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

Veterans unite!

I can understand how a technology, this one or any others, can be a fun and interesting tool, a creative one even, but a few things bother me a lot about it which all can be summarized as what Ivan Illich called "Tools for Conviality".

Simply put, we delegate a freedom of use and cognitive power to complex tools and organizations that control and shapes them. One can argue that it's kind of the same if I decide to code any kind of programs the 'old' way, especially using native language, albeit their exist toolchains and OSes that are open source and thus technically free of monolithic take over.

Furthermore those LLMs tools seem to me like the transhumanists cybernetic enhancements of cyberpunk dystopia, splitting Humanity between those of us that would be able to afford them and the others that are left off the competitive arena. Again, an issue that were still there to some degree in a capitalist economy but where the real entry to programming was just a computer and an internet connection to some extent, a way more democratic and affordable goal than having a subscription to a Big Bad Corporation owning everything about you and your creation, where 'free' non local models are not a real answer here either.

Any new technology have some good potential, sure, it's obvious even. I don't think the path they naturally lead to are always the best we could take though, and I hope we wake up to the fact our society are nothing short of democratic* when the economical entities that govern us is nothing but.

* Well, I don't even think we could call our political systems democratic without any kind of random selection anyways. A pastiche of one at best.

The best part is, Active Server Pages, COM components, VB6 are also made viable once again through the use of AI.

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.

viagra for swe

Building things as I read this.

Same! 61, been at it since 18. I can't put the prompting stick down. I have way too many projects at one time to keep up with.

53 here, coded in Assembler in late 80s, then C, Turbo Pascal - you know the route. 30 years later i am finishing all the products i started and never could finish because i for the love of god can not wrap my head around Frontend Design.

My first finished product: ZIB, a RSS Reader inspired by Innoreader, just free ;)

This whole thread feels like an Iranian cyber attack.

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.

Perhaps I shouldn't say this but I feel that with the current LLMs I've found "my people" :)

LFG Grandpa

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".

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).

I'm 64 years old. I'm on an airplane _right now_ vibe coding in C#. I have written code professoinally every day for over 40 years, and now I'm invigorated! It's the same thrill as when I wrote my first Fortran or IBM BAL programs back in 1979.

Same here, 60 and few months and I'm excited about AI

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

As a father of 4 children who’s married, I haven’t had time in years to pursue any of my software hobbies. The nights playing with arch Linux, fussing with half built oss projects - I can’t justify the time anymore but I still Enjoy them. The cloud and Kubernetes came along, I told my wife this was something I had to learn and throw myself at. Despite spending tons of family time instead in my lab in my basement and trying to push those techs at work - I got my butt handed to me - felt like a young man’s game for every interview I went to.

At home, this has changed. Claude helped me setup a satellite dish, tune it, recompiled goesrec, for me and built a website to serve it - and my family dynamic was only “slightly interrupted” (daddy are you working still?). But it worked! And now I log in and tend to my projects with terminus instead of blindly go through the news or social media. Amazing! I’m still throwing myself at a new tech but way less invasve to my personal/family time.

At work though, i have been made into an absolute powerhouse. I invested the time years ago fussing with those oss projects and arch Linux or setting up lan parties and fixing my buddies rigs - toiling through terrible codebases at companies, deploying bad infrastructure, owning it and learning the hard way how to succeed - and it all is paying off and now 10x. AI can’t replace my judgement in the context of my org - maybe in time as the org shifts, but not for a few years.

The existential threat is not to me, at least for 5y - it’s when I’m asked - how do we get more features out the door?

* More headcount? Not unless they’re rockstars - more tokens.

* offshore talent? No, context switching and TZ - just more tokens.

* fly by night software startup xyz? No I’ll just write my own fault injection framework for $5 tailored to this project.

* consultants? Nope - pretty easy to try and fail fast and rewrite - again building to suite - software is disposable.

* oh no it was written in language xyz or deployed to cloud provider abc - no sweat, we’ll make it work on our cloud provider for $8.

Junior devs and offshore talent are the real losers here - I worry about them. Unless you’re die hard, I’d just assume do the work myself. But how do you accumulate this level of skill without getting paid to do it? I look back - I never got beyond baby projects or hobbies at home. I had to have someone roll the dice on me at a real job cause - rent and shit like that.

For those of you just starting out - I don’t have a great answer for you on how to start out, but - I can say you can install arch Linux, any oss project you want and all the things I did to get started in an afternoon - this is the new normal and embrace it.

For the rest of us it is our cloud moment - use the free tier - get your feet wet - we’re about to go for a hell of a ride. If you stick to the “took ur derbs” and want to keep treating your craft like artisian soap - go ahead, we’ll need those but don’t expect to survive on that

Congratulations! Are you still coding VB using Claude? Or something else.

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

I am saying this in all seriousness, what difference is this to addiction?

This is something already talked about [1]. You are getting the sugar (results) and none of the nutrients (learning).

[1]https://quasa.io/media/the-hidden-dangers-of-ai-coding-agent...

https://hils.substack.com/p/help-my-husband-is-addicted-to-c...

This and a lot of similar HN comments, often by fresh accounts, just read like viral marketing. Not least because of the capitalisation.

Claude Code sure is great. Claud Code and my Codex reignited my passion for programming. Codex and Claude.

Ugh.

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.

I get hate on only using cli. Glad someone else see's a different perspective

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.

Met too - I'm 50 and have spent the past 3 years building AI startups, some successfully and in the last two months I've built two side projects with ccode..its amazingly good in past month with Opus

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!

I think a lot of people have a biased idea of writing code. When you're a good programmer, you will be able to prompt a pretty good concept and navigate through any missteps.

When you have no fucking idea what you're talking about, you cannot fix those issues. Simply telling opus "its broken, fix it" wont help. Sure, eventually it comes with a solution, but you have no idea if it's good.

Its like renting a bunch of construction tools and building a house. Unless you know what's important, you have no idea if your house will fall down tomorrow. At the end of the day, companies will always need an expert to sit there and confirm the code is good.

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

Everything in this post is proof that Anthropic will kill it when they go public. I believe in it, so does everyone else.

i dont know, i'm in my 50's, and been doing software engineering work every day professionally since i was 15, and i can say claude code (max) has made me at least 20x more productive... Its definitely an improvement. I think what they've got is top notch, doesnt come close to what the competition are offering, at this point.

"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in"

This is the way. It's the most fun computers have been in decades.

I'm 50. I've been coding since the 6th grade. I'm a director for my org but still have to be hands on because of how small we are.

I only ever wanted to code.

I've spent decades developing mentorship, project management, and planning skills. I spent decades learning networking, databases, systems administration, testing, scrum, agile, waterfall, you name it. Every skill was necessary to build good software.

But I only ever wanted to code.

And I've spent decades burning out. I'm burt out on terrible documentation, tedious boiler plate and systems that don't interoperate well. I despise closed ecosystems, dependency management gone mad, terrible programming languages, over abstraction and I have fundamental and philosophical objections to modern software development practices.

I only ever wanted to code and I just couldn't do it anymore. And then AI happened.

This has been liberating for me.

The mountainous pile of terrible documentation written for somebody that has 36 years less experience? Ask the AI to find that one nugget I need.

That horrific mind numbingly tedious boilerplate? Doesn't matter if it's code, xml, yaml, or anything else. Have the AI do the busy work while I think about the bigger picture.

This nodejs npm dependency hell? Let the AI figure it out. Let the AI fix yet another breaking change and I'll review.

That hard to find bug? Let the AI comb through the logs and find the evidence. Present it to me with recommendations for a fix. I'll decide the path forward.

That legacy system nobody remembers? Let the AI reverse engineer it and generate docs and architectural diagrams. Use that to build the replacement strategy.

I've found a passion for active development that I've been missing for a very long time. The AI tools put power back in my hands that this bloated and sloppy industry took from me. Best of all it leverages the skills I've spent decades honing.

I can use the tools to engineer high quality solutions in an environment that has not been conducive to doing so on an individual level for a very long time. That is powerful and very motivating for somebody like me.

But I still fear the future. I fear a future where careless individuals vibe code a giant pile of garbage 10,000x the size of the pile of muck we have today. And those of us who actually try and follow good engineering practices will be right back to where we started: not able to get anything done because we're drowning in a sea of bullshit.

At least until that happens I'm going to be hyper productive and try to build the well engineered future I want to see. I've found my spark again. I hope others can do the same.

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.

The framework fatigue angle in this thread is real. I spent years maintaining legacy JS and CSS codebases, watching the ecosystem reinvent the same dropdown menu in Backbone, then Angular, then React, then Vue. What I didn't expect is that all that time understanding the actual DOM, specificity rules, and browser quirks would become useful again — when Claude goes sideways on an old codebase, the underlying mental model is what lets you catch it. Vibe-coding isn't replacing that knowledge, it's finally giving it a place to move fast.

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Young people who consider studying CS should reflect on the fact that the marketing oriented part of boomers and Gen-X are vile people who will use you and sell you out at any moment.

They started with co-opting DEI in open source so they could retain their positions without working. Part of the DEI people now probably pivoted to Trump.

Now they sell you out by promoting their intellectual wheelchairs, because they no longer care about future employment.

The three star bloggers that promote AI are all Gen-X.

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.