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

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, completely understand that viewpoint. It’s bizarre how many people hate it. Everything I can do with LLM’s is amazing.

Same at 42. I've been making software for 30 years and the gap between what I can envision and what I can code in a single day is so huge that it takes all the steam out of me. With agentic coding I can move at a pace that feels right again.

Getting real oldschool runescape runecrafting vibes here

Is this a repost? I saw an extremely similar post a few months ago, even down to that last line.

I get it , I did lost my interest in coding, didn't make sense to me anymore. Now, I can't stop

I like thec concept of being able to quickly turn thoughts into actionable projects but I do miss the financial strain, years of study, trials and tribulations and the blood sweat and tears of the old school journey that created those life-long memories of that aha moment you spent months, if not years trying to achieve. ~Respect The Grind~

“Hell-ya brother”

100% agree even with half your experience.

I've never built anything outside of a python notebook before, but Claude Code felt like magic to me.

I 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.

Some times it feels amazing, sometimes it feels like doomscrolling.

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.

Curious, what are you building?

Almosts same history here. 61 years, 40 as developer. More passionate and productive than ever thanks to those tools.

Me too. I’m loving it.

I'm 120 and my waifu performs better than any girl I've ever had.

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.

as a 22 year old it's interesting to see how things are going to span out. o've 0 idea what i spend my time building my expertise on.

luckily i'm trusting my gut that staying away from cheap dompamine and following what's cool might just land somewherere

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.

51 here. I code professionally and as a hobby/side-projects.

I loved coding before and love it still now.

I'm with you on the liberation not just with building, but I've also learned so much and so fast with LLM's the past few years.

Kinda scary like a motor bike, too.

God speed, you! And meh the haters and pontificators.

Here's a word I learned yesterday, my gift should you chose to accept - occhiolism.

Same. 52 year old CTO here.

Please think further than just the passion of code, mind implication of your projects and what you work on, in particular in regards to climate change and energy crisis. Coding, like any other form of engineering, cannot be done just for self interest and without ethics or conscience.

62, similar path, same renewed passion combined with my entrepreneurial mindset. These are good times for us old codgers.

The whole 'software craftsmanship' thing was hilarious from the get-go. Software is not furniture, where the best examples will stand the test of time. It all ends up, good or bad, in a figurative landfill. But if it is a thing, AI is going to soon be a ten armed very skilled octopus. If you weren't having fun all this time, well, the joke's on you. Might as well use the new tools to start having fun now.

Shuffling through my 70's here. It's still mind blowing to be able to build stuff that would take orders of magnitude more time and effort otherwise but today's AI is still an idiot savant though the ratio of savant to idiot continues to improve. Since good prompting/specing is the key to success, the most disappointing aspect of today's AI is its inability to be a better brainstorming design partner where the limitation is how utterly pedestrian the AI's contributions typically are.

yup, I have to cutback now, started to get palpitations from too many all nighters.

Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!

im 58 and Cluade has given me everything i wanted to do in my 20's and on, and that is coding, I have some programming skills and understand making software, but with claude, i am building much faster and it is crazy how do the stuff is,

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.

I'm 73 (all the way retired). I'm in love with creating software again.

I wrote my first computer program in 1967. Since, it's been one fascinating thing after another but, for me, the modern age had become dull. The thought of figuring out another API or framework makes me need a nap.

Now I can have an idea, negotiate with Milo (Claude Code integrated with a neo4j graph database because now I can!) and it's off to the races.

Did I learn CYPHER, the neo4j query language? Nope. Am I the master of Agent SDK? Nope. Milo is my cognitive partner. I am inspired.

Ideas I had years ago are off the back burner. More new ideas flood my brain. I am set free. It feels like love. I lay awake at night thinking of things to do.

I am so grateful that I lived to see this day and still have the intellectual flexibility to enjoy it.

Let's gooooo !!!

I wish I have the same energy once I am your age !

I'm writing this at 4am on a Friday night (Saturday morning now I guess), hacking up a next-gen Faxing platform. Had it on my mind for years and never had the time for the coding or the research I needed to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

Claude has made my coding sessions WAY more productive and helps me find bugs and plan features like never before.

I'm also dealing with some career bullshit, so having a tool like this has helped me re-discover what I love about computing that capitalism has beaten out of me.

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

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.

57 here. I haven’t been this charged up since Navigator 1.1

Retire at 60! Lucky one. In my country it's 67!

I can not read or write code, always wanted to thou, in last three months I have made a couple of web apps, love how lego like coding is when the blocks are made for you by LLMs.

This sounds super cool.

What does your dev stack look like?

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?

I've heard this from so many greybeards... including me!

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.

I too had the "ok, I better dive in", rather than ducking out epiphany. Similar story, 37 years of IT, many roles, top performer, yada yada yada. I bought a MacBook pro 3 weeks ago(all the cool kids are doing it). I've been developing various automated audit and compliance based projects with Claude and openai. Having been a developer for perhaps 20 of those years, I find this new experience amazing.

I've been leveraging a lay audience (one of my teams) to deep dive requirements, wants etc.

Anyway, I'm so torn. I like these people, I hate to see them lose their jobs. I'll retire soon, I want to find a better, "feel good role" than my current, yet very lucrative situation.

I want to leverage my years of good software design for good. Where, for who?

--old lost IT guy in FL

And I hear "why am I helping you code me out of a job". I scare them with "if you help, you'll stay", assuming they get that what I really mean is "if you duck away, bury you're head in the sand, you'll be out"

Bwahaha! I'm 55 and just started grad school at an R1 because I can't compete. Fucking scary as hell! My lab partner is 23, I get up as my peers are going to bed, and I work hard to not say, "In my day..." BUT, I love being enrolled. The resources are incredible and networking is in high gear again.

Like a "spontaneous" public testimonial that someone converted to $ideology.

This is likely fake and an ad. In case it isn't, consider treatment for AI psychosis.

I have found similar energy, not in code, but rather in making AI generated videos of little stories. Or even AI generated paintings that I’d like to replicate by hand and put up in my home.

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 2.0

I have no other desires, I have no other goals, I don’t care. I or better yet - someone else, must do it.

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 software

Just 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.