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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

#941

Post by theshrike79 »

jitbit wrote: post #901
corysama wrote: post #858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly brother, mind if I hug you. I can play with my 7yo, or help the 11yo with his homework, or go for a run!! - while LLM is cooking a well-spec'ed agentic task. This sounds embarrassing, but LLMs have made our lives healthier, unbelievable. PS. Not to mention all the "boring" sh*t that I used to postpone/stretch indefinitely, like writng docs or polishing copy for my website... No more stress, no procrastination…

I've had ideas while walking with the dogs, whipped out Claude on my phone, switched to my "research" -repo (shoutout @simonw) and told it to test if the idea is viable

Phone goes back in my pocket and I'll have something to read when I get back home. Literal game changer.

Before those ideas just flowed through my brain and either out the other ear or got filed into "don't have time anyway shrug" and never completed or even tried.

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

#942

Post by theshrike79 »

leptons wrote: post #804
aklein wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLMs lie constantly. There should be no trust in that system. And no I don't think they will "get better".

How do they "lie constantly"? We are specifically talking about code here, not LLMs writing legal documents.

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

#943

Post by theshrike79 »

scottLobster wrote: post #66
TimFogarty wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. I have been thinking about how the vastly different reactions people seem to have to agentic coding could be influenced by what they value about coding. To me it seems like there are three joys in coding: 1. Creating something 2. Solving puzzles 3. Learning new things If you are primarily motivated by seeing a finished product of some sort, then I think agentic coding is transcendent. You can get…

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…

You can use (and create) tools to codify what you think of as "quality".

There's the new frontier for delivering good or the best products. Less relying on the feels of an experienced programmer and more configuring and creating deterministic tools to define quality.

Unless you get actual joy and enjoyment from writing 42 unit tests for a CRUD API with slight variations for each test. Then go ahead =)

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

#944

Post by theshrike79 »

meebee wrote: post #756
socalgal2 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's amazing!! Can I ask, do you pay for any server service or run your own or are these standalone apps? For me, many of your ideas, if I was to implement them, I'd want them to have a server. Habits Tracker, need to access from whatever device I'm on at that moment. Grocery List. Same thing, and multiple users so everyone in the same house can add things to one list. Etc.... This is not really LLM related but I f…

Most all of the apps sync with iCloud so it syncs across all of my devices. However the MediaWatch app syncs between me and my wife which iCloud does not support (as a sidenote, this is one of the hallucination traps that both Claude and ChatGPT led me down -- both said it was possible, and after a few weeks and many, many hours, I learned the major constraints. I was not wanting any of my apps on the Appstore, so th…

Protip: you can install Tailscale on both phones and the Pi and then the phones can connect to the database from anywhere using the Pi's Tailscale IP.

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

#945

Post by oblio »

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?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...

Fluid intelligence peaks early (20s) but crystallized intelligence peaks much later (50s-60s), and it's not like you can't crystallize a desire to continue to learn, even if you're potentially less creative from a raw intelligence perspective.

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

#947

Post by hkonte »

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…

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

#948

Post by hkonte »

crazygringo wrote: post #623
codazoda wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What really matters is how well does the code performs 1 month after it goes live, 6 months, 5 years. After 40 years in this industry—I started at 10 and hit 50 this year—I’ve developed a low tolerance for architectural decay. Last night, I used Claude to spin up a website editor. My baseline for this project was a minimal JavaScript UI I’ve been running that clocks in at a lean 2.7KB ( https://ponder.joeldare.com…

I don't understand. You specifically: > neglected to include my usual "zero-framework" constraint in the prompt And then your complaint is that it included a bunch of dependencies? AI's do what you tell them. I don't understand how you conclude: > If a simple editor requires 89 third-party packages to exist It obviously doesn't. Why even bother complaining about an AI's default choices when it's so trivial to change…

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

#949

Post by leptons »

theshrike79 wrote: post #942
leptons wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs lie constantly. There should be no trust in that system. And no I don't think they will "get better".

How do they "lie constantly"? We are specifically talking about code here, not LLMs writing legal documents.

I've had the LLM "lie" to me about the code it wrote many times. But "lie" and "hallucinate" are incorrect anthropomorphisms commonly used to describe LLM output. The more appropriate term would be garbage.
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