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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

#951

Post by heddycrow »

r_lee wrote: post #925
heddycrow wrote: post #836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fear is the mind killer.

So just have no fear? Then when should we have fear? Fear is a natural response, one that in this case is perfectly appropriate imo. I don't fear for my life, but I'm not optimistic at the moment

Do what you want. I take it that it's a crime around hear to encourage people to not be afraid so shame on me.

It's a light-hearted reference to a quote from the Dune books/movies. I didn't mean it to invalidate your experience.

If anything, I was suggesting you take heart and be strong. But again, do whatever you think works for you.

Got to love this culture!

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

#952

Post by tartoran »

nazgob wrote: post #720
tartoran wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Process of coming up what to type was interesting to me, not the act of typing itself.

It was the same to me but we haven’t fully lost the driving seat. We just moved one level higher in abstraction.

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

#953

Post by kazinator »

ad_hockey wrote: post #917
jv22222 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. TIL: The real exposure isn't Anthropic, OpenIA claiming your code, it's you unknowingly distributing someone else's GPL code because the model silently reproduced it, with essentially zero recourse for the model owner.

It depends on your plan, but Google[1] and Anthropic[2] at least provide indemnity against this. Haven't checked the others. Still not a situation you want to find yourself in, though. [1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/p... [2] https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanded-legal-protections-ap...

> Under the updated terms, we will defend our customers from any copyright infringement claim made against them for their authorized use of our services or their outputs, and we will pay for any approved settlements or judgments that result

"We are going to use our deep billionaire pockets to squash the fucker artist who dares identify something of his that we stole, that made its way into your output ..."

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

#954

Post by munksbeer »

scottLobster wrote: post #931
munksbeer wrote: post #738

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 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.

> 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.

But why would I do vibe coding? I am releasing this code to production systems that will bring the company down if there is a significant error. And my human peers will give me hell for raising terrible code for review.

I have a helpful, endlessly patient junior engineer with superhuman typing speed who will take all of my advice and apply it exactly as a I want it, and write my code for me. When I see errors, I'll tell it, and I'll even ask it to remember why it is a problem in our code base (maybe not others). So it has memory and (mostly) won't do that again.

And I also make sure to apply the same quality to the tests we write together.

Over the last few months I'd say between 50-80% of code being delivered to our repo is "typed" by agents. Humans are still guiding them and ensuring the quality meets our high standards.

I don't really have a grasp on how other people are working with this stuff that they're seeing problems with production code.

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

#955

Post by heddycrow »

qnleigh wrote: post #937
heddycrow wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I can guess that you like this exercise and you seem to be adept at it. I can't help but think you are my kind of people in that regard. Kudos!

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

#957

Post by IronRod »

Just turned 69 last week and I feel the same way. One difference for me is, because I'm retired, I can use Claude to explore things in ways and at a speed I never could before without any pressure. It truly feels like the old days of learning and working with all those early languages and all the discovery and sense of exploring new frontiers.

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

#958

Post by aryehof »

barrkel wrote: post #678
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 always tell Claude, choose your own stack but no node_modules. What's missing is another LLM dialog between you and Claude. One that figures out your priorities, your non-functional requirements, and instructs Claude appropriately. We'll get there.

This perhaps reflects the general divide in viewpoints on “vibe-coding”. Do you let go of everything (including understanding) and let it rip, or require control and standards to some degree. Current coding agents seem to promote the former. The only way with their approach, is to provide them with constraints?

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

#959

Post by coldtrait »

stein1946 wrote: post #84

I am 37; Claude Code and it's parallels have extinguished multiple ones. I was able to steer clear of the Bitcoin/NFT/Passport bros but it turns out they infiltrated the profession and their starry puppy delusional eyes are trying to tell me that iteration X of product Y released yesterday evening is "going to change everything". They have started redefining what "I have build this" actually means, and they have outj…

If I was 60 and still had to do any work like this I'd consider myself a failure.

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

#960

Post by lban2049 »

This resonates deeply. The "I have ideas but can't ship them" problem isn't about coding ability — it's about the deployment complexity that comes after. I've been working on MyVibe (https://www.myvibe.so) to solve exactly this — one-command publishing to a live demo, no hosting config. Making AI coding actually useful for non-engineers means collapsing the build-to-share gap. Love hearing these stories.
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