alt Hacker NewsI'm 56 and still coding full-time. My least favorite part of the job has always been trying to learn some brand new tech, googling with 47 tabs open, and you don't even know enough to ask the right questions yet. Turns out you were stuck on something so beginner that Stack Overflow didn't even have a post on it. ChatGPT has made that part of the job soooooo much less painful. But I'm not ready to let Claude run wild yet. I still want to understand everything I'm pasting.
There is a lot more Claude Code can do for you that an AI chat bot can't because it a) has tool access b) has access to your source code.
- Root cause and fix failures.
- Run any code "what if scenario".
- Performance optimizations.
- Refactor.
There's no reason why you shouldn't (and you should) read all the code and understand it after Claude does any work for you but the experience vs. the "old" SO model of looking for some technical detail is very different.