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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

#991

Post by actionfromafar »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #990
MachineBurning wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it was mostly that people didn't want to rewrite (and maintain) their code for a new proprietary programming model they were unfamiliar with. People also didn't want to invest in hardware that could only run code written in CUDA. Lots of people wanted (and Intel tried to sell, somewhat succesfully) something they could just plug-and-play and just run the parallel implementations they'd already written for superco…

The completely low information and amateur hour aspect of what our HPC Welfare Queens were pushing above was that a couple hours invested into coding Intel's Xeon Phi alternative to GPUs demonstrated the folly of their BS "recompile and run" strategy and any attempt to code the thing exposed how much better a design CUDA was than their series of APIs of The Month that followed*. And I was all but blacklisted by the H…

Phi was cool, I think it could have been leveraged into something great. Imagine all consumer CPUs coming with 512 little pentiums in them or something like that.

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

#993

Post by tech_tuna »

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…

I have mixed feelings but echo your sentiments a bit. On the one hand, I can get a lot more done and feel "unchained" so to speak. I have long hated doing frontend development and now it doesn't matter and I love that. However, I don't feel satisfaction from solving problems the same way I used to. I had one long session with Claude a few weeks ago and I told Claude I was done for the night at which point it fired back with "Sounds good, look at how much you accomplished." and I responded with you mean "look at how much you accomplished, I just told you what to do."

It is still weird to me that I talk to a remote Python app but that's how we write code nowadays. Still, I felt almost mocked when Claude plauded my "accomplishments".

So I'd say that I am definitely more productive than I used to be but I enjoy the work less on one level. But on another level, I feel like I can build a lot more and tackle problems I wouldn't have tackled in the past. It's a mixed blessing. It's also a WIP, I expect that the way we write code will change even more, over the next few years.

I love it, I hate it, it's the Brave New World of software development.

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

#994

Post by kulandai »

That's superb!

All that matters is solving a business problem, as quick as possible. Software should be simple and maintainable.

I see some hate for AI-generated code in HN and other forums. If AI does the above, why not embrace it. After all, we invent tools to make our lives better.

If jobs are going to be lost, lets open a coffee shop ;-)

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

#997

Post by herdymerzbow »

ilc wrote: post #834
herdymerzbow wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a self teaching beginner* this is where I find AI a bit limiting. When I ask ChatGPT questions about code it is always about to offer up a solution, but it often provides inappropriate responses that don't take into account the full context of a project/task. While it understands what good structure and architecture are, it's missing the awareness of good design and architecture and applying to the questions I hav…

I can't summarize 40~ YOE of programming easily. (30+ professional) I can tell you: Your problems are a layer higher than you think. Coding, Architecture, etc. Those get the face time. Process, and Discipline, and where the money is made and lost in AI. To give a minor example: My first attempt at a major project with AI failed HORRIBLY. But I stepped back and figured out why. What short-comings did my approach have,…

Thanks for reply. I have notifications off so didn't realise you had.

I guess it sounds like a bit of a trap in some ways. Those without experience (noobs like me) are gifted a tool that can suggest to them solutions or strategies that you'd typically come across only after many years working/learning peeling back the onion. You don't really have the taste or canniness to know how best to use those tools without the experience, which you typically gain by working and gaining the experience!

I cycle regularly and it actually reminds me a little of the many people who've taken to ebikes recently. I'm generally in favour of ebikes for adding another mode of non-car transport out there but I definitely see a lot of newish ebikers attempting manouveres that only experienced cyclists would do, because you wouldn't do it if you didn't have the strength to get up to speed and have the handling. But ebikers are able to bypass the strength and skills training and get themselves in somewhat dangerous situations that you'd only find yourself in if you were a pretty strong cyclist and had the bike handling skills to match your speed.

A bit of a tangent there!

I do like spending time planning. Problem is as a relative beginner there's only so much you can add to your plan when you're still learning how to do so much. I do use AI to help advise on my strategies, toolkit approaches rather than do the code though. It does send me really inappropriate solutions though quite regularly that a human would (hopefully) avoid because the human understands the wider context or at least will ask questions.

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

#998

Post by vincentbusch »

Same energy here. I've been vibe-coding with Claude Code for weeks — built an entire platform where Claude, GPT-4o and Gemini debate engineering problems autonomously. No team, just me and the AI at 3am.

The feeling is exactly what you describe — that "one more thing" energy where you look up and it's 4am. Haven't felt this since discovering Rails in 2006.

What are you building with it?

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

#1000

Post by ddmma »

grigri907 wrote: post #189
ddmma wrote: post #129

I’m on my 40s and building a platform to support my late cognitive decline. Tools that shaped human existence.

I'd like to hear more

The first tool that lets you directly program a neural network's behaviour — not train, not fine-tune, not prompt-engineer. Program. https://pypi.org/project/qriton-hlm/
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