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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

#931

Post by scottLobster »

munksbeer wrote: post #738
scottLobster wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add "craftsmanship". It isn't just delivering "A" finished product, you want to deliver a "good", if not "the best", finished product. I guess if you're in an iterative MVP mindset then this matters less, but that model has always made me a little queasy. I like testing and verifying the crap out of my stuff so that when I hand it off I know it's the best effort I could possibly give. Relying on AI code denies m…

> I'll add "craftsmanship". It isn't just delivering "A" finished product, you want to deliver a "good", if not "the best", finished product. I don't raise a single PR that I feel I wouldn't have written myself. All the code written by the AI agent must be high quality and if it isn't, I tell it why and get it to write bits again, or I just do it myself. I'm having quite a hard time understanding why this is a proble…

If you take the time to read the code and understand it to that level, great. But that sort of belies the promise of vibe-coding, where all software engineers essentially become PMs to a bunch of agents.

I use AI to extract information from documentation and write me bespoke examples, but I'd never feel good relying on code it actually generated without extremely thorough testing and review.

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

#932

Post by kubanczyk »

ACCount37 wrote: post #766
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…

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.

> do you enjoy the "micro" of getting bits of code to work and fit together neatly, or the "macro" of building systems that work?

These are not toys. I want to make money. The customers want feature after feature, in a steady stream. It's bad business if the third or fourth feature takes ages. The longer stream, the better financially.

That the code "works" on any level is elementary, Watson, what must "work" is that stream of new features/pivots/redesigns/fixes flowing.

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

#933

Post by burnstek »

bartread wrote: post #702
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…

Same age, same situation. I got completely fed up of continually having to learn new incantations to do the same shit I’ve been doing for decades without enough of a value add on top. I know what I want to build, and I know how to architect and structure it, but it’s simply not a good investment of my increasingly limited time to learn the umpteenth way to type code in simply to display text, data, and images on the…

Yeah dude. Amen. In my 20's I could literally code a side project all day into the evening (sometimes overnight) and it was absolute serendipity. Coding in and of itself was a vibe. Then, life happened, more life happened, and eventually software development just became a career instead of a passion. Coding became a means to an end.

"Resentful" is a perfect way of putting it - I may just be old and grumpy now, but I think it's sad what we as a community have done to the process of web development. It's such a circle jerk. Node in my view is the worst thing that ever happened to building web applications.

Enter Claude Cowork. I've spent the past few days building an app that would have taken me weeks of time in the past. It's using a framework I've never built with, and I don't have to learn the intricacies. Shipping this to Vercel and hosting the database on Supabase is incredibly easy and it's very exciting. The only drawback so far is the unsettling fear of the unknown regarding leaking secrets and whatnot, so I'm going to have to manually audit the finished project before deploying.

And here I thought my days of "side projects" were completely over.

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

#934

Post by newsoftheday »

aklein wrote: post #723
newsoftheday wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details Where do I even begin...yes, you should care about implementation details unless you're only going to write stuff you run locally for your own amusement.

until you learn to trust the system and free mental capacity for more useful thinking. at some point compilers became better at assembly instructions than humans. seems inevitable this will happen here. caring about the details and knowing the details are two different things.

Compilers are deterministic tools. AI is not deterministic. It will tell you this if you ask it. AI then, is not a tool. It is an aide. It is not a tool like a compiler, IDE, editor, etc.

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

#935

Post by brabel »

midtake wrote: post #824
brabel wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an ageist quote. I am in my 40s and never stopped coding even as I've become the principal engineer. Claude just frees me from the mundane tasks I'd done a million times before and never wanted to do again if possible, which it now is. I can still throw a fastball without AI, but why would I when I can throw it much faster, with much less effort now, while still enjoying what I am doing? It's still coding. If yo…

Do you really think you are as eager, inquisitive, and open to learning new ideas in your 40s compared to your 20s?

Yes. Older people do not become less inquisitive and eager to learn, they just become less open to hype as they've seen whatever younger folks think is the new hot idea several times before, just in different shapes and sizes. However, with AI we're truly seeing something new that we had not seen before (the AI of the 80's, 90's and 2000's was interesting but it never managed to do anything truly generalist - it was mostly able to get good at a very narrow, specific activity, very different from today's LLMs), so I feel just as curious and eager to "learn it" as I was eager to learn, say, Functional Programming in my 20's and Neural Networks in my 30's.

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

#937

Post by qnleigh »

heddycrow wrote: post #829
qnleigh wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the analogy hits home on both sides. You go faster, but you miss the meditative experience of going slow.

My knee jerk is that there are quite a few people who can't or won't snowmobile when needed and ski when needed. That's where the analogy starts to break a bit. You can't mode switch between skis and snowmobile, but you sure can ai assist/not pretty quickly. One more quick one - imagine skiers showing up to the snowmobile club hating on snowmobiles and vice versa. I, for one, have still not properly got a grip on how…

Actually I think it still kinda works: - You could ski easy routes but snowmobile harder ones (not that anyone actually does this).

- Snowmobiles are loud and chew up the snow, analogous to AI flooding a repo with low-effort PRs?

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

#938

Post by antonvs »

zpeti wrote: post #385
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…

> 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. LOL. Maybe you are referring to OpenAI and Anthropic? Yes they have codex and opus. But about 1-2 months behind them is Grok, Gemini, and then 2-3 months behind them are all the other mod…

I agree with your general point, but there's an important qualifier:

> when you can probably use models for free that are about 2 months behind the best models.

You can use them for free, but training of near-SOTA foundation models is currently not an open-source process, and it's funded almost exclusively by large and/or wealthy corporations. That's a weak point at the moment from the perspective of openness.

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

#939

Post by theshrike79 »

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…

I want to "hack" at a different level.

What I want to do is create bespoke components that I can use to create a larger solution to solve a problem I have.

What I don't want to do is spend 45 minutes wrangling JSON to a struct so that I can get the damn component working =)

A quick example: I wanted a component that could see if I have new replies on HN using the Algol API. ~10 minutes of wall clock time with Claude, maybe a minute of my time. Just reading through the API spec is 15 minutes. Not my idea of fun.

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

#940

Post by webcon »

48, and you guys at 50 and stuff make me feel old really. I never stopped coding, never stopped learning. I've been right at forefront of all of this stuff Man, 50 is not that old, come on. I went from CGI back in the day to PHP and then JavaScript, jQuery, and then all of your different, not only all of your different frameworks to that come along with JavaScript again. JAVA back in the day actually as well. I spend up to 200 hours a month now in Claude Code. And I'm absolutely killing it. I've mainly been an AWS infrastructure guy for the last 10 years, but I suppose Claude Code has made me extend myself more. It has ignited, reignited a passion, but seriously, like I can't believe that there are 50 year old people and 60 year old people here that stopped at PHP, etc. or ASP. Wow, that's ancient. That's crazy. I'm happy I never went near ASP or any Microsoft stuff.
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