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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

#891

Post by lovelearning »

overgard wrote: post #641
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…

Coding is one of the least gate kept things in history. Literally the only obstacle is "do I want to put in the time to learn it". All Claude is doing is remixing all the free stuff that was already a google search away.

I suggest trying to find out how the things you're taking for granted - time, literacy, books - remain barriers for many people in many parts of the world.

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

#892

Post by _zagj »

tqwhite wrote: post #566
palmotea wrote: post #172

> I’m ready to retire. ... Fast forward decades and Claude Code is giving me that same energy and drive. I love it. It feels like it did back then. I’m chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep. Of course you love it, you don't have to worry about retirement anymore. Give me your 401k, then tell you feel about Claude Code.

Oh, you are screwed. I feel badly about that. More about the environmental disaster and student loan screw job that AI than AI. I am retired and am nearly equaling my salary with side jobs and only working a few hours a day. I don't see any reason you can't do that so stop whining and start learning.

> start learning

What is there to learn about all of this? The way it's presented makes it come across as an "end of history" technology with a low skill floor and a skill ceiling that comes down more with each iteration.

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

#894

Post by AlexeyBelov »

Smart_Medved wrote: post #633

The framework fatigue angle in this thread is real. I spent years maintaining legacy JS and CSS codebases, watching the ecosystem reinvent the same dropdown menu in Backbone, then Angular, then React, then Vue. What I didn't expect is that all that time understanding the actual DOM, specificity rules, and browser quirks would become useful again — when Claude goes sideways on an old codebase, the underlying mental mo…

LLM-ass comment.

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

#895

Post by _zagj »

nickjohnsteblay wrote: post #510

I remember learning and writing Cobol with with the Microsoft Cobol compiler on my Tandy as I was training at the local VoTech and working as a night operator on an IBM mainframe flipping tapes. I can categorically say that writing code with Antigravity is worlds different than those early days. It is inspiring, but for me its more about understanding the models and how they do their magic. At 67 I'm refreshing my ca…

> At 67 I'm refreshing my calculus, linear algebra, and statistics

Does anyone else find this messaging from Anthropic's marketing department silly? AI ultimately devalues human knowledge by commoditizing it, which ought to make one less motivated to go out of their way to acquire it, not more. Yet if these comments are to be believed, it's the exact opposite, with (as of now) 72 instances of the word "learning" in this thread. This, as we barrel headlong towards a world where having a strong back and the ability to turn a wrench or swing a hammer is going to be more remunerative than being able to solve differential equations or follow some arXiv preprint about frontier models. (At least until robotics is solved.)

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

#896

Post by sghiassy »

tartoran wrote: post #584
sghiassy wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been coding since 13, now 44 working in FAANG. Love AI explaining code Dislike AI for writing code (that was my fun part)

You dont like the quality of the generated code or the process of not typing it out yourself?

I just like writing code. It was fun

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

#897

Post by xigoi »

satvikpendem wrote: post #677
xigoi wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities. Programming was already “democratized” in the sense that anyone could learn to program for free, using only open-source software. Making everyone reliant on a few evil megacorporations is the opposite of democratization.

You know what they mean by that term, it's about building things without needing to put in the learning effort. I have bosses building small POCs via vibe coding, something they would not have done via learning to code and typing it manually. It's the same sort of argument artists use when it comes to AI generated media, there obviously is a qualitative difference in the people now able to generate whatever they want…

> I have bosses building small POCs via vibe coding

They are not building anything; they are paying Anthropic to do it.

> Lastly, many, many open weight models exist.

Good luck running them when the megacorporations have bought out all hardware.

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

#898

Post by rstuart4133 »

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…

I'm in the hard disagree camp. I'm heading towards late 60s now, and have been writing software for all of my working life.

I am wondering how your conclusions are so different from mine. One is you only write "in the small [0]". LLMs are at least as good as a human at turning out "web grade" software in the small. Claude CLI is as good an example of this sort of software as anything. Every week or two I hit some small bug. This type of software doesn't need a "principal software engineer".

The second is you never used an LLM to write software in the large. LLMs are amazing things, far far better than humans at reading and untangling code. You can give some obfuscated javascript and they regurgitate commented code with self explanatory variable and function names in a minute or two. Give them a task and they will happily spit out 1000s of lines of code in 10 minutes or so which is amazing.

Then you look closer, and it's spaghetti. The LLM has no trouble understanding the spaghetti of course, and if you are happy to trust your tests and let the LLM maintain the thing from then on, it's a workable approach.

Until, that is, it gets large enough for a few compile loops to exceed the LLM's context window, then it turns to crap. At that point you have to decompose it into modules it can handle. Turns out decomposition is something current LLMs (and junior devs) are absolutely hopeless at. But it's what a principal software engineer is paid to do.

The spaghetti code is the symptom of that same deficiency. If they decide they need code to do X while working on concept Y, they will drop the code for X right beside the code for Y, borrowing state from Y as needed. The result is a highly interconnected ball of mud. Which the LLM will understand perfectly until it falls off the context window cliff, then all hope is lost.

While LLM ability to implement a complex request as simple isolated parts remains, a principal engineer's job is safe. In fact given LLMs are accelerating things, my guess is the demand will only grow. But I suspect the LLM developers are working hard at solving this limitation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_in_the_large_and_p...

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

#899

Post by latexr »

crazygringo wrote: post #636
latexr wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping. This parroted argument is getting really tired. It signals either astroturfing or someone who just accepts what they are sold without thinking. LLMs aren’t “democratising” anything. There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at an…

> LLMs aren’t “democratising” anything. They absolutely are. Anytime new knowledge or skills become widely available to everyone, that's a term used for it. > There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal. None of that has anything to d…

Those things were already available. That’s the point. What do you think LLMs are trained on?

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

#900

Post by latexr »

cade wrote: post #852
latexr wrote: post #401

Earlier 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…

> 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…

You misunderstood. Spamming and bad submissions has nothing to do with the original comment.
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