by cindyllm »

PaulHoule wrote: post #721
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…

You feeling that way is the world telling you you’re doing it wrong. It is more fun to treat them as coding buddies, usually using them one at a time a time, it is fair to race them at debugging a bug or spend waiting time looking at docs or something. The real bottleneck is how much you can hold in your head simultaneously to be sure about quality as a moral subject.

[dead]

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

#873

Post by bGl2YW5j »

0x20cowboy wrote: post #812
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…

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 brea…

I very much agree! It feels like it's going to be exceptionally challenging in the coming years to convince non-technical people of the value of true SWE; by that I mean, SWE is not just coding, it's everything around that too.

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

#874

Post by LoganDark »

I love Claude Code because it lets me try out ideas a lot faster. Sometimes I have to fight with it to get the outcome I want, but other times it's like I can do something in 3 days that'd otherwise take me weeks. For example, I recently had it port a diffusion language model to Swift+MLX so that I could run it on macOS. It messed up one of the details at first, but it was able to figure out the problem and fix it. And for another example, there's a RISC-V bare-metal project where I wanted to play with low-level operating-system-esque things; Claude Code helped me with things like the QEMU invocation, setting up `defmt`, and stuff like that.

I review absolutely everything it does and do a lot of manual iteration on its work to clean up after it, but I think it's worth it, especially because it makes it so much easier to get ideas out that otherwise don't feel worth learning to make fully manually.

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

#875

Post by _zagj »

59918276 wrote: post #521

I am 80 years old and I use Claude for target selection in Iran. Sometimes it chooses schools, but men with a chest do not care. Since war is my passion, it keeps me awake at night. Sorry, this "Tell HN" is 100% a stealth advertisement and the usual bots in the comments confirm the ad.

Even though I almost posted a comment like yours earlier ("I'm an African-American lesbian with a seizure disorder, and ChatGPT is finally enabling me to finish my novel!"), I'm not sure how many of these comments are bots, since many are from quite old accounts, e.g., this one replying in a bot-like manner to a fairly obvious bot actually registered in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286976

But when you inspect Mr. "AI girlfriend's" post history, even ignoring the AI promotion, it's all superficial: short, unargumentative, inoffensive posts. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a black market for HN accounts similar to reddit accounts.

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

#876

Post by HPSimulator »

AI coding tools feel like they’re shifting the bottleneck in building.For a long time the hardest part was implementation — frameworks, infrastructure, deployment, etc.Now it feels like the harder problem is understanding systems and user behavior well enough to build something useful in the first place.

In a weird way it’s making software development feel more like engineering again rather than constant framework churn.

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

#877

Post by pembrook »

tkel wrote: post #329
pembrook wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More gatekeeping, more no true Scotsman fallacies, more bitter cope. You can absolutely take pride in having raised your own cows. But the guy down the street can also take pride in having cooked his own steak. In fact, the guy down the street might actually be a better chef than you, even though you know how to breed cattle.

You're wrong because you are making the wrong comparison. In this analogy, The guy down the street didn't cook his own steak. He told someone else to cook the steak. And then claimed that he himself cooked it. Telling himself, "wow, I'm a great chef!". When In fact, he did not cook the steak. Your greatness as a chef isn't measured by how well you manage restaurant kitchens. That would be a great manager. Your greatn…

You have it completely backward, in fact in the culinary arts your greatness as a Chef is entirely dependent on being a manager of restaurant kitchens.

You get judged on the final end product, the full dining hospitality experience, as had by influential customers on a random night (like Michelin inspectors).

The food is just one factor of that experience, and the overwhelming majority of that food on any given night is not actually prepared by the chef with their name on the door, but by his/her staff (the AI Agents in this analogy).

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

#878

Post by fragmede »

nineteen999 wrote: post #867
arcanemachiner wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Same. After 40+ years of typing code on a keyboard, my hands aren't as nimble as they were, a little pain sometimes builds up (whether it's arthritis or carpal tunnel or something, I'm not sure). Being able to have large amounts of code written with much less input is a godsend - and it's been great to learn and see what models like Claude can really do, if you can remain organized and focussed on the API's/interface…

Do you have WisprFlow or similar STT setup? It's a real Star Trek moment vocally telling my computer what to build, and then to have it build it.

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

#879

Post by slopinthebag »

tqwhite wrote: post #544
slopinthebag wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, I have "vibe coded" various tools and stuff that, while nice to have, isn't really something I need or brings a ton of value to me. Just nice-to-haves. I think people enjoy writing code for various reasons. Some people really enjoy the craft of programming and thus dislike AI-centric coding. Some people don't really enjoy programming but enjoy making money or affecting some change on the world with…

I will say that I grieve the passing of 'coding', per se. I used to love getting the flow, envisioning the data flows and object structures and cool mechanisms, refactoring to perfection. I truly miss it. But the payoff for letting that go is huge.

> I used to love getting the flow, envisioning the data flows and object structures and cool mechanisms, refactoring to perfection.

You still have to do this, LLM's are still quite bad at choosing the right data structures and dealing with their interdependent relationships.

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

#880

Post by fragmede »

cheema33 wrote: post #768
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…

I am in my 50s. I agree with what others have said about your happy place. For me, it is not APIs and fine details of operator overloading. I love solving problems. So much so that I hope I never retire. Tools like Claude Code give me wings. The need for assembly programmers diminished over the decades. A similar thing will happen here.

Or retire and realize the beach forever is not your version of retirement, and get back to it. I spent a week in the Philippines on the beach before getting bored of that and pulling out a laptop and digging into some Linux thing with Claude code, and then now I'm torn between which app to work on to launch.
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