The astro turfing is strong in this whole thread I am a London housewife of the industrial times and Claude has re ignited my love for programming. My steam machines are pumping again hapilly
what do you mean by "the industrial times"?
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
#972I am 80 years old and I use Claude for target selection in Iran. Sometimes it chooses schools, but men with a chest do not care. Since war is my passion, it keeps me awake at night. Sorry, this "Tell HN" is 100% a stealth advertisement and the usual bots in the comments confirm the ad.
definitely something odd going on in this thread, but lets say it is an ad, what would the ad be? i cant imagine it being for claude code since everyone here would already be well aware of it
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#973[dead]
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#974I’m 66 and retired in 2023, and I agree.
In most respects I consider myself a Luddite, or maybe a neo-Luddite. I think a lot of that comes from the constant business push for “new” and “faster” for no reason other than that they’re new and faster.
But I’ve used both Claude and Codex for more than a year now, and while they can still be amazingly frustrating, they also keep getting better. Since the projects I work on now are my own, I like being able to work with these tools almost the way I’d work with a smart but inexperienced junior programmer—useful, capable, sometimes surprising, and still needing guidance.
To me, it still takes skill, domain knowledge, and programming knowledge to get meaningful results. What it can remove is not the need to think, but a lot of the hours spent pounding out code.
I understand the sense of loss some people feel when they talk about the art of programming. But no one is stopping them from opening their IDE and doing it the old way. For my part, I enjoy seeing my ideas come to life with less sweat. I’ve done plenty of sweating alrea
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#975This comment about the OpenClaw guy hits a little too close to home: “Peter Steinberger is a great example of how AI is catnip very specifically for middle-aged tech guys. they spend their 20s and 30s writing code, burn out or do management stuff for a decade, then come back in their late 40s/50s and want to try to throw that fastball again. Claude Code makes them feel like they still got it.”
I get it. Knowing good code and how to correctly build software that people actually want is experience that is consistently hampered by constantly having to learn yet another tech stack. Using an LLM lets you quickly learn (or quickly avoid having to learn) yet another tech stack while you leverage your inherent software development knowledge.
This is it for me. I burned out on chasing the latest stack about 12 years into my career. I went into management and concerned myself with system design, product design, and process design. LLMs let me use that knowledge to build things I care about: features and products, without getting (too) bogged down in things I don't: super elegant code in the hot new framework that users will never see or pay for.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#976The backlog problem is real, projects that sat untouched for months are actually getting built now.
The shift I noticed is the bottleneck moved from execution to judgment pretty fast. You spend less time writing and more time deciding what actually matters. For anyone coming back to building after years in management, that's a good trade.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#977As 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…
This is really interesting to me; I have the opposite belief. My worry is that any idiot can prompt themselves to _bad_ software, and the differentiator is in having the right experience to prompt to _good_ software (which I believe is also possible!). As a very seasoned engineer, I don't feel personally rugpulled by LLM generated code in any way; I feel that it's a huge force multiplier for me. Where my concern abou…
As always has been, but for most of two boom times throught he industry was forgotten, is that specification is everything.
If you adequately specify what you want, then LLM's today are perfectly capable to produce code of a quality exceeding most humans.
But what has been going on is that many of the details of architecture and code have been implied as "good practice" or "experience" because it is time consuming to write a good specification, partly because you need to first work out exactly what you want.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#978Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same. After 40+ years of typing code on a keyboard, my hands aren't as nimble as they were, a little pain sometimes builds up (whether it's arthritis or carpal tunnel or something, I'm not sure). Being able to have large amounts of code written with much less input is a godsend - and it's been great to learn and see what models like Claude can really do, if you can remain organized and focussed on the API's/interface…
Do you have WisprFlow or similar STT setup? It's a real Star Trek moment vocally telling my computer what to build, and then to have it build it.
I tried WisprFlow after you mentioned it and after spending ages clicking through all the dialogs only to find it didn't work out of the box with my terminal (I use Claude cli almost exclusively). Could have been something wrong with my terminal I guess, since I wrote my own.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#979Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those things were already available. That’s the point. What do you think LLMs are trained on?
Huh? There was no tool that could easily whip up a 300 line script to do something for me when I didn't know how to code, and do it in just seconds. The topic here is the democratization of a whole set of new abilities . Not just knowledge.
>when I didn't know how to code
....so your only option was to just learn? learn from the freely & vastly available resources? Oh the horrifying tragedy. How elitist. How gatekeeping. To think you had to put in effort.
LLMs have a lot of good and bad, but saying they "democratised" anything is plain bullshit.
Re: Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
#980Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's so bizarre I see everyone happy using llms trained unethically, so they stop doing the only creative and interesting part of the whole SDLC and just become managers
There is no strong argument that they were "trained unethically". You can google or ask an LLM to argue pro/con that claim... but of course, you haven't, since doing so would itself violate your apparent worldview. > so they stop doing the only creative and interesting part of the whole SDLC and just become managers Bullshit (and, speaking as an old, incredibly whiny). Figuring out the right way to talk to yet anothe…
There is plenty of proof on how these models were trained, you're just too enamored with your "more code, move faster" button to care.
That's fine no one's perfect we all look away from some things here and there, me included. But don't throw shade