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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

#881

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #822
ACCount37 wrote: post #766

Earlier 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…

“Technical excellence” has never been about whether you are using a for loop or while loop. It’s architecture, whether you are solving the right problem, scalability, etc

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

#882

Post by jlas »

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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_...

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

#883

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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.

Yes if I actually did web development I’m sure I could still be using JQuery.

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

#884

Post by fragmede »

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 could, but then you'd still be stuck doing PHP templates with embedded hand written JavaScript and that madness, or maybe Django or RoR. Or cgi-bin and Perl. Technology evolves as an industry and the only guarantee is that you have to keep learning new things to stay relevant in this industry.

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

#885

Post by jcelerier »

silh wrote: post #676
jcelerier wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really don't know how to fill the minutes that AI takes to write code. Think of it like being a project manager in a team. There's a lot you can do to help the project moving forward without touching one line of code

I would’ve become a project manager if I enjoyed that, right?

no one's preventing you to write the code yourself

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

#886

Post by gsf_emergency_7 »

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.

Imagine 2 or more Taoist priests raised in different cultures each trying to get the others riled up while cooperating to solve a deep technical problem. How do they keep this game fun _and_ productive? Disregarding for the moment the tradeoffs---eg patience-impatience, learn-earn, purpose-technik &c--- that should replace morality-quality questions.

(Iirc there was a (nihilist) electric shock Zen meditation game that uses HRV, but the above framing may take that to another (positivist) level. Getting LLMs in the loop is one other kind of level)

Some call this the Glass-bead-game

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

#887

Post by chamomeal »

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…

I’m kinda in both camps. I can make multiple times more proof-of-concepts than ever before, which is awesome. Especially for internal work tools. But then I rely on it too much, and I don’t really know how the thing works, and it makes it hard to get excited about adding to it

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

#888

Post by senordevnyc »

_zagj wrote: post #299
WillPostForFood wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is more like: You gatekeep your bike, you keep it behind a gate, you don't let anyone else ride it. Your neighbor got a nicer bike for Christmas, rode it by your house and now you are sad because you aren't the special kid with the bike any more, you are just regular kid like your neighbor.

Yeah, if you studied and mastered all of the various disciplines required for fabricating a bicycle, and then fabricated your own by hand and offered to do likewise for others, sometimes in exchange for compensation, sometimes for free (provided others could use the bike), only for some machine that mass produces bikes to (informal) spec that was built by studying all of the designs you used for the bikes you made to…

Yeah, and that machine that replaces you was built by engineers.

We can dish it out, but we can’t take it.

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

#889

Post by xlos21 »

This really resonates. I've been building a side project recently using Claude, and it made me feel like those early days when you'd discover something new and just couldn't stop. The gap between "I have an idea" and "it's live" has never been shorter. Enjoy the ride.

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

#890

Post by lovelearning »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #651
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…

> " removal of gatekeeping " Gates were put in place for lawyers, doctors, and engineers (real ones, not software "engineers") because the cost of their negligence and malpractice was ruined lives and death. Gatekeeping has value. Software quality, reliability, and security was already lousy before the advent of LLMs, making it increasingly clear that the gate needed to be kept. Gripes about "gatekeeping" are a dogwh…

The argument for lawyers, doctors and "real" engineers seems like a strawman here.

This discussion is specifically about lowering the barriers of programming and creating using software.

I haven't said anything at all about other professions nor do I think my arguments for democratizing software creation apply to law, medicine, or "real" engineering.

There's also a false equivalence in the software part of your comment. It equates lowering of barriers for recreational/hobby coding with software engineering for serious purposes.

Since you dismiss me as a dogwhistle, I hope my terming your argument as elitist, strawmanish, and full of false equivalences is only seen as fair.

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