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

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 cheat code for me and have breathed new life into my desire to create. I know more than enough about architecture and coding to understand the plumbing and effectively debug, yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details. It's almost an unfair unlock.

It'll also be good to see leetcode die.

To those of you reading the comment section thinking something like the following:

>"Wait a moment! Being forced to use AI gave me depression, and I'm really aware of the fact that it's only going to become better and better the more developers are using it, to the point where the 10 job openings of yesterday are 1 job opening tomorrow. Why are people so excited", remember this:

You are reading HN, the survivorship bias and groupthink is just as high as any other self-calibrating online community ("upvote if you agree" -> self-calibration of the popular opinion), and there's an extremely high survivorship bias because people who are into this LLM craze have a higher probability of browsing HN.

As for you, OP, I have no idea why age is a factor to consider to this. I'm 45, and while I programmed as a hobby since I was 16 I turned it into a career during COVID, and all the pressure cooking LLM watch-six-agents-writing-and-you-proofreading gave me so much existential crisis and depression that I seriously can't even get myself writing anything "over the weekend".

I hope to God the next generation of wonder kids that is the equivalent of the 12 year old discovering how to bent the computer to do what they want it to do enjoy arguing with multiple agents concurrently back and forth.

I'm about a decade behind you, but I also started my programming career during the "good" COM/DCOM/MFC/ATL/ActiveX/CORBA days. Java just came out. I slept little during that time because truly, there was nothing like programming. It was the thing that pulled me awake in the morning, and pulled me from falling asleep at night. I was so spellbound, calling it Csikszentmihalyi's flow felt like it didn't do it justice.

Fast forward 30 years later, I thought those days were gone forever. I'd accepted that I'd never experienced that kind of obsession again. Maybe because I got older. Maybe those feelings were something exclusively for the young. Maybe because my energy wasn't what it used to be. Yada yada, 1000s of reasons.

I was so shocked when I found out that I could experience that feeling again with Claude Code and Codex. I guess it was like experiencing your first love all over again? I slept late, I woke up early, I couldn't wait to go back to my Codex and Claude. It was to the point I created an orchestrator agent so I could continue chatting with my containerized agents via Telegram.

"What a time to be alive" <-- a trite, meaningless saying, that was infused by real meaning, by some basic maths that run really, really, really fast, on really, really expensive hardware. How about that!

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.

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.

Without experience, programming with AI (vibe coding, I guess) can be compared to being a rat in maze... You work your way through a project, but the dead-ends exact a high cost in terms time, attention, and ultimately cost.

With experience, you see these dead ends before they have a chance to take hold and you know when and how to adjust course. It's literally like one poster said: coding with some buddies without ego and without the need to constantly talk people out of using the latest and greatest shiny objects/tools/frameworks.

I've really enjoyed going back a revisiting old ideas and projects with the help of AI. As the OP stated -- it has restored my energy and drive.

Do you think it's doing the same thing for younger generations? How are they inspired by tech? I'm an old man too, but old man stories don't really matter. What matters is what we leave behind, how well understood it will be by who comes after.

50. Started coding at 7. I never stopped coding. In fact, the past decade saw heavy open source contribution, public speaking, etc.

I love coding with agents. Claude Code now almost exclusively. The 20x max subscription is endless until you start writing custom multi-agent processes, and even then. Still takes quite a bit of effort to burn through.

I get so much more done, and can be productive with languages/frameworks I'm not familiar with.

To everybody worried that AI will kill jobs. There have been many points in the evolution of software dev where some new efficiency was predicted to kill off jobs. The opposite happens. Dev becomes more economical, and all of the places where dev was previously too expensive open up. Maybe this time won't work out that way, but history isn't on the side of that prediction.

An experienced software dev can get multiples of efficiency out of AI coding tools compared to non-devs, and can use them in scaled projects, where non-devs are only going to compound a mess. Some of those non-devs will learn how to be more efficient and work with scaled projects. How? They'll learn to be devs.

I'd be building several side projects for myself if I wasn't super busy with the primary work I'm doing. The AI tools take over the tedious work, and remove a lot of work that would just add mental load. Love it.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

I’m 63 (almost 64), and I’m rewriting an app (server and native client), that took a couple of years to originally write.

Been working for about a month, and I’m halfway through. The server’s done (but I’m sure that I’ll still need to tweak and fix bugs), and I’m developing the communication layer and client model, now. It took seven months to write the first version of the server, and about six months to write a less-capable communication driver, the first time.

This is not a “vibe-coded” toy for personal use. It’s a high-Quality shipping app, with thousands of users. There’s still a ton of work, ahead, but it looks like an achievable goal. I do feel as if my experience, writing shipping software, is crucial to using the LLM to develop something that can be shipped.

I’ve had to learn how to work with an LLM, but I think I’ve found my stride. I certainly could not do this, without an LLM.

The thing that most upset me, since retirement, has been the lack of folks willing to work with me. I spent my entire career, working in teams, and being forced to work alone, reduced my scope. I feel as if LLMs have allowed me to dream big, again.

This thread doesn't resonate with me whatsoever. It's not that I don't get where these people are coming from. LLMs have allowed people to churn out projects (especially small, personal projects) faster than ever, skipping what a lot of people view as the boring or tedious parts. But these discussions feel like a kid playing with toys, while a nuclear explosion is going off in the background.

Until I realized that no one here is going to be in the blast radius. So many people who agree with this admit to being in their 40s, 50s, 60s. All of them have already had the time to learn without LLMs, get industry experience, network, climb their career ladders as high as they could. These people are now sitting on piles of assets, and they know that if LLMs start pushing out people from the industry, it'll be us juniors and new grads. They will either remain relevant in the industry due to seniority/experience/pivoting to managerial duty, use their money and connections to easily learn new skills and pivot, or punch out and coast through retirement before it affects them.

  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:

- 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 games

Many 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.

Going over the 50 bump, and I see myself selling toasts, as being an IC/Architect is no longer valued enough, everyone is expected to be a PM for their agents minions.

The teams get reduced, as now one can do effectively more with less, and in South Europe, in IT there is hardly a place to get a job above 50 years old, unless one goes consulting as the company owner, and even then the market cannot hold everyone.

As kid I have seen this happening, as factory automation replaced jobs in complete villages, the jobs that weren't offshored into Asia or Eastern Europe for clothing and shoes, got replaced with robots.

The few lucky ones were the ones pressing the buttons and unloading trucks.

Likewise a few ones will be lucky AI magicians, some will press buttons, and the large majority better get newer skills beyond computing.

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.

A lot of comments from more grown up engineers who feel nostalgia like it's COM/CORBA/MFC again and they are excited how they can be productive again.

I'm really sorry (and accept down-vote storm) to disappoint you but you won't be young again and burning midnight oil may remind old days and bring excitement, but in the end it will harm your health.

Learning like crazy, late night hacking and other attributes of fresh engineers is sometimes a necessity to build a career, knowledge base, equity to comfortably start a family. Some people enjoy it and many hate, but most of us did it at some point.

I wouldn't oppose it if it wasn't harmful for the industry. What all those engineers who are excited again would think of a startup that stole all free land, building material and doubled housing? I bet all youngsters would be excited to have their own place for $20 monthly mortgage payment, telling everyone who has paid most of their salary over last 30 years how energizing is feeling you don't need to work for your house your whole life and ignoring equity crash for those folks.

I just had what you might probably describe as the opposite experience. I was sat at a very important all hands meeting by our senior tech leader with about 100 people or so .who was mandating an AI goal for every employee on workday, he basically says that “if we all do not learn to adapt to AI, we will all get left behind” , and he had presented how to utilise spec driven development. He opened up the room for Q&A at the end of the meeting. A lot of them had technical questions about the agentic framework itself but I had a philosophical one. I I felt uncomfortable asking him the question in the open, so I sent him a private note .

The note read something like as follows : I don’t exactly agree with the framing that we will all get left behind if we all don’t learn to adapt to AI. More accurately, I see it this way. While the company definitely stands to gain from all the hyper increase in productivity by the use of said AI tools, I stand to pay a personal price and that personal price is this - I’m may very slowly stop exercising my critical thinking muscles because I am accustomed passing that to AI for everything and this will render me less employable, it is this personal price that I feel reluctant to pay. There has always been a delicate balance between an employer and employee. We learn new technologies on the job and we’re more employable for transferring that to other companies. This equation is now unbalanced. The company trapped more value, but there is skill erosion on my side . For instance, our team actually has to perform a Cassandra DB migration this year . Usually, I’d have to take a small textbook and read about the internals of CassandraDB, and maybe learn a guide on how to write Cassandra queries. What do I put in my resume now? That I vibe coded Cassandra migration? How employable is that? And I’m not sure if others felt the same way. But I definitely felt like the odd one out here for asking that question because everyone else in the meeting was on board with AI adoption.

The leader did respond to me and he said that learning agentic AI actually will make me more employable. So there is a fundamental disagreement as to what constitutes skill. I think he just spoke past me. Oh well at least I tried.

++1

Was able to build a large financial application just with the 20 USD subscription in the last 12 month - without Claude, I would have required 5 - 6 people and at least 1 year of funding.

This was by far my best investment in my whole life 12x20 USD vs. 750.000 salary :-)

It is especially inspiring since it brings you usually a few new ideas into your context; also just joking around with it can yield new inspirations.

I'm wondering how long it will stay at 20 USD for the smallest subscription, no chance that they can keep this price, I'd say? Its impressive that they are giving it away for nearly free.

This resonates deeply. I'm 49 and spent the last 18 months building six web apps with Claude while working a full-time Director role. The experience is exactly what you describe - that feeling of staying up late not because you have to, but because you can't stop.

What changed for me was the feedback loop. Before AI tooling, I'd have an idea, realize it would take weeks to prototype, and let it die. Now I go from concept to working MVP in a weekend. The constraint shifted from "can I build this" to "should I build this" - which is a much better problem to have.

The stack that works for me: Lovable for frontend, Replit for backend, Claude API for the AI layer, Neon for Postgres. Not fancy, but it ships.

The biggest lesson: AI doesn't replace the need for experience and taste. It amplifies it. Your decades of context about what makes good software - that's the real asset. Claude is just fast hands.

I remember learning and writing Cobol with with the Microsoft Cobol compiler on my Tandy as I was training at the local VoTech and working as a night operator on an IBM mainframe flipping tapes. I can categorically say that writing code with Antigravity is worlds different than those early days. It is inspiring, but for me its more about understanding the models and how they do their magic. At 67 I'm refreshing my calculus, linear algebra, and statistics in an effort to be able to read the papers on the subject. In the future, I'm imagining the norm being an automated layer for coding, similar to compilers of today, that take natural language and produce trusted, reliable and performant code all the way down to the machine level. The real work will be developing the models and their layered and optimized machine level interfaces and implementation. It is all kind of amazing.

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-1

It 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.

Is HN dead? Why are people commenting on a vapid post by a brand new account, which reads like an ad, and they're not questioning anything..?

> 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.

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.

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/

The "occasional goofing off and wrecking everything" part is so real. What I've found is that the longer a context window gets, the more Claude starts confidently hallucinating its own previous decisions. We've started treating sessions like shifts: fresh context, explicit state summary at the top, specific task scope. Dramatically fewer "why did you just rewrite the entire auth module" moments.

The re-ignition thing resonates though. There's something about having a collaborator that removes the activation energy of starting. The blank file problem is real and brutal at 25, probably more so at 60 when you know exactly how much work lies ahead. AI doesn't eliminate the hard parts but it compresses the "ok where do I even begin" phase from hours to minutes.

What are you building?

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.

COM !! I remember that was the biggest idea that I learned and thought if I can get it right, I will be the best programmer ever. And to learn, I bought my most expensive book by Dale Rogerson if I remember the author's name correctly. But it was a different time and soon everyone was talking about Java. Just nostalgia and I remember my past.

I feel the same way but I am in my 30s. In my case I have had projects for years sitting in my brain, cooking up how I want them built. Well, Claude is amazing for brain dumping to. I have finally broken ground on my dream projects and they are better than I could have ever imagined. I get to instruct Claude to use the exact tools I wanted.

Hoping to start blogging about some of these projects in the future.

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.

I'm 62, and it's had the opposite effect on me. I've never stopped loving writing code, learning new things, trying random stuff, etc. I code all day, and spend more time playing with stuff in the evenings (the main difference is I'm sipping some scotch while I do it). Having to use LLM's at work has sucked most of the joy out of my work. Fighting with them, keeping them on track, catching hallucinations before they go too far, wasted effort...it's exhausting me like nothing else in my 40+ year career.

You have never been on HN before and yet you feel the need to tell the community something vague and useless but which happens to align with LLM hype?

I remember my first few weeks of Claude Code. The high will wear off as you bump into the limitations, and then it starts to feel like you're more of a "manager of a junior-ish dev." The work shifts to clarity of intent and capturing edge cases, rather than purely coding. It's a fun time when you first jump in, but don't be surprised when your excitement reverts back to baseline.

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.

Green account ending in "cc". I didn't realize Hacker News was doing ads now.

> I’m chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep.

Let’s get you to bed, gramps, you can talk to your French friend tomorrow.

This is great to hear.

I am 43. I used to code as a kid and I've dabbled in it here and there, but I quickly realised I didn't want to code as a career, but now with these new tools I am building again and it's great, because I'm building the things that work for me.

To manage my life there was a todo app I used, now I've built my own, don't need to pay for it and it works exactly as I want it and now I also have a few ideas for other things I Want to do.

It's great, it feels like we might be able to start taking control of our tech back again now, when we can build the tools ourselves that work the way we want, we don't have to worry about the nonsense companies are sticking into there products, we can make things work exactly as we want it.

I think that I understand you. I started programming in the mid-1960s as a kid and now in my mid-70s I have been retired for two years (except for occasional small gigs for old friends). Nothing special about me but I have had the pleasure of working with or at least getting to know many of the famous people in neural networks and AI since the mid-1980s.

My current passion is pushing small LLMs as far as I can using tools and agentic frameworks. The latest Qwen 3.5 models have me over the moon. I still like to design and code myself but I also find it pleasurable to sometimes use Claude Code and Antigravity.

I am 60 in October, I have a couple of PyQt projects that were desktop apps, specialised tools I use for Electrical Engineering and Control/Safety Systems design and build.

So I decided that I wanted web apps, something that is probably beyond me in any reasonable time, if at all, if I was to code myself by hand.

For my coding AI "stack" I am now running OpenClaw sitting on top of Claude Code, I find the OpenClaw can prompt Claude Code better and keep it running for me without it stopping for stupid questions. Plus I have connected OpenClaw to my Whatsapp so I can ask how it is going or give instructions to the OpenClaw while not at the keyboard.

One app was a little complex with 35,000 loc, plus libraries etc. I reckon I had spent maybe 2500 hours on it over some years, but a significant part of that was developing the algorithm/workflow that it implemented - I only knew roughly what I wanted when I started, writing several to throw away at the beginning.

AI converted it to a webapp overnight, with a two sentance prompt, without intervention of any kind.

It took me another 15 minutes and a couple of small changes, mostly dependancies issues, and I had a working version of the same app that was literally 95%+ of the original, in terms of funcitonality and use.

I have a bunch of ideas for things I want to make that I probably never would have been able to otherwise.

I am just totally unable to fathom people that just make a blanket proclamation that AI is good for nothing. I can accept that it is not good for everything, it may cause some social disruption and the energy use is questionable, but improving, but not useful? Wake up.

A few years younger than OP, and started programming somewhere around 1982. The technology is obviously interesting, the capabilities are fascinating. I use LLMs a very large portion of every day.

The problems, as ever, are 1) what negative things are enabled by the technology, 2) do the positive things that are enabled by the technology outweigh those ("is the price worth paying?"), and 3) how much harm will "stupid" and/or "evil" cause as a result of the technology?

And so on.

The fact that a thing is exciting or interesting or stimulating is neat, for sure, but as always there is no relevant thought given to ramifications.

Humans lag well behind technological advancement, and this particular wave is moving faster than perhaps anything else (because prior technological advances enable it, etc).

It's cool that you enjoy it. Me, too. I might enjoy shooting heroin into my eyeballs, too, right up until I don't.

I'm 45 and I feel exactly the same way.

Such a big part of coding becomes mundane after a while. Constantly solving variations of the same kinds of problems.

Now Claude does it at my direction and I get so much more done!

But maybe even more important: It gets me to go outside my comfort zone and try things I wouldn't normally try because of the time it would take me to figure it out.

Like: Wat if I used this other audio library? I don't have to figure it out, I just pass in the interface I need to implement and get 90% of a working solution.

AI augmented programming couldn't have come at a better time and I'm really happy with it!

I know a guy who first tried programming at uni using a mainframe. He handed in his first program and was told to retrieve the result the next day. The following day he went to pick up his results and got an error listing. He decided coding wasn't for him. A few years later, he saw a C64 and started coding in BASIC and it turned into a career.

I started out with an 8 bit micro so I really enjoy tinkering and coding. AI doesn't seem attractive at all.

It's not only about what you do, but also about how you do it.

The primary reason I do programming is for me. I'm 51. It's always been that way for me.

First with LOGO on the Apple ][, making the turtle move around the screen and follow your commands. It was magic.

Then discovering BASIC, and the ability to turn the pixels on and off and make them any color you like.

Making my Amiga talk with the "SAY" command.

The first time I dialed a BBS in the dead of night with my Commodore 64 and my 300 baud modem, watching those colorful letters sloowly make their way across the TV screen...

Running my own BBS software and dialing in from my cousin's house at Thanksgiving...

Putting up my own web page and cgi-bin scripts....

It's all been magic, and it's all been just for me.

So when you remove everything else, all the cruft and crap,

I will still be programming just for me.

I have seen more reactions of people about this tech than actual implementations made possible which pushed the boundaries further. It is an amplifier of technical debt in mostly naive(people experienced in bad patterns) user base.

Take anthropic for example, they have created MCP/claude code.

MCP has the good parts of how to expose an API surface and also the bad parts of keeping the implementation stuck and force workarounds instead of pushing required changes upstream or to safely fork an implementation.

Claude code is orders of magnitude inefficient than plainly asking an llm to go through an architecture implementation. The sedentary black-box loops in claude code are mind bending for anyone who wants to know how it did something.

And anthropic/openai seems to just rely of user momentum to not innovate on these fundamentals because it keeps the token usage high and as everyone knows by now a unpredictable product is more addictive than a deterministic one.

We are currently in the "Script Monkey" phase of AI dev tools. We are automating the typing, but we haven't yet automated the design. The danger is that we’re building a generation of "copy-paste" architects who can’t see the debt they’re accruing until the system collapses under its own weight.

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

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.

I'm much younger, just 42, but due to other medical problems, my attention span was being reduced. I've been programming profesionally for about 25 years, but the last years I was putting myself more into other roles, because being able to focus on code for a few hours uninterrupted is a luxury that I don't have anymore. I was honestly thinking I'll have to retire early. That was until I've tried Claude Code last year. It feels like a superpower. I can guide it, I can review it, I don't need it for thinking, I need it for writing code and under very strict guidance, it does that well. I feel like this extends the years I can do software well into to the future. In a way, I welcome masses thinking AI can produce software on it's own, it gives me hopes for more earning in the future for me.

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.