HN

Comments (179)

• Menu

  dbdoug
  Hey, I'm nearly 80 years old. I haven't written a line of code in over 10 years. But I'm coding now, with the help of Claude & Gemini, and having a great time. Each block of Python or Applescript that they generate for me is a much better learning tool than a book - I'm going through the code line by line and researching everything. And I'm also learning how to deal with LLMs and their strengths & weaknesses. Correcting them from time to time when they screw up. Lots of fun.
• tkgally
  Very similar here. I am 68.While I have never developed software professionally, in the four decades I have been using computers I have often written scripts and done other simple programming for my own purposes. When I was in my thirties and forties especially, I would often get enjoyably immersed in my little projects.These days, I am feeling a new rush of drive and energy using Claude Code. At first, though, the feeling would come and go. I would come up with fun projects (in-browser synthesizers, multi-LLM translation engines) and get a brief thrill from being able to create them so quickly, but the fever would fade after a while. I started paying for the Max plan last June, but there were weeks at a time when I barely used it. I was thinking of downgrading to Pro when Opus 4.5 came along, I saw that it could handle more sophisticated tasks, and I got an idea for a big project that I wanted to do.I have now spent the last two months having Claude write and build something I really wanted forty years ago, when I was learning Japanese and starting out as a Japanese-to-English translator: a dictionary that explains the meanings, nuances, and usages of Japanese words in English in a way accessible to an intermediate or advanced learner. Here is where it stands now:https://www.tkgje.jp/https://github.com/tkgally/je-dict-1It will take a few more months before the dictionary is more or less finished, but it has already reached a stage where it should be useful for some learners. I am releasing all of the content into the public domain, so people can use and adapt it however they like.
• Menu

  ynac
  Same here - it's like programming with a couple of buddies. Occasionally they goof off and wreck everything, but we put it back together and end up with a finished project. I'm literally going through my backlog of projects from the early 80s! There are parts of each of these projects that were black holes for me - just didn't know enough to get a toe hold. With Karl (that's my agent) he explains everything I don't understand, does stuff, breaks stuff, and so on. It's really a blast.
• Menu

  samiv
  As 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" with a LLM.
• Menu

  zhoujianfu
  This 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.”
• Menu

  al_borland
  I spent the last 2 days primarily using Claude instead of coding things myself at work. I felt the exact opposite way. It was so unfulfilling. I’d equate it to the feeling of getting an A on a test, knowing I cheated. I didn’t accomplish anything. I didn’t learn anything. I got the end result with none of the satisfaction and learned nothing in the process.I’m probably going to go back and redo everything with my own code.
• jrnichols
  I'm over 50 now and feel like this as well. Haven't used Claude yet but used Codex a bunch, and it's been SO MUCH fun going over all the old perl & shell scripting stuff that I used to do years ago before I got into healthcare time and morphed to a hobby sysadmin.Staying up and re-learning what I used to love long ago has given me a new found passion as well. Even if I do vibe code some scripts, at least I have the background now to go through them and make sure they make sense. They're things I'm using in my own homelab and not something that I'm trying to spin up a Github repo for. I'm not shipping anything. I'm refreshing my old skills and trying to bring some of them up to date. An unfortunate reality is that my healthcare career is going to be limited due to multiple injuries along the way, and I need to try to be as current as I can in case something happens. My safety net is limited.
• tomhow
  A real-life scene that made me chuckle last weekend…“Oh shit, Hey Babe did you close my laptop?”My not-very-technical friend as we returned home from a Sunday afternoon trip to the park with the kids to find his Claude Code session had been thwarted.
• Menu

  meebee
  So excited to be getting to my backlog of apps that I've wanted but couldn't take the time to develop on my own. I'm 66 and have been in the software field in various capacities (but programming mostly as a hobby). Here's a partial list of apps I've completed in the last few months: - Media Watch app to keep a list of movies and shows my wife and I want to watch- Grocery List with some tracking of frequent purchases- Health Log for medical history, doc appointments and past visits- Habits Tracker with trends I’m interested- Daily Wisdom Reader instead of having multiple ebooks to keep track of where I'm at- A task manager similar to the old LifeBalance app- A Home Inventory app so that I can track what I have, warranty, and maintenance- An ios watch app to see when I'm asleep so that it can turn off my music or audiobook- An ios watch chess tactics trainer app- some gamesMany of these are similar to paid offerings, but those didn't check off all the features I really wanted, so I vibe-coded my own. They all do what I want, the way I want it to.
• Menu

  scottLobster
  Maybe the internet has made me too cynical, and I'm glad people seem to be having a good time, but at time of posting I can't help but notice that almost every comment here is suspiciously vague as to what, exactly, is being coded. Still better than the breathless announcements of the death of software engineering, but quite similar in tone.
• droidmaker
  I tried to execute a project in 1986 and was told it was impossible. Every few years as tech has improved I tried again, but it was still impossible. CD-ROM, CD-I, Web, Wiki, even AI a few years ago... But 2 weeks ago I taught myself to vibe code, and I built it. 40 years of planning and a few days of work. I'm freakin' thrilled.
• Kiboneu
  I introduced my dad to claude code. He doesn’t even code, but now it’s a more welcoming and rewarding experience from the get-go. He’s happy, became more comfortable with linux.Occasionally I remote in to help fix something, but the coding agent really takes a load off my back, and he can start learning without knowing where the endpoints are.
• qzira
  This resonates. The emotional side of returning to coding is real.With Claude Code specifically, I've noticed that the longer it runs autonomously, the more cost anxiety creeps in. You stop thinking about the problem and start watching the token counter.What finally let me stop worrying and just build again was building a hard budget limit outside the app — not just alerts, but an actual kill switch.Glad you found the spark. It's worth protecting.
• jesperwe
  Another +1 from me at 62 years. My problem is this has led to me feeling like I am tech lead for a team of a dozen excellent developers, but I have no task for them!
• thangalin
  Yes! Although 60 is still a decade away, I've spent a fair few evenings vibe-coding a FOSS dependency-free raw git repo browser.[1] Never would have even started such a project without LLMs because:* Implementing a raw Git reader is daunting.* Codifying syntax highlighting rules is laborious.* Developing a nice UI/UX is not super enjoyable for me.* Hardening with latest security measures would be tricky.* Crafting a templating language is time-consuming.Being able to orchestrate and design the high-level architecture while letting the LLM take care of the details is extremely rewarding. Moving all my repositories away from GitLab, GitHub, and BitBucket to a single repo under my own control is priceless.[1]: https://repo.autonoma.ca/treetrek/
• stuaxo
  A great thing you can do with LLMs:"in (language I'm familiar with) I use (some pattern or whatever) what's the equivalent in (other language)?"It's really great for doing bits and then get it to explain or you look and see what's wrong and modify it and learn.
• palmotea
  > I’m ready to retire. ... Fast forward decades and Claude Code is giving me that same energy and drive. I love it. It feels like it did back then. I’m chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep.Of course you love it, you don't have to worry about retirement anymore.Give me your 401k, then tell you feel about Claude Code.
• kazinator
  Opposite here. I was excited by writing code and worked on open source side projects consistently. Somehow, I've not done anything since around August 2025.I have a sense that AI could have something to do with it.AI is degrading the status of our profession; its perception in the public eye.At the same time, it is stealing our work and letting cretins pretend to be software engineers.It's a bad taste in the mouth.
• Menu

  TutleCpt
  I remember before style sheets existed. Webites were all nested tables and font tags. I built a video website before YouTube be even existed. Claude code and AI is definitely an exciting time.
• JKCalhoun
  I've always dabbled in electronics, as a hobbyist. I've never had any formal courseware or training in it.But I have been haranguing Claude/Gemini to help me on an analog computer project for some months now that has sent me on a deep dive into op-amps and other electronics esoterica that I had previously only dabbled a bit in.Along the way I've learned about relaxation oscillators, using PWM to multiply two voltages, integrating, voltage-following…I could lean on electronics.stackexchange (where my Google searches often lead) but 1) I first have to know what I am even searching for and 2) even the EEs disagree on how to solve a problem (as you might expect) so I am still with no clear answer. Might as well trust a sometimes hallucinating LLM?I guess I like the first point above the best—when the LLM just out of the blue (seemingly) suggests a PWM multiplier when I was thinking log/anti-log was the only way to multiply voltages. So I get to learn a new topology.Or I'm focused on user-adjustable pots for setting machine voltages and the LLM suggests a chip with its own internal 2.45V reference that you can use to get specific voltages without burdening the user to dial it in, own a multimeter. So I get to learn about a chip I was unfamiliar with.It just goes on an on.(And, Mr. Eater, I only let the magic smoke out once so far, ha ha.)
• Menu

  YZF
  It's a lot of fun. I'm also an old timer.I think it's also somewhat addictive. I wonder if that's part of what's at play here.A coworker that never argues with you, is happy to do endless toil... sometimes messes up but sometimes blows your mind...
• 999900000999
  From what I've seen, and of course the models get better everyday, if you have very simple grunt work that needs to be done. Coding agents are basically magic. The moment something gets either difficult or subjective, coding agents love to add completely incorrect solutions.Try to tell Claude Code to refactor some code and see if it doesn't just delete the entire file and rewrite it. Sure that's cute, but it's absolutely not okay in a real software environment.I do find this stuff great for hobbyist projects. I don't know if I'd be willing to put money on the line yet
• Menu

  cmos
  51 year old electrical engineer here, same thing! (minus the retiring part cause finances)It's given me the guts to be a solo-founder (for now). I
• wepple
  As a parent to two young kids and in more of a leadership position at work, Claude allows me to grind through my backlog of ideas in minutes between other tasks, and see which ones take flight.
• anon
  undefined
• firecall
  As a solo dev, using LLMs for coding has made me a better programmer for sure!I can ask an LLM for specific help with my codebase and it can explain things in context and provide actual concrete relevant examples that make sense to me.Then I can ask again for explanations about idiomatic code patterns that aren't familiar for me.Working on my own, I don't get that feedback and code review loop.Working with new languages and techniques, or diving into someone else's legacy code base is no longer as daunting with an LLM to ask for help!
• Menu

  tombert
  I have had the opposite experience.When it was just asking ChatGPT questions it was fine, I was having fun, I was able to unblock myself when I got non-trivial errors much quicker, and I still felt like I was learning stuff.With Codex or Claude Code, it feels like I'm stuck LARPing as a middle manager instead of actually solving problems. Sometimes I literally just copy stuff from my assigned ticket into Claude and tell it to do that, I awkwardly wait for a bit, test it out to see if it's good enough, and make my pull request. It's honestly kind of demoralizing.I suppose this is just the cost of progress; I'm sure there were people that loved raising and breeding horses but that's not an excuse to stop building cars.I loved being able to figure out interesting solutions to software problems and hacking on them until something worked, and my willingness to do the math beforehand would occasionally give me an edge. Instead, now all I do is sit and wait while I'm cuckolded out of my work, and questioning why I bothered finishing my masters degree if the expectation now is to ship slop code lazily written by AI in a few minutes.It was a good ride while it lasted; I got almost fifteen years of being paid to do my favorite thing. I should count my blessings that it lasted that long, though I'm a little jealous of people born fifteen years earlier who would be retiring now with their Silicon Valley shares. Instead, I get to sit here contemplating whether or not I can even salvage my career for the next five years (or if I need to make a radical pivot).
• TimFogarty
  Same! After years in engineering management I'm building so many small side projects thanks to Claude Code. I'm creating at a breakneck pace. Claude Code has mostly raised the level of abstraction so I can focus much more on the creative aspect of building which has been so much fun.There are definitely a lot of limitations with Claude Code, but it's fun to work through the issues, figure out Claude's behavior, and create guardrails and workarounds. I do think that a lot of the poor behavior that agents exhibit can be fixed with more guardrails and scaffolding... so I'm looking forward to the future.
• blueeon
  I'm 38 years old, and as a manager, it's gradually become difficult to find joy in coding. Claude Code has helped me rediscover that pleasure. Now, all I want to do is code every day and use up my quota.
• Menu

  eventmapx
  I’m a 13 year lurker, first time commenter (Not sure why this post compelled me). I don’t think this is a genuine take. I don’t see how a 60 year old has any kind of joy for actual software creation suddenly from llms. It might be a joy in seeing software automatically be created but it’s definitely not doing the work. (I may be biased, I left the field 5 years ago) I doubt he’s spending any time fixing the software to make it near usable for anyone besides himself and the semi-working state the llm gave him. Meaning he’s going to have 10 or more half-finished projects again.
• Kim_Bruning
  Getting claude to build mathematical models for me and running simulations really got me back into doing sciency things too. It's the model that's important, not the boilerplate each time!
• Menu

  bGl2YW5j
  I've also been loving the speed Claude has enabled me to move at, and now agree that the coding part of SWE has become LLM-wrangling instead. I now see interacting with an LLM, to build all parts of software, as the new "frontend".Following this idea, what do people think "backend" work will involve? Building and tweaking models, and the infra around them? Obviously everyone will shift more into architecture and strategy, but in terms of hands-on technical work I'm interested in where people see this going.
• anupshinde
  Glad to see this. I was tired of seeing posts that are on the extremes - "death of software by AI" vs "AI can't do this and that".I took a break from software, and over the last few years, it just felt repetitive, like I was solving or attempting to solve the same kinds of problems in different ways every 6 months. The feeling of "not a for loop again", "not a tree search again", "not a singleton again". There's an exciting new framework or a language that solves a problem - you learn it - and then there are new problems with the language - and there is a new language to solve that language's problem. And it is necessary, and the engineer in me does understand the why of it, but over time, it just starts to feel insane and like an endless loop. Then you come to an agreement: "Just build something with what I know," but you know so much that you sometimes get stuck in analysis paralysis, and then a shiny new thing catches your engineer or programmer brain. And before you get maintainable traction, I would have spent a lot of time, sometimes quitting even before starting, because it was logistically too much.Claude Code does make it feel like I am in my early twenties. (I am middle-aged, not in 60s)I see a lot of comments wondering what is being built -Think about it like this, and you can try it in a day.Take an idea of yours, and better if it is yours - not somebody else's - and definitely not AI's. And scope it and ground it first. It should not be like "If I sway my wand, an apple should appear". If you have been in software for long, you would have heard those things. Don't be that vague. You have to have some clarity - "wand sway detection with computer vision", "auto order with X if you want a real apple", etc.. AI is a catalyst and an amplifier, not a cheat code. You can't tell it, "build me code where I have tariffs replacing taxes, and it generates prosperity". You can brainstorm, maybe find solutions, but you can't break math with AI without a rigorous theory. And if you force AI without your own reasoning, it will start throwing BS at you.There is this idea in your mind, discuss it with ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude. See the flaws in the idea - discover better ideas. Discuss suggestions for frameworks, accept or argue with AI. In a few minutes, you ask it to provide a Markdown spec. Give it to Claude Code. Start building - not perfect, just start. Focus on the output. Does it look good enough for now? Does it look usable? Does it make sense? Is the output (not code) something you wanted? That is the MVP to yourself. There's a saying - customers don't care about your code, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't. In this case, make yourself the customer first - care about the code later (which in an AI era is like maybe a 30min to an hour later)And at this point, bring in your engineer brain. Typically, at this point, the initial friction is gone, you have code and something that is working for you in real - not just on a paper or whiteboard. Take a pause. Review, ask it to refactor - make it better or make it align with your way, ask why it made the decisions it made. I always ask AI to write unit tests extensively - most of which I do not even review. The unit tests are there just to keep it predictable when I get involved, or if I ask AI to fix something. Even if you want to remove a file from the project, don't do it yourself - acclimatize to prompting and being vague sometimes. And use git so that you can revert when AI breaks things. From idea to a working thing, within an hour, and maybe 3-4 more hours once you start reviews, refactors, and engineering stuff.I also use it for iterative trading research. It is just an experiment for now, but it's quite interesting what it can do. I give it a custom backtesting engine to use, and then give it constraints and libraries like technical indicators and custom data indicators it can use (or you could call it skills) - I ask it to program a strategy (not just parameter optimize) - run, test, log, define the next iteration itself, repeat. And I also give it an exact time for when it should stop researching, so it does not eat up all my tokens. It just frees up so much time, where you can just watch the traffic from the window or think about a direction where you want AI to go.I wanted to incorporate astrological features into some machine learning models. An old idea that I had, but I always got crapped out because of the mythological parts and sometimes mystical parts that didn't make sense. With AI, I could ask it to strip out those unwanted parts, explain them in a physics-first or logic-first way, and get deeper into the "why did they do this calculation", "why they reached this constant", and then AI obviously helps with the code and helps explain how it matches and how it works - helps me pin point the code and the theories. Just a few weeks ago, I implemented/ported an astronomy library in Go (github.com/anupshinde/goeph) to speed up my research - and what do I really know about astronomy! But the outputs are well verified and tested.But, in my own examples, will I ever let AI unilaterally change the custom backtesting engine code? Never. A single mistake, a single oversight, can cost a lot of real money and wasted time in weeks or months. So the engine code is protected like a fortress. You should be very careful with AI modifying critical parts of your production systems - the bug double-counting in the ledger is not the same as a "notification not shown". I think managers who are blanket-forcing AI on their employees are soon going to realize the importance of the engineering aspect in softwareJust like you don't trust just any car manufacturer or just any investment fund, you should not blindly trust the AI-generated code - otherwise, you are setting yourself up to get scammed.
• penneyd
  Same, early 50s and this is like the heyday of coding where you could rapidly iterate on things and actively make leaps and bounds of progress. Super fun.
• asah
  I've heard this from so many greybeards... including me!
• markus_zhang
  Congratulations! Are you still coding VB using Claude? Or something else.
• par
  It's taken over my life, I am in a leadership position at faang but i'm daydreaming about getting back to my claude sessions at work.
• pclowes
  “Hell-ya brother”100% agree even with half your experience.
• NetOpWibby
  I'll be 38 next month. I always wonder what I'm do in 30 more years and I cannot see myself NOT coding. Happy to see that spark is alive and well within you.
• fishingisfun
  btw how good are any of these tools for embedded programming? we need a new era for hardware enthusiasts. my dad made plenty of fun things in the 80s but it was at the tail end of the newess that came from radiokits and other gadgets that flooded the market due to the uchip
• fidicen
  I've never built anything outside of a python notebook before, but Claude Code felt like magic to me.
• msoori
  Same here, 60 and few months and I'm excited about AI
• joshu
  all the insane and/or speculative projects that i never did because they would require heavy lift but with vague outcomes are now in progress. it's glorious.
• ms_menardi
  try asking claude to write in VB6. Make some Active Server Pages. Use COM components. Why not? We can do things "better" now, but what does that matter when you can do the same things as before, but better?
• Menu

  ares623
  I'm so excited to be able to continue build things when I'm living on the streets. I'm glad to know that drive to create will always be with me and keep me warm during winters.
• valentinza
  I get hate on only using cli. Glad someone else see's a different perspective
• Menu

  dnw
  Curious, what are you building?
• farsa
  I expect to have at least 15 more years in the workforce and I hate that I have to live through this "revolution". I worry about what will be final balance of lives improved vs lives worsened.
• whalesalad
  I don't play games anymore. I just work on whacky ideas with LLMs. I even nuked my gaming PC and installed ollama+rocm to play with local models, run openclaw there to experiment with that too. It's a lot of fun. I feel like agents are particularly useful for people who are ADD and want to work on 10 things at once.
• Menu

  ddmma
  I’m on my 40s and building a platform to support my late cognitive decline. Tools that shaped human existence.
• balls187
  I’m on a field trip chaperoning my kid. I get a couple slack messages asking for some tweaks to a UI. I type a couple words into a Github AI Agent Session while riding the bus. Fixes are deployed to our staging env in 10 minutes.Fucking wild.
• Menu

  juleiie
  I have this idea that probably violates some law of computing but I am really stubborn to make it happen somehow.I want a game that generates its own mechanics on the fly using AI. Generates itself live.Infinite game with infinite content. Not like no mans sky where everything is painfully predictable and schematic to a fault. No. Something that generates a whole method of generating. Some kind of ultra flexible communication protocol between engine and AI generator that is trained to program that protocol.Develop it into a framework.Use that framework to create one game. A dwarf fortress adventure mode 2.0I have no other desires, I have no other goals, I don’t care. I or better yet - someone else, must do it.
• system2
  Everything in this post is proof that Anthropic will kill it when they go public. I believe in it, so does everyone else.
• drivingmenuts
  My main worry is: what is the license on the code produced by Claude (or any other coding agent)? It seems like, if it was trained using open-source software, then the resulting code needs to be open-source as well and it should be compatible with the original source. Artwork produced by an AI cannot be copyrighted, but apparently code can be?If the software produced is for internal use, the point is probably moot. But if it isn't, this seems like a question that needs to be answered ASAP.
• hparadiz
  Building things as I read this.
• Menu

  stein1946
  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 outjerked the executives by slinging outrageous value creation narratives.> I’m chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep.You are 60; go spend some time with your grand-kids, smell a flower, touch grass forget chasing anything at this age cause a Tuesday like the others things are gonna wrap up.Absolutely sincerely.
• tmtvl
  I see many comments here about Claude and I get the same feeling I get when I see comments about MacOS: it's nice that you're content with it, but I don't trust Apple/Anthropic for a fraction of an angstrom.Wake me when we have ethically trained, open source models that run locally. Preferably high-quality ones.
• dboreham
  Perhaps I shouldn't say this but I feel that with the current LLMs I've found "my people" :)
• adampunk
  This is the way. It's the most fun computers have been in decades.
• Menu

  throwaway314155
  I have bipolar disorder. The more frustrating aspects of coding have historically affected me tenfold (sometimes to the point of severe mania). Using Claude Code has been more like an accessibility tool in that regard. I no longer have to do the frustrating bits. Or at the very least, that aspect of the job is thoroughly diminished. And yes - coding is "fun again".
• mfalcon
  "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in"
• pstuart
  Older here, equally excited. It's like programming with a team of your best buddies who are smarter than you but humble and eager to collaborate.
• d0gebro
  [dead]
• animanoir
  [dead]
• zenon_paradox
  [dead]
• fishcrackers
  [dead]