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

Tools like Claude Code are the ultimate cheat code for me and have breathed new life into my desire to create

I'm in my 60s and retiring this summer. I feel the opposite. Agents have removed most of the satisfaction and fulfilment from designing, building, testing and completing a feature or component. And if frameworks are a problem, learning to create simply and efficiently without them has its own sense of satisfaction.

Maybe it's a question of expectations. I suspect weavers felt the same with the arrival of mechanised looms in the industrial revolution. And it may be that future coders learn to get their fulfilment otherwise using agents.

I can absolutely see the attraction to business of agents and they may well make projects viable that weren't previously. But for this Luddite, they have removed the joy.

Same age, same situation.

I got completely fed up of continually having to learn new incantations to do the same shit I’ve been doing for decades without enough of a value add on top. I know what I want to build, and I know how to architect and structure it, but it’s simply not a good investment of my increasingly limited time to learn the umpteenth way to type code in simply to display text, data, and images on the web - especially when I know that knowledge will be useful for maybe, if I’m lucky, a handful of years before I have to relearn it again for some other opinionated framework.

It’s just not interesting and I’ve become increasingly resentful of and uninterested in wasting time on it.

Claude, on the other hand, is a massive force multiplier that enables me to focus on the parts of software development I do enjoy: solving the problems without the bother of having to type it all in (like, in days of old, I’d already solved the problem before my fingers touched the keyboard but the time-consuming bit was always typing it all in, testing and debugging - all of that is now faster but especially the typing part), focussing on use cases and user experience.

And I don’t ever have to deal directly with CSS or Tailwind: I simply describe the way I want things to look and that’s how the end up looking.

It’s - so far at any rate - the ultimate in declarative programming. It’s awesome, and it means I can really focus on the quality of the solution, which I’m a big fan of.

I'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.

You know you could just choose a framework and stick with it? The way you look down on "the whole profession" for what's basically a straw man and your own decision is a bit bizarre. Especially coupled with the fact that tech has never moved so fast as right now, being on top of the AI-game is a target changing a hundred times faster than frontend frameworks back in the days.

“yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details”

Implementation details can very much matter though. I see this attitude from my managers that now submit huge PRs, and it is becoming a big problem.

I definitely agree that these tools allow one with an in-depth developer background to cover territory that was too much work previously. But plop me into a Haskell codebase, and I guarantee I’d cause all kinds of problems even with the best intentions and newest models. But the ramp up for learning these things has collapsed dramatically, and that’s very cool.

I still don’t want to have to learn all the pitfalls of those frameworks though. Hopefully we will converge on a smaller number, even if it’s on tooling that isn’t my favourite.

Turning 50 this year.

Coding has never _stopped_ being a passion for me, but my increasingly limited time becomes an issue.

And Claude code (and cursor) saves me So. Much. Time.

I only have 10-20 active years ahead of me, so this is really, really important. Young ppl don’t get it.

> It'll also be good to see leetcode die.

Agreed. Leetcode caused more harm than good.

> yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details

Where do I even begin...yes, you should care about implementation details unless you're only going to write stuff you run locally for your own amusement.

> 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.

They often do solve business problems around responsive design, security and ux.

Currently working maintenance with one foot in a real legacy system and the other foot in modern systems the difference is immense.

Youthful 40 here, had to comment on this:

>> tired of the never ending rat race of keeping up with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks

Instead of just keeping up with the latest development frameworks, I also now have to keep up with the latest AI frameworks. I spent a week at my $ job just installing plugins, requesting permissions, debugging issues with the agents, before I went back to writing code myself (plumbing between the latest frameworks) because I'm expected to get stuff done in addition to managing agents that were supposedly going to do my work for me.

My personal agentic AI coding setup never fully materialized while I have been chasing the latest crazes and I am back to handwriting my personal code too (with AI chat help) until I manage to stick to a particular setup.

Anyway, I feel like the rat race just opened yet another front. And I bet I'll still be expected to leetcode in my next technical interview (still was in 2025) in addition to leetprompting or whatever the next segment on interviews will be.

You truly speak for many. I don't have the energy to center a div anymore, and to be honest, that time was thrown away [excluding money, a pretty big exclusion]. I am sure my boss's "Uber for cats" will work, I just like using AI at this point. I can iterate on 15 "Uber for cats" with 200 centered divs, spitting out documentation and excellent objects all day.

But the real talk we need to have is... "Uber for cats"

Not nearly your age but I agree with your sentiments entirely. I mainly focused on using computing not for business purposes but scientific purposes and how we can forward science using compute and technology and I’ve felt much the same way for some time. The new layers and layers of abstraction added little in the way of productivity to getting to the root problems I wanted to and there have always only been so many hours in the day and dollars in the sponsoring agency’s purse to pursue new innovative work.

Now a lot can be cast off to LLMs to focus on the problem space and the innovative computing use around them. It’s been exciting to not worry about arbitrary idiosyncrasies and machete through jungles of technical minutia to get to the clearing. I still have to deal with them but less of them. And I don’t have to commit nearly as much in the technical space to memory to address problems, I can often focus on higher level architectural decisions or new approaches to problems. It’s been quite enjoyable as well.

> 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

I kinda feel the same way when I visit Home Depot once a year

> 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

Have you tried Claude? No, Opus? No, not that version, it's two weeks old, positively ancient lol. Oh wait, now OpenClaw is the cool thing around the block.

My dude, the rat race just became a rat sprint. I hope you're keeping up, you're no spring chicken any more.

I also find these things incredibly annoying. But I've been actively working in webdev the past couple of years so I was actually keeping up with stuff. And I still consider this a cheat-code.

It makes it so easy to cut through the bullshit. And I've never considered myself scared of asking "stupid" questions. But after using these AI tools I've noticed that there are actually quite a few cases where I wouldn't ask (another human) a question.

Two examples: - What the hell does React mean when they say "rendering"? Doesn't it just output HTML/a DOM tree and the browser does the actual rendering? Why do they call it rendering? - Why are the three vectors in transformer models named query, key & value? It doesn't really make sense, why do they call it that?

In both cases it turns out, the question wasn't really that stupid. But they're not the kind of question I'd have turned to Stackoverflow for.

It really is a bit like having a non-human quasi-expert on most topics at your fingertips.

agree with u papa, fuck leetcode!

> as if solving business problems just became too boring

And yet, having customers and listening to them is the whole point.

Anything that re-ignites a person's zest for thinking and creating is a net gain.

That said, it is paradoxical that the catalyst in this case is a technology that replaces thinking.

[dead]

Nah man. I understand the frustration, but this is a glass is half empty view.

You have decades of expert knowledge, which you can use to drive the LLMs in an expert way. Thats where the value is. The industry or narrative might not have figured that out yet, but its inevitable.

Garbage in, garbage out still very much applies in this new world.

And just to add, the key metric to good software hasn't changed, and won't change. It's not even about writing the code, the language, the style, the clever tricks. What really matters is how well does the code performs 1 month after it goes live, 6 months, 5 years. This game is a long game. And not just how well does the computer run the code, but how well can the humans work with the code.

Use your experience to generate the value from the LLMs, cuase they aren't going to generate anything by themselves.

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

I must say I find this idea, and this wording, elitist in a negative way.

I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping.

Chances are, you were able to accumulate your expert knowledge only because:

- book writing and authorship was democratized away from the church and academia

- web content publication and production were democratized away from academia and corporations

- OSes/software/software libraries were all democratized away from corporations through open-source projects

- computer hardware was democratized away from corporations and universities

Each of the above must have cost some gatekeepers some revenue and opportunities. You were not really an idiot just because you benefited from any of them. Analogously, when someone else benefits at some cost to you, that doesn't make them an idiot either.

> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.

I've been a tech lead for years and have written business critical code many times. I don't ever want to go back to writing code. I am feeling supremely empowered to go 100x faster. My contribution is still judgement, taste, architecture, etc. And the models will keep getting better. And as a result, I'll want to (and be able to) do even more.

I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities.

Any "idiot" can build their own software tailored to how their brains think, without having to assemble gobs of money to hire expensive software people. Most of them were never going to hire a programmer anyway. Those ideas would've died in their heads.

This is really interesting to me; I have the opposite belief.

My worry is that any idiot can prompt themselves to _bad_ software, and the differentiator is in having the right experience to prompt to _good_ software (which I believe is also possible!). As a very seasoned engineer, I don't feel personally rugpulled by LLM generated code in any way; I feel that it's a huge force multiplier for me.

Where my concern about LLM generated software comes in is much more existential: how do we train people who know the difference between bad software and good software in the future? What I've seen is a pattern where experienced engineers are excellent at steering AI to make themselves multiples more effective, and junior engineers are replacing their previous sloppy output with ten times their previous sloppy output.

For short-sighted management, this is all desirable since the sloppy output looks nice in the short term, and overall, many organizations strategically think they are pointed in the right direction doing this and are happy to downsize blaming "AI." And, for places where this never really mattered (like "make my small business landing page,") this is an complete upheaval, without a doubt.

My concern is basically: what will we do long term to get people from one end to another without the organic learning process that comes from having sloppy output curated and improved with a human touch by more senior engineers, and without an economic structure which allows "junior" engineers to subsidize themselves with low-end work while they learn? I worry greatly that in 5-10 years many organizations will end up with 10x larger balls of "legacy" garbage and 10x fewer knowledgeable people to fix it. For an experienced engineer I actually think this is a great career outlook and I can't understand the rug pull take at all; I think that today's strong and experienced engineer will be command a high amount of money and prestige in five years as the bottom drops out of software. From a "global outcomes" perspective this seems terrible, though, and I'm not quite sure what the solution is.

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

It may look the same, but it isn't the same.

In fact if you took the time to truly learn how to do pure agentic coding (not vibe coding) you would realize as a principal engineer you have an advantage over engineers with less experience.

The more war stories, the more generalist experience, the more you can help shape the llm to make really good code and while retaining control of every line.

This is an unprecedented opportunity for experienced devs to use their hard won experience to level themselves up to the equivalence of a full team of google devs.

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

No, it can't. I use claude code and AMP a lot, and yet, unless I pay attention, it easily generate bad code, introduces regressions while trying to fix bugs, get stuck in suboptimal ideas. Modularity is usually terrible, 50 year ideas like cohesion and coupling are, by the very nature of it, mostly ignored except in the most formal rigid ways of mimicry introduced by post-training.

Coding agents are wonderful tools, but people who think they can create and mantain complex systems by themselves are not using them in an optmal way. They are being lazy, or they lack software engineering knowledge and can't see the issues, and in that case they should be using the time saved by coding agents to read hard stuff and elevate their technique.

I’m with you here.

I grew up without a mentor and my understanding of software stalled at certain points. When I couldn’t get a particular os API to work, in Google and stack overflow didn’t exist, and I had no one around me to ask. I wrote programs for years by just working around it.

After decades writing software I have done my best to be a mentor to those new to the field. My specialty is the ability to help people understand the technology they’re using, I’ve helped juniors understand and fix linker errors, engineers understand ARP poisoning, high school kids debug their robots. I’ve really enjoyed giving back.

But today, pretty much anyone except for a middle schooler could type their problems into a ChatGPT and get a more direct answer that I would be able to give. No one particularly needs mentorship as long as they know how to use an LLM correctly.

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

No they can't. They think they can, but they will still need to put in the elbow grease to get it done right.

But, in my case (also decades of experience), I have had to reconcile with the fact that I'll need to put down the quill pen, and learn to use a typewriter. The creativity, ideas, and obsession with Quality are still all mine, but the execution is something that I can delegate.

I echo another reply here, if anything my experience coding feels even more valuable now.

It was never about writing the code—anyone can do that, students in college, junior engineers…

Experience is being able to recognize crap code when you see it, recognizing blind alleys long before days or weeks are invested heading down them. Creating an elegant API, a well structured (and well-organized) framework… Keeping it as simple as possible that just gets the job done. Designing the code-base in a way that anticipates expansion…

I've never felt the least bit threatened by LLMs.

Now if management sees it differently and experienced engineers are losing their jobs to LLMs, that's a tragedy. (Myself, I just retired a few years ago so I confess to no longer having a dog I this race.)

As a Principal SWE, who has done his fair share of big stuff.

I'm excited to work with AI. Why? Because it magnifies the thing I do well: Make technical decisions. Coding is ONE place I do that, but architecture, debugging etc. All use that same skill. Making good technical decisions.

And if you can make good choices, AI is a MEGA force multiplier. You just have to be willing to let go of the reins a hair.

Short answer: use your expertise in complex project.

Story: I'm dev for about 20 years. First time I had totally the same felling when desktop ui fading away in favor of html. I missed beauty of c# winforms controls with all their alignment and properties. My experience felt irrelevant anymore. Asp.net (framework which were sold as "web for backed developers") looked like evil joke.

Next time it have happened with the raise of clouds. So were all my lovely crafted bash scripts and notes about unix command irrelevant? This time however that was not that personal for me.

Next time - fall of scala as a primary language in big data and its replacement with python. This time it was pretty routine.

Oh and data bases... how many times I heard that rdbms is obsolete and everybody should use mongo/redis/clickhouse?

So learn new things and carry on. Understanding how "obsolete" things works helps a lot to avoid silly mistake especially in situation when world literally reinvent bicycle

It's not black/white. There's are scales of complexity and innovation, and at the moment, the LLMs are mostly good (with obvious caveats) at helping with the lower end of the complexity scale, and arguably almost nowhere on the innovation scale.

If, as a principal engineer, you were performing basic work that can easily be replicated by an LLM, then you were wasted and mistasked.

Firstly, high-end engineers should be working on the hard work underlying advances in operating systems, compilers, databases, etc. Claude currently couldn't write competitive versions of Linux, GCC (as recently demonstrated), BigQuery, or Postgres.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, LLMs are good at doing work in fields already discovered and demonstrated by humans, but there's little evidence of them being able to make intuitive or innovative leaps forwards. (You can't just prompt Claude to "create a super-intelligent general AI"). To see the need for advances (in almost any field) and to make the leaps of innovation or understanding needed to achieve those advances still takes smart (+/- experienced) humans in 2026. And it's humans, not LLMs, that will make LLMs (or whatever comes after) better.

Thought experiment: imagine training a version of Claude, only all information (history, myriad research, tutorials, YouTube takes and videos, code for v1, v2, etc.) related to LLMs is removed from the training data. Then take that version and prompt it to create an LLM. What would happen?

I'm surprised that as a principal engineer, you view your greatest skill set as your expertise in programming. While that is certainly an enormous asset, I have never met a principal engineer that hadn't also mastered how to work within the organization to align the right resources to achieve big goals. Working with execs and line managers and engineers directly to bring people together to chase something complex and difficult: that skill is not going to be replaced by LLMs and remains extremely valuable.

I consider myself very good at writing software. I built and shipped many projects. I built systems from zero. Embedded, distributed, SaaS- you name it.

I'm having a lot of fun with AI. Any idiot can't prompt their way to the same software I can write. Not yet anyways.

> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.

My experience is the opposite. Those with a passion for the field and the ability to dig deeply into systems are really excited right now (literally all that power just waiting to be guided to do good...and oh does it need guidance!). Those who were just going through the motions and punching a clock are pretty unmotivated and getting ready to exit.

Sometimes I dream about being laid off from my FAANG job so I have some time to use this power in more interesting than I'm doing at work (although I already get to use it in fairly interesting ways in my job).

IMHO any idiot can create a piece of crap. It takes experience to create good software. Use your experience Luke! Now you have a team of programmers to create what ever you fancy! Its been great for me, but I have only been programming C++ for 36 years.

With all due respect. If _any idiot_ can prompt their way to the _same_ software you’d have written, and your primary value proposition is to churn out code, then you’re… a bit of an outlier when it comes to principal engineers.

Same here, although hopefully won't be retiring soon.

What's missing from this is that iconic phrase that all the AI fans love to use: "I'm just having fun!"

This AI craze reminds me of a friend. He was always artistic but because of the way life goes he never really had opportunity to actively pursue art and drawing skills. When AI first came out, and specifically MidJourney he was super excited about it, used it a lot to make tons and tons of pictures for everything that his mind could think of. However, after awhile this excitement waned and he realized that he didn't actually learn anything at all. At that point he decided to find some time and spend more time practicing drawing to be able to make things by himself with his own skills, not by some chip on the other side of the world and he greatly improved in the past couple of years.

So, AI can certainly help create all the "fun!!!" projects for people who just want to see the end result, but in the end would they actually learn anything?

You don't know what you don't know.

Playing with Claude, if you tell it to do something, it'll produce something. Sometimes it's output is ok, sometimes it's not.

I find I need to iterate with Claude, tell it no, tell it how to improve it's solution or do something in a different way. It's kind of like speed running iterating over my ideas without spending a few hours doing it manually, writing lots of code then deleting it to end with my final solution.

If I had no prior coding knowledge i'd go with what ever the LLM gave me and end up with poor quality applications.

Knowing how to code gives you the advantage still using an LLM. Saying that, i'm pessimistic what my future holds as an older software engineer starting to find age/experince is an issue when an employer can pay someone less with less experience to churn out code with prompts when a lot of time the industry lives by "it's good enough".

Good engineers are way more important than they’ve ever been and the job market tells the story. Engineering job posts are up 10% year over year. The work is changing but that’s what happens when a new technology wave comes ashore. Don’t give up, ride the new wave. You’re uniquely qualified.

I am sorry you feel that way but I feel professionally strongly insulted by your statement.

Specifically the implication high LLM affinity implies low professional competence.

"My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM."

Strong disagree.

I've earned my wings. 5 years realtime rendering in world class teams. 13 years in AEC CAD developing software to build the world around us. In the past two years I designed and architected a complex modeling component, plus led the initial productization and rendering efforts, to my employers map offering.

Now I've managed to build in my freetime the easy-to-use consumer/hobbyist CAD application I always wanted - in two years[0].

The hard parts, that are novel and value adding are specific, complex and hand written. But the amount on ungodly boilerplate needed to implement the vision would have taken either a) team and funding or b) 10 years.

It's still raw and alpha and it's coming together. Would have been totally impossible without Claude, Codex and Cursor.

I do agree I'm not an expert in several of the non-core technologies used - webview2 for .net for example, or xaml. But I don't have to be. They are commodity components, architected to their specific slot, replaceable and rewritable as needed.

As an example of component I _had_ professional competence 15 years ago - OpenGL - I don't need to re-learn. I can just spec quickly the renderpasses, stencil states, shader techniques etc etc and have the LLM generate most of that code in place. If you select old, decades old technlogies and techniques and know what you want the output is very usable most of the time (20 year old realtime rendering is practically already timeless and good enough for many, many things).

[0] https://www.adashape.com/

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

You sound quite jaded. The people I see struggling _the most_ at prompting are people who have not learned to write elegantly. HOWEVER, a huge boon is that if you're a non-native English speaker and that got in your way before, you can now prompt in your native language. Chinese speakers in particular have an advantage since you use fewer tokens to say the same thing in a lot of situations.

> Talk about a rug pull!

Talk to product managers and people who write requirements for a living. A PM at MSFT spoke to me today about how panicked he and other PMs are right now. Smart senior engineers are absorbing the job responsibilities of multiple people around them since fewer layers of communication are needed to get the same results.

Completely the opposite experience here! I am a tech lead with decades of experience with various programming languages.

When it comes to producing code with an llm, most noobs get stuck producing spaghetti and rolling over. It is so bad that I have to go prompt-fix their randomly generated architecture, de-duplicate, vectorize and simplify.

If they lack domain knowledge on top of being a noob it is a complete disaster. I saw llm code pick a bad default (0) for a denominator and then "fix" that by replacing with epsilon.

It isn't the end, it is a new beginning. And I'm excited.

Yes, the LLM can write it. No, the LLM cannot architect a complex system and weave it all together into a functioning, workable, tested system. I have a 400 table schema networked together with relationships, backrefs, services, well tested, nobody could vibe code their way to what I've built. That kind of software requires someone like yourself to steer the LLM.

> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.

My greatest frustration with AI tools is along a similar line. I’ve found that people I work with who are mediocre use it constantly to sub in for real work. A new project comes in? Great, let me feed it to Copilot and send the output to the team to review. Look, I contributed!

When it comes time to meet with customers let’s show them an AI generated application rather than take the time to understand what their existing processes are.

There’s a person on my team who is more senior than I am and should be able to operate at a higher level than I can who routinely starts things in an AI tool but then asks me to take over when things get too technical.

In general I feel it’s all allowed organizations to promote mediocrity. Just so many distortions right now but I do think those days are numbered and there will be a reversion to the mean and teams will require technical excellence again.

> 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!

Really?

The vibe coders are running into a dark forest with a bunch of lobsters (OpenClaw) getting lost and confused in their own tech debt and you're saying they can prompt their way to the same software?

Someone just ended up wiping their entire production database with Claude and you believe that your experience is for nothing, towards companies that need stable infrastructure and predictability.

Cognitive debt is a real thing and being unable to read / write code that is broken is going to be an increasing problem which experienced engineers can solve.

Do not fall for the AI agent hype.

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software

I have been thinking about the "same software"

Because I remember seeing Sonnet 4.5 and I had made comments that time as well that I just wanted AI to stop developing more as the more it develops, the more harm to the economy/engineers it would do than benefit in totality.

It was good enough to make scripts, I could make random scripts/one-off projects, something which I couldn't do previously but I used to still copy-paste it and run commands and I gave it the language to choose and everything. At that time, All I wanted was the models getting smaller/open source.

Now, I would say that even an Idiot making software with AI is gonna reach AI fatigue at one point or another and it just feels so detached with agents.

I do think that we would've been better off in society if we could've stopped the models at sonnet 4.5. We do now have models which are small and competitive to sonnet (Qwen,GLM,[kimi is a little large])

I understand your feelings. You spent years working hard to learn and master a complex craft, and now seeing that work feel almost irrelevant because of AI can be deeply unsettling.

However, this can also be an opportunity to gain some understanding about our nature and our minds. Through that understanding, we can free ourselves from suffering, find joy, and embrace life and the present moment as it is.

I am just finishing the book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and your comment made me think about what is explained in it. Tolle talks about how much of our suffering comes from how deeply we (understandably) tie our core identity and self-worth to our external skills, our past achievements, and our status among peers.

He explains that our minds construct an ego, with which we identify. To exist, this ego needs to create and constantly feed an image of itself based on our past experiences and achievements. Normally we do this out of fear, in an attempt to protect ourselves, but the book explains that this never works. We actually build more suffering by identifying with our mind-constructed ego. Instead of living in the present and accepting the world as it is, we live in the past and resist reality in order to constantly feed an ego that feels menaced.

The deep expertise you built is real, but your identity is so much more than just being a 'principal engineer'. Your real self is not the mind-constructed ego or the image you built of yourself, and you don't need to identify with it.

The book also explores the Buddhist concept that all things are impermanent, and by clinging to them we are bound to suffer. We need to accept that things come and go, and live in the present moment without being attached to things that are by their nature impermanent.

I suggest you might take this distress you are feeling right now as an opportunity to look at what is hurting inside you, and disidentify yourself from your ego. It may bring you joy in your life—I am trying to learn this myself!

Even as a principal engineer, there is an infinite number of things you don't know.

Suppose you get out of your comfort zone to do something entirely new; AI will be much more helpful for you than it is for people who spent years developing their skills.

AI is the great equalizer.

> I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued.

That remains to be seen. There's a huge difference between an experienced engineer using LLMs in a controlled way, reviewing their code, verifying security, and making sure the architecture makes sense, and a random person vibecoding a little app - at least for now.

Maybe that will change in a year or two or five or never, but today LLMs don't devalue expert knowledge. If anything, LLMs allow expert programmers to increase productivity at the same level of quality, which makes them even more valuable compared to entry-level programmers than they were before.

I think you've got this backwards!

I've been working with computers since an Apple ][+ landed in our living room in the early 80s.

My perspective on what AI can do for me and for everyone has shifted dramatically in the last few weeks. The most recent models are amazing and are equipping me to take on tasks that I just didn't have the time or energy for. But I have the knowledge and experience to direct them.

I haven't been this enthused about the possibilities in a long time.

This is a huge adjustment, no doubt. But I think if I can learn to direct these tools better, I am going to get a lot done. Way more than I ever thought possible. And this is still early days!

Just incredible stuff.

I don't find the same, like you, principle/CTO engineer, there's a world of difference between simplistic prompt/vibe coding and building a properly architected/performant/maintainable system with agentic coding.

> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.

I consider myself to have been a 'pretty good' programmer in my heyday. Think 'assembly for speed improvements' good.

Then came the time of 'a new framework for everything, relearn a new paradigm every other week. No need to understand the x % 2 == 0 if we can just npm an .iseven()' era ... which completely destroyed my motivation to even start a new project.

LLMs cut the boilerplate away for me. I've been back building software again. And that's good.

From my point of view, having the llm as co-pilot is like having the junior engineer that the team would never justify the budget to hire. I get quite a bit more done when I can assign the tool a task to work on, work on something else in the meantime, and come back in 5 or 10 minutes to check on its progress and make adjustments.

There are many aspects of software engineering that are fun, but the pure mechanical part gets sold quickly; there are only but so many times you can type "emplace" and feel fulfilled. I'm finding that co-pilot is extremely good at that part.

I might be wrong but this sounds like an ego issue more than anything. Twice you berated less skilled programmers. I’m skilled as well and it did sting when I realized that a relatively new technology could beat me. But there’s so much more to it, especially PMs. PMs find big high value problems and solve them. The coding should be the easy part. If your coding skills are such a big part of your identity and you enjoy the feeling of superiority, a good therapist (chatgpt maybe lol) could be useful.

I'm not sure why you feel devalued or let down, LLM code is a joke and will be a thing of the past after everyone has had their production environment trashed for the nth time by "AI."

I'm in the hard disagree camp. I'm heading towards late 60s now, and have been writing software for all of my working life.

I am wondering how your conclusions are so different from mine. One is you only write "in the small [0]". LLMs are at least as good as a human at turning out "web grade" software in the small. Claude CLI is as good an example of this sort of software as anything. Every week or two I hit some small bug. This type of software doesn't need a "principal software engineer".

The second is you never used an LLM to write software in the large. LLMs are amazing things, far far better than humans at reading and untangling code. You can give some obfuscated javascript and they regurgitate commented code with self explanatory variable and function names in a minute or two. Give them a task and they will happily spit out 1000s of lines of code in 10 minutes or so which is amazing.

Then you look closer, and it's spaghetti. The LLM has no trouble understanding the spaghetti of course, and if you are happy to trust your tests and let the LLM maintain the thing from then on, it's a workable approach.

Until, that is, it gets large enough for a few compile loops to exceed the LLM's context window, then it turns to crap. At that point you have to decompose it into modules it can handle. Turns out decomposition is something current LLMs (and junior devs) are absolutely hopeless at. But it's what a principal software engineer is paid to do.

The spaghetti code is the symptom of that same deficiency. If they decide they need code to do X while working on concept Y, they will drop the code for X right beside the code for Y, borrowing state from Y as needed. The result is a highly interconnected ball of mud. Which the LLM will understand perfectly until it falls off the context window cliff, then all hope is lost.

While LLM ability to implement a complex request as simple isolated parts remains, a principal engineer's job is safe. In fact given LLMs are accelerating things, my guess is the demand will only grow. But I suspect the LLM developers are working hard at solving this limitation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_in_the_large_and_p...

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

Not only it would be good if true, but it is also not true. Good programmers learn how to build things, for the most part, since they know what to build, and have a general architectural idea of what they are going to build. Without that, you are like the average person in the 90s with Corel Draw in their hands, or the average person with an image diffusion model today: the output will be terrible because of lack of taste and ideas.

Same level of engineer here - I feel that the importance of expertise has only increased, just that the language has changed. Think about the engineer who was an expert in Cobol and Fortran but didn't catch the C++ / Java wave. What would you say to them?

LLMs goof up, hallucinate, make many mistakes - especially in design or architecting phase. That's where the experience truly shines.

Plus, it let's you integrate things that you aren't good at (UI for me).

I know that your post has lots of comments, but I'd like to weigh in kindly too.

> I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued.

Listen to the comments that say that experience is more valuable than ever.

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

No they cannot. You and an LLM can build something together far more powerful and sophisticated than you ever could have dreamt, and you can do it because of your decades of experience. A newbie cannot recognize the patterns of a project gone bad without that experience.

> I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon.

Welcome to the industry. :) It happens. Why not take a break? Work on a side project, something you love to do.

> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.

Once upon a time painters and illustrators were not "artists", but archivists and documenters. They were hired to archive what something looked like, and they were largely evaluated on that metric alone. When photography took that role, painters and illustrators had to re-evaluate their social role, and they became artists and interpreters. Impressionism, surrealism, conceptualism, post-modernism are examples of art movements that, in my interpretation, were still attempting to grapple with that shift decades, even a century later.

Today, we SWE are grappling with a very similar shift. People using LLMs to create software are not poor coders any more (or less) than photographers were poor painters. Painters and illustrators became very valuable after the invention of photography, arguably more valuable socially than before.

I am a principal engineer too. In the last 5 months I have been working on a project using the latest LLMs. 5 years ago that project would have required 30 engineers. Now I am alone but need at least 5 more months to have an MVP. You are just not working on projects that are complex and difficult enough. There are so many projects that I have in mind that feel within reach and I would have never considered 5 years ago.

Yes, anyone can generate code, but real engineering remains about judgment and structure. AI amplifies throughput, but the bottleneck is still problem framing, abstraction choice, and trade-off reasoning. Capabilities without these foundations produce fragile, short-lived results. Only those who anchor their work in proper abstractions are actually engineering, no matter who’s writing the code.

youre getting it backwards. anyone can get to something that looks alright in a browser... until you actually click something and it fails spectacularly, leaks secrets, doesn't scale beyond 10 users and is a swamp of a codebase that prevents clean ongoing extension = hard wall for non techies, suddenly the magical LLM stops producing results and makes things worse.

All this senior engineering experience is a critical advantage in these new times, you implicitly ask things slightly different and circumvent these showstoppers without even thinking if you are that experienced. You don't even need to read the code at all, just a glimpse in the folder and scrolling a few meters of files with inline "pragmatic" snippets measured in meters and you know its wrong without even stepping through it. even if the autogenerated vanity unit tests say all green.

Don't feel let down. Slightly related to when Google sprung into existence - everyone has access and can find stuff, but knowing how to search well is an art even today most people don't have, and makes dramatic differences in everyday usage. Amplified now with the AI search results even that often are just convincing nonsense but most people cannot see it. That intuitive feel from hard won experience about what is "wrong" even without having an instant answer what would be "right" is getting more and more the differentiator.

Anyone can force their vibe coded app into some shape thats sufficient for their own daily use and they're used to avoiding their own pitfalls of the tool they created and know are there, but as soon as there's some kind of scaling (scope, users, revenue, ...) involved, true experts are needed.

Even the new agent tools like Claude for X products at the end perform dramatically different in the hands of someone who knows the domain in depth.

Nah - I've also spent decades trying to become the best software developer I can and now it is giving me enormous power. What used to take me 5 days is now taking me a day, and my output is now higher quality. I now finish things properly with the docs, and the nooks and crannies before moving on.

What used to take incompetent developers 5 days - it is still taking them 5 days.

The best programmers I know are the ones most excited about it.

The mediocre programmers who are toxic gate keepers seem to be the ones most upset by it.

I feel it is about being disinterested than about being good. the ones who were not interested(whether good or bad) and were trapped in a job are liberated and happy to see it be automated.

The ones who are frustrated are the ones who were interested in doing(whether good or bad) but are being told by everyone that it is not worth it do it anymore.

As a senior engineer if your value add was "accumulated expert knowledge". Then yes, you are in a bad place.

If instead it was building and delivering products / business value. Good judgement, coordination and communication skills, intuition, etc… then you are now way way more leveraged than you ever were and it has never been greater.

I love it. I can't stand this sentiment and this type of technologist pompous ass. You are why software mostly sucks. You have no imagination. Hopefully the models make your limited, extraordinarily overvalued skill set the last 20 years completely democratized. We will see who is the idiot going forward.

I find fun in using opencode and Claude to create projects but I can't find the energy to run the project or read the code.

Watching this program do stuff is more enjoyable then using or looking at the stuff produced.

But it doesn't produce code that looks or is designed the way I would normally. And it can't do the difficult or novel things.

It is weird because I am the opposite. The symbols were never the objective for me but instead how they all fit together.

Now I am like a perfect weapon because I have the wisdom to know what I want to build and I don't have to translate it to an army of senior engineers. I just have Github Copilot implement it directly.

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

They simply can't in my experience. Most people cannot prompt their way out of a wet paper sack. The HN community is bathed in thoughtful, high quality writing 24/7/365, so I could see how a perception to the contrary might develop.

I urge you to actually try these tools. You will very quickly realize you have nothing to worry about.

In the hands of a knowledgeable engineer these tools can save a lot of drudge work because you have the experience to spot when they’re going off the rails.

Now imagine someone who doesn’t have the experience, and is not able to correct where necessary. Do you really think that’s going to end well?

> 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.

Do you like the craft of programming more than the outcomes? Now you are in a better position than ever to achieve things.

I fancy myself pretty good at writing software, and here's my path in:

All the tools I passed up building earlier in my career because they were too laborious to build, are now quite easy to bang out with Claude Code and, say, an hour of careful spec writing...

You summed up my feelings pretty well, thanks for this counterpoint to usual comments in HN

Indeed, and I noticed companies now are focusing on hiring coops, paying them peanuts and just use AI, and have maybe one senior and one wrangler (engineering/project manager), that’s basically what I have noticed what neo-teams are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_...

I don't understand this sentiment at all.

For me it, feels more like a way integrate search results immediately into my code. Did you also feel threatened by stack overflow?

If you actually try it you'll find it's a multiplier of insight and knowledge.

For me this is a painting vs photography thing

Painting used to be the main way to make portraits, and photography massively democratized this activity. Now everyone can have as many portraits as they want

Photography became something so much larger

Painting didn't disappear though

No worries. True, you need to learn new skills to work properly with Claude. However, 30 yrs of coding experience come in handy to quickly detect it is going in the wrong direction. Especially on an architectural level you need to guide it.

Embrace

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

Well, this is not what the main value of software actually is? Its not about prompting a one shot app, sure there will be some millionaires making an app super successful by coincidence (flapp bird, eg.), but in most cases software & IT engineering is about the context, integration, processes, maintenance, future development etc.

So actually you are in perfect shape?

And no worries: The one who werent good at writing code, will now fail because of administration/uptime/maintenance/support. They will fail just one step later.

That's how progress looks like! We need less to produce more. The less includes less skill and human capital.

For me, LLMs just help a lot with overcoming writer's block and other ADHD related issues.

Based on your comment you’re probably not a very good principal engineer ;)

Hence, you are back in the group of those who should benefit from LLMs. Following your own logic :)

Ps: please don’t take it seriously

very hard to feel sorry of you when countless professions experienced the same in the past - only that they were poor / working class and not overpaid software engineers at FAANG.

also very egocentric & pessimist way to look at things. humankind is much better off when anyone can produce software and skilled experts will always be needed, just maybe with a slightly different skillset.

I thought this was parody until the last sentence.

I think it’s important for you to understand that there were always way more people who loved programming than were able to work professionally as high-level coders. Sure, if you spent most of your working life writing code, you’d be very proficient. But for many, many others, they haven’t been able to spend the time developing those muscles. Modern LLMs really are a joyful experience for people who enjoy software creation but haven’t had the 10,000 hours.

I review PRs daily and people are pushing changes that have basic problems, not to talk about more serious flaws. The amount of code an engineer can produce is higher, but it's also less thought through.

There will be more code with lower quality. If you want to be valued for your expertise, you need to find niches where quality has to stay high. In a lot of the SaaS-world, most products do not require perfection, so more slop is acceptable.

Or you can accept the slop, grind out however more years you need to retire, and in the meanwhile find some new passion.

No offense but you sound more like a “principle coder”, not a principle engineer. At least in many domains and orgs, Most principal engineers are already spending most their time not coding. But -engineering- still take sip much or most of their time.

I felt what you describe feeling. But it lasted like a week in December. Otherwise there’s still tons of stuff to build and my teams need me to design the systems and review their designs. And their prompt machine is not replacing my good sense. There’s plenty of engineering to do, even if the coding writes itself.

CC is not nearly that good. It may never be. It's an amplifier not a replacer.

On the plus side you're retiring soon... imagine if your were a graduate today

What I keep hearing is that the people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones reluctant to embrace LLMs because they are too emotionally attached to "coding" as a discipline rather than design and architecture, which are where the interesting and actually difficult work is done.

I think that the biggest difference is between people who mostly enjoy the act of programming (carefully craft beautiful code; you read and enjoyed "Programming Pearls" and love SICP), vs the people who enjoy having the code done, well structured and working, and mostly see the act of writing it as an annoying distraction.

I've been programming for 40 years, and I've been on both sides. I love how easy it is to be in the flow when writing something that stretches my abilities in Common Lisp, and I thoroughly enjoy the act of programming then. But coding a frontend in React, or yet another set of Python endpoints, is just necessary toil to a desired endpoint.

I would argue that people like you are now in the perfect position to help drive what software needs writing, because you understand the landscape. You won't be the one typing, but you can still be the one architecting it at a much higher level. I've found enjoyment and solace in this.

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software

If you really think it's the reality, then your expert knowledge is not that good to begin with.

Really? I love LLMs because I can't stand the process of taking the model in my brain and putting it in a file. Flow State is so hard for me to hit these days.

So now I spec it out, feed it to an LLM, and monitor it while having a cup of tea. If it goes off the rails (it usually does) I redirect it. Way better than banging it out by hand.

In my experience, the truly best in class have gone from being 10x engineers to being 100x engineers, assuming they embrace AI. It's incredible to watch.

I wouldn't say I'm a 10x-er, but I'm comfortable enough with my abilities nowadays to say I am definitely "above average", and I feel beyond empowered. When I joined college 15 years ago, I felt like I was always 10 steps ahead of everyone else, and in recent years that feeling had sort of faded. Well, I've got that feeling back! So much of the world around me feels frozen in place, whereas I am enjoying programming perhaps as much as when I learned it as a little kid. I didn't know I MISSED this feeling, but I truly did!

Everything in my daily life (be it coding or creating user stories — who has time to use a mouse when you can MCP to JIRA/notion/whatever?) is happening at an amazing speed and with provable higher levels of quality (more tests, better end-user and client satisfaction, more projects/leads closed, faster development times, less bug reports, etc.). I barely write lines of code, and I barely type (often just dictate to MacWhisper).

I completely understand different people like different things. Had you asked me 5 years ago I probably would have told you I would be miserable if I stopped "writing" code, but apparently what I love is the problem solving, not the code churning. I'm not trying to claim my feelings are right, and other people are "wrong" for "feeling upset". What is "right" or "wrong" in matters of feelings? Perhaps little more than projection or a need for validation. There is no "right" or "wrong" about this!

If I now look at average-to-low-tier-engineers, I think they are a mixed bag with AI on their hands. Sometimes they go faster and actually produce code as good as or better than before. Often, though, they lack the experience, "taste" or "a priori knowledge" to properly guide LLMs, so they churn lots of poorly designed code. I'd say they are not a net-positive. But Opus 4.6 is definitely turning the tide here, making it less likely that average engineers do as much damage as before (e.g. with a Sonnet-level model)

On top of this divide within the "programming realm", there's another clear thing happening: software has finally entered the DIY era.

Previously, anyone could already code, but...not really. It would be very difficult for random people to hack something quickly. I know we've had the terms "Script kiddies" for a long time, but realistically you couldn't just wire your own solution to things like you can with several physical objects. In the physical world, you grab your hammer and your tools and you build your DIY solutions — as a hobby or out of necessity. For software...this hadn't really been the case....until now! Yes, we've had no-code solutions, but they don't compare.

I know 65 year olds who have never even written a line of code that are now living the life by creating small apps to improve their daily lives or just for the fun of it. It's inspiring to see, and it excites me tremendously for the future. Computers have always meant endless possibilities, but now so many more people can create with computers! To me it's a golden age for experimentation and innovation!

I could say the same about music, and art creation. So many people I know and love have been creating art. They can finally express themselves in a way they couldn't before. They can produce music and pictures that bring tears to my eyes. They aren't slop (though there is an abundance of slop out there — it's a problem), they are beautiful.

There is something to be said about the ethical implications of these systems, and how artists (and programmers, to a point?) are getting ripped off, but that's an entirely different topic. It's an important topic, but it does not negate that this is a brand new world of brand new artists, brand new possibilities, and brand new challenges. Change is never easy — often not even fair.

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On the bright side, working in tech between 2006 and 2026 means you should be extremely wealthy and able to retire comfortably.

I'm significantly younger but also programmer for two decades since my early teens and am experiencing something similar. CC is so freeing in that it makes those "nice but no time" ideas into reality by doing it next to your main project, almost feels like a drug.

It suddenly turns that dead time while you're waiting for CI, review or response into time where you can work on the fun or satisfying side projects by firing up a few prompts, check an iteration or 2, and then pause again until the next time or while the agent is doing its thing

That was an enjoyable read :) how about that?

> it's like programming with a couple of buddies. Occasionally they goof off and wreck everything,

Nailed it :)

Same for me (even though I am a bit younger). I burned out a couple of times and assumed I will never finish so many sideprojects I have lying around. Now I can just feed them into claude and guide it to completion. It feels great. And yes, ideally I would have more time and energy to do it all by myself, but I don't. And to me results matter, not the tinkering itself, if I would be after that, I would do some code puzzles for fun. But I am rather interested in making ideas reality and AI is helping with that.

Maybe it's like that. But they're drunk. Which means they are very supportive but quite unreliable and have a short memory.

I've caught Claude making the gravest anti pattern mistakes using Elixir and trying to get it to correct them makes the whole thing worse.

It's ok for smaller scoped stuff but actual architectural changes come out worse than before more often than not.

What an ageist quote. I am in my 40s and never stopped coding even as I've become the principal engineer. Claude just frees me from the mundane tasks I'd done a million times before and never wanted to do again if possible, which it now is. I can still throw a fastball without AI, but why would I when I can throw it much faster, with much less effort now, while still enjoying what I am doing?

It's still coding. If you think it's not you probably think that letting the IDE auto-complete or apply refactorings is also not coding.

Same but for me it's 25 years of accumulated personal backlog that I'm finally burning through. Like I've been a project hoarder and now I have a house elf to tidy up and do all that widget fobbering business. I just need to figure out what the rules of the house are.

This idea of LLMs a vehicle of midlife crisis is fascinating. I'm not sure if it's just about "throwing the fastball" though. Most of the usual midlife crisis things are a rejection of virtue. For example: buying a porsche, pickign up a frivolous hobby, or cheating on your wife, these are irresponsible uses of money, time, or attention that a smart, dedicated, family man wouldn't partake in.

In relation to LLM usage I think there's two interepretations. 1) This midlife crisis is a rejetion of empathy, understanding, and social obligation however minute. Writing a one-sentence update on an issue, understanding design decisions of another developer, reading documention are all boilerplate holding them back from their full potential in a perfectly objective experience. Of course, their personal satisfaction still relies on adoption of their products by customers (though decades of viewing customers through advertising surveillance has stripped away the customers' humanity from their perspective). Or 2) economic/political factors such as inflation, rising unemployment, supply chain issues, starvation of public services, and general instability means doing the usual midlife crisis activities are too expensive or risky, and LLMs present a local optmimum allowing them to reject societal virtues (eg. craftsmanship, collaboration, empathy) without endangering their financial position. Funny enough, I feel this latter point was also a factor of the NFT bubble (though, the finances were more clearly dubious).

And why would they not? do they have to feel they ain’t got it anymore because age?

I get it. Knowing good code and how to correctly build software that people actually want is experience that is consistently hampered by constantly having to learn yet another tech stack.

Using an LLM lets you quickly learn (or quickly avoid having to learn) yet another tech stack while you leverage your inherent software development knowledge.

> late 40s

This describes me nearly perfectly. Though I didn’t exactly burn out of coding, I accidentally stumbled upon being an EM while I was coding well and enjoying. But being EM stuck so I got into managing team(s) at biggish companies which means doing everything except one that I enjoy the most which is coding.

However now that I run my own startup I’m back to enjoying coding immensely because Claude takes care of grunt work of writing code while allowing me to focus on architecture, orchestration etc. Immense fun.

And what's the problem with that?

That's interesting. I have been thinking about how the vastly different reactions people seem to have to agentic coding could be influenced by what they value about coding. To me it seems like there are three joys in coding:

1. Creating something

2. Solving puzzles

3. Learning new things

If you are primarily motivated by seeing a finished product of some sort, then I think agentic coding is transcendent. You can get an output so much quicker.

If your enjoyment comes from solving hard puzzles, digging into algorithms, how hardware works, weird machine quirks, language internals etc... then you're going to lose nearly all of that fun.

And learning new things is somewhere in the middle. I do think that you can use agentic coding to learn new technologies. I have found llms to be a phenomenal tool for teaching me things, exploring new concepts, and showing me where to go to read more from human authors. But I have to concede that the best way to learn is by doing so you will probably lose out on some depth and stickiness if you're not the one implementing something in a new technology.

Of course most people find joy in some mix of all three. And exactly what they're looking for might change from project to project. I'm curious if you were leaning more towards 2 and 3 in your recent project and that's why you were so unsatisfied with Claude Code.

The creator of OpenClaw had a great line about this:

"If your identity is tied to you being an iOS developer, you are going to have a rough time. But if your identity is 'I'm a builder!' it is a very exciting time to be alive."

Plus, there is no rule that says you can't keep coding if it's faster for you and/or it's quicker in general. e.g I can write a Perl one liner much faster than Claude can. Heck, even if it's not faster and you enjoy coding, just keep coding.

This past week I found and fixed a bug that happens once in 40,000 transactions working with Claude Code - Opus 4.6. Our legacy app was designed around 2008 and has had zillions of band aids added since then. Nobody (~700 person company) has been able to reliably reproduce this issue to confidently claim that they know what the cause is and how to definitively fix it. That all changed yesterday. I spent today writing up summaries that were shared far and wide. My wizard status is yet again renewed.

I'm a few years younger than the OP, but I remember the early Internet days. I started with Perl CGI scripts, ASP, even some early server side JS, in the form of Netscape Livewire.

Over the past couple months, I've created several applications with Claude Code. Personal projects that would've taken me weeks, months, or possibly forever, since I generally get distracted and move on to something else. I write pretty decent specs, break things into phases, and make sure each phase is solid before moving on to the next.

I have Claude build things in frameworks I would've never tried myself, just because it can. I do actually look at the code. Some of it is slop. In a few cases, it looks like it works, but it'll be a totally naive or insecure implementation. If I really don't like how it did something, I'll revert and give it another attempt. I also have other AIs review it and make suggestions.

It's fun, but I ultimately gain little intellectual satisfaction from it. It's not like the old days at all. I don't feel like I'm growing my skill set. Yes, I learned "something", but it's more about the capabilities of AI, not the end result.

Still, I'm convinced this is the future. Experienced developers are in the best position to work with AI. We also may not have a choice.

For fun and education purposes, learning and satisfaction are understandable.

For work, companies won't support it. Get it done. Fast. That's the new norm.

When it comes to writing code, I can almost tell before writing code that whether this particular piece of code will be intellectually stimulating to me. If so, I write it myself without thinking about whether Claude might have done it faster. If not, I let Claude write it. Currently I'd estimate maybe 70% of the code falls in the first category, and the remaining 30% is something I would've used a lot of my own willpower to get started anyways.

Also, when I write code myself, I still ask Claude to review it. It's faster than asking a human colleague to review it, so you can have Claude review often. Just today after a five-minute review Claude said a piece of code I wrote had four bugs, three of which were hallucinations and one was a real bug. I honestly do think it would have taken me a bit more than five minutes to find that one real bug.

I had a similar feeling trying to calculate some combinatorial structures. At some point the LLM made a connection to extremal combinatorics and calculated tighter bounds and got me to the solution faster.

Felt flashbacks of playing chess against humans online as a teen by copying moves from a chess engine.

Whats the point haha

Then you haven't had any exciting idea and the need to actually build it. I personally like thinking of different projects and come up with ideas to make them unique. With Claude Code you can iterate like you're on steroids.

> It was so unfulfilling.

I'm going to say something people hate... you're probably holding it wrong. Why do I say that? Because I absolutely felt exactly the way you are feeling. In fact, it can be worse than unfulfilling, it can be even draining.

But I, over time, changed how I used LLMs and I actually now find it rewarding and I'm learning a huge amount. I've learned more technologies (and I do mean learn) in the last year than I have ever in the past.

I think my advice is that if it feels wrong then you shouldn't be doing it that way. But that isn't inherent in using LLMs to help you work. Everyone has different preferences for how they work (and what languages they like, etc). The people using 15 LLMs to build software probably love that but I don't think that's how I want to do it. And that's fine.

I think it depends what you're building. I find it fun, once in a while, an engineer to "not go shoeless" and get some of things I need done.

You're paid by a company to create software, so they can use it to drive business value and make a profit. You did so effortlessly. But it didn't make you feel personally fulfilled. So you're going to go back and re-do it, so you feel better?

How do you think your company's CEO is going to feel when you tell them you could be finishing the software much faster, but you'd rather not, because it feels better to do it by hand?

> I’m probably going to go back and redo everything with my own code.

Why? Did Claude do a bad job?

Your choices are not limited to one extreme or the other.

> 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.

I have been doing something similar. In my case, I prefer reading reference documentation (more to the point, more accurate), but I can never figure out where to start. These LLMs allow me to dive in and direct my own learning, by guiding my readings of that documentation (i.e. the authoritative source).

I think there has been too much emphasis (from both the hypesters and doomsayers) on AI doing the work, rather than looking at how we can use it as a learning tool.

>>>>Hey, I'm nearly 80 years old.

You are an inspiration. I will remember this when I grow older. Just wanted to say this, I am 1/2 your age, and I am sure there are 1/3 or even 1/4 people here. ;)

I'm very happy for you and hope when I'm nearing 80 I get to be doing something similar.

It's cool to rediscover Applescript for me (I'm late 40's) but it's a funny thing where I can like smell the NeXT in it almost nostalgically but it's quite handy in this new era of hijacking mac mini's (OpenClaw obviously is one way to do it, but why not just straight to the core).

I personally think coders get better with age, like lounge singers.

Good for you. Learning is a life long thing!

That's great and I'm the same, 40s multiple founder and I was ready to hang it up after my last exit -- had 0 passion to code anymore and now I'm back and LLMs are reigniting my passion to create again.

> better learning tool than a book

Learning for what? That day when you write it yourself, that will never come ...

There is only so much you can learn by reading; it requires doing.

The good thing about traditional sources like books, tutorials and other people's code bases is that they give you something, but don't write your project for you.

Now you can be making a project, yet be indefinitely procrastinating the learn-by-doing part.

You are an inspiration. Reading this makes me happy

I second another fellow commenter, you are my inspiration too! Thanks for sharing.

The other week I used Copilot to write a program that scans all our Amazon accounts and regions, collects services and versions, and finds the ones going EOL within a year. The data on EOL dates is scraped from several sources and kept in JSON. There's about 16 different AWS API calls used. It generates reports in markdown, json, and csv, so humans can read the markdown (flags major things, explains stuff), and the csv can be used to triage, prioritize, track work over time. The result is deduplicated, sorted, consolidated (similar entries), and classified. I can automatically send reports to teams based on a regex of names or tags. This is more data than I get from AWS Health Dashboard, and can put it into any format I want, across any number of accounts/regions.

Afaik there are no open source projects that do this. AWS has a behemoth of a distributed system you can deploy in order to do something similar. But I made a Python script that does it in an afternoon with a couple of prompts.

> almost every comment here is suspiciously vague as to what, exactly, is being coded

Why? You don't trust a newly-created account that has not engaged with any of the comments to be anything but truthful?

In my experience, I have "vibe coded" various tools and stuff that, while nice to have, isn't really something I need or brings a ton of value to me. Just nice-to-haves.

I think people enjoy writing code for various reasons. Some people really enjoy the craft of programming and thus dislike AI-centric coding. Some people don't really enjoy programming but enjoy making money or affecting some change on the world with it, and they use them as a tool. And then some people just like tinkering and building things for the sake of making stuff, and they get a kick out of vibe coding because it lets them add more things to their things-i-built collection.

Yes. I never really see people say wtf they're making. It's always "AI bot wrote 200k lines of code for me!" Alright, cool. Is the project something completely new? Useful? A rushed remake of a project that already exists in GitHub with actual human support behind it? I never see an answer.

I am currently using a Claude skill that I have been building out over the last few days that runs through my Amazon PPC campaigns and does a full audit. Suggestions of bid adjustments, new search terms and products to advertise against and adjustment to campaign structures. It goes through all of the analytics Amazon provides, which are surprisingly extensive, to find every search term where my product shows up, gets added to cart and purchased.

It's the kind of thing that would be hours of tedious work, then even more time to actually make all the changes to the account. Instead I just say "yeah do all of that" and it is done. Magic stuff. Thousands of lines of Python to hit the Amazon APIs that I've never even looked at.

Some _fun_ stuff i "coded" in a day each just in last couple weeks:

https://hippich.github.io/minesweeper/ - no idea why but i had a couple weeks desire to play minesweeper. at some point i wanted to get a way to quickly estimate probability of the mine presence in each cell.. No problem - copilot coded both minesweeper and then added probabilities (hidden behind "Learn" checkbox) - Bonus, my wife now plays game "made" by me and not some random version from Play store.

another one made in a day - https://hippich.github.io/OpenCamber - I am putting together old car, so will need to align wheels on it at some point. There is Gyraline, but it is iOS only (I think because precision is not good enough on Android?). And it is not free. I have no idea how well it will work in practice, but I can try it, because the cost of trying it is so low now!

yes, both of these are not serious and fun projects. unlikely to have any impact. but it is _fun_! =)

In the past month, in my spare time, I've built:

- A "semantically enhanced" epub-to-markdown converter

- A web-based Markdown reader with integrated LLM reading guide generation (https://i.imgur.com/ledMTXw.png)

- A Zotero plugin for defining/clarifying selected words/sentences in context

- An epub-to-audiobook generator using Pocket TTS

- A Diddy Kong Racing model/texture extractor/viewer (https://i.imgur.com/jiTK8kI.png)

- A slimmed-down phpBB 2 "remake" in Bun.js/TypeScript

- An experimental SQLite extension for defining incremental materialized views

...And many more that are either too tiny, too idiosyncratic, or too day-job to name here. Some of these are one-off utilities, some are toys I'll never touch again, some are part of much bigger projects that I've been struggling to get any work done on, and so on.

I don't blame you for your cynicism, and I'm not blind to all of the criticism of LLMs and LLM code. I've had many times where I feel upset, skeptical, discouraged, and alienated because of these new developments. But also... it's a lot of fun and I can't stop coming up with ideas.

It's also usually from people who stopped coding and haven't kept their skills up.

The combination of the internet and how insanely pushed every single facet of AI bullshit is has made me incredibly cynical. I see a post like this reach the top of HN by a nobody, getting top votes and all I can think is that this is once again, another campaign to try and make people feel better about AI.

Every time I've asked people about what the hell they're actually doing with AI, they vanish into the ether. No one posts proof, they never post a link to a repo, they don't mention what they're doing at their job. The most I ever see is that someone managed to vibe code a basic website or a CRUD app that even a below-average engineer can whip up in a day or two.

Like this entire thread is just the equivalent of karma farming on Reddit or whatever nonsense people post on Facebook nowadays.

Yes and they all mention Claude as if it's the only LLM that can code.

I wrote SuperSecretCrypt.com, ScoreRummy.com. Other stuff, too.

I have integrated Claude Code with a graph database to support an assistant with structured memory and many helpful capabilities.

I have a freelance gig with a startup adapting AI to their concept. I have one serious app under my belt and more on the way.

Concrete enough?

think about why anybody would ever associate a production level product with slop when consumers are polarized towards generative AI

this site gets indexed

there are too many disincentives to cater specifically to your suspicion and cynicism

I have always had ADHD and as a consequence have a decades long backlog of things that I want to do “some day”, and Claude just removes all the friction from going from idea to execution. I am also a software engineer, so basically for me it is like having a team of developers available 24 hours a day to build anything I want to design.

I have built and thrown away a half dozen projects ideas and gotten one into production at work in just the last few months.

I can build a POC for something in the time it would take me to explain to my coworkers what I even want. An MVP takes as long as what a POC used to take.

The thing that really unlocks stuff for me is how fast it is to make a cli/tui/web ui for things.

Claude Code has killed my ADHD and turned me into an always-on hyper-focused machine.

I am getting 20x done. This is a literal superpower.

I am not using it in agentic mode yet. I am telling it everything I want it to do. I will tell it where I want the files, what I want structs to be named, how I want the SQL queries to join, etc. I then review every line and make edits (typically with Claude first).

I haven't tried the agentic stuff yet, but I probably will at some point soon. I'm anxious about losing control over the architecture and data model, which is something I feel gives me my speed with Claude Code and that I know is important for my engineering work and quality.

I won't be writing code by hand ever again. This is the future. We'll look back at the old way as horse carriages.

Claude is also really freaking good at Rust, and the fact that it emits proper Rust with tests makes me even more confident of my changes.

We are literally living in the future now. Twenty years of SaaS and smartphone incrementalism and now we have jet packs.

Instead of engineers inventing 50 different frameworks and conventions for any given language or platform, maybe that energy will be directed to creating better AI tools.

Edit: I'll also reiterate what others are saying in that I think this is a tool best leveraged by engineers who know what they're doing and that care about code quality. The results you get back will also depend on your repo/project's code quality. If your project is poorly structured or has a lot of cruft, Claude will see that and spit it right back out. Keeping your code clean and low on tech debt is going to matter tremendously.

Fully agree: I believe my decades of software engineering experience definitely help me fly LLM tools better than less experienced folks.

But the much more interesting question to me: as LLM coding becomes the norm, does it drive the cost of self or small-company generated software to 0?

Like many SW architects/engineers my not-so-developed work-in-retirement plan is to assemble a small team of people I’ve loved working with over the years, start an LLC, and try to make a reasonable (not posh) living doing what we love: making software to solve problems.

On the one hand, it’s clear LLM coding can accelerate and amplify our efforts, but alternately there’s many people claiming there’s no possibility of a moat, your solution/innovation can be cloned in a matter of days … ie. the value of your software is exactly 0.

Not sure which future will be closer to reality. A backup plan that seems reasonable in the 0-value case is to focus our effort on creating actual physical gadgets and systems in the embedded realm, which conceivably can be designed and prototyped by a small team… It seems like these would still be valuable.

That's amazing!!

Can I ask, do you pay for any server service or run your own or are these standalone apps?

For me, many of your ideas, if I was to implement them, I'd want them to have a server. Habits Tracker, need to access from whatever device I'm on at that moment. Grocery List. Same thing, and multiple users so everyone in the same house can add things to one list.

Etc....

This is not really LLM related but I feel like I have a blindspot, or hurdle or something where I haven't done enough server work be comfortable making these solutions. Trying to be clearer, I've setup a few servers in the past so it's not like I can't do it. It's more a feeling for comfort, or maybe discomfort.

Example: If you ask me to make a static website, or a blog, I'd immediately make a new github repo, install certain tools (static site generator or whatever), setup the github actions, register a new domain if needed, setup the CNAME, check it it's working. If I think it's going to be popular put cloudflare in front of it. I'm 100% confident in that process. I'm not saying my process is perfect. Only that I'm confident of it. I also know what it costs, $10-$20 a year for the domain name and maybe a yearly subscription to github

Conversely, if I was to make anything that was NOT a static server but actually a server with users and accounts, then I just have to go read up on the latest and cross my fingers I'm not leaking user data, have an XSS, going to get a bill for $250k from a DOS attack, picking the right kind of database, ID service, logging, etc... I could expose a home server but then be worried it'll get hacked. Need to find a backup solution, etc....

I know someone will respond I'm worrying to much but I hoping for more example of what others are doing for these things. Is there some amazing saas that solves all of this that most of you use? Some high-level framework that solves all of this and I just pick "publish" don't have to worry about giant bills?

And the biggest thing is that: software the way we want is much easier. No ads. No monthly cost.

This is the reason. I have just been vibe-coding my way for a few months now, got almost all the tools (except Browser and Mail) that I use daily, designed by me (with the help of LLM).

The isolation of being a retired programmer is a real bitch. I think back to the days of a few young programmers with me at the whiteboard, the fast back and forth, the satisfaction of seeing ideas come together. I really missed that.

I'm not allowed to feel like AI is an adequate replacement for fear that the critics will tell me I'm not healthy but, between you and me, as much as I miss the camaraderie of real humans, being able to brainstorm with an entity that knows pretty much everything and is able to execute my will without complaint is not bad.

And, it's nice to have someone, something, to talk to about technical ideas. It's a great time to be alive.

Having never touched Perl in my life, Claude has enabled me to create a plugin for this ancient Perl software a lot of people are still using to this day. This felt different from just creating some new code with some LLM. This felt like ancient gods we're whispering their knowledge into me.

> LLM watch-six-agents-writing-and-you-proofreading gave me so much existential crisis and depression

this is extremely bizarre because I’m 53, been coding since 12, and it has had literally the exact opposite effect on me, I find it tremendously exciting, like riding a snowmobile instead of manually cross-country skiing

but I do think that if you’re not ready to work like this, you may need to consider a career pivot in the short term

As the lead dev on our team told us "You will all have a different journey on this road". Not everyone is going to get along with allowing an LLM to write code for them, something they've probably spent their entire lives crafting a skill for. Others only saw code as a means to and end, so an LLM finally removes that silly barrier.

I'm in the former camp. Every time I have an LLM write code it makes me entirely depressed because the satisfaction I get from programming is the programming. However, what I have found incredibly valuable is having LLM's help me plan. Using it as someone to brainstorm with, to "rubber duck" if you will. I still get to code, it just speeds up the planning process and has gone from a depressing exercise to one where I am excited to work.

Find your own path.

OP has his retirement prepared. That might increase their perception of the upsides and negate some of the downsides of adopting AI.

60 is relevant because it's inherent to the point they are making in having experienced something that inherently requires having lived through a longer period of time.

Its not uncommon for people to lose interest or find the passion has gone out of things they enjoyed when they were younger, especially in their professional lives where the enjoyment eroded through forced contact with aspects of it that were less enjoyable or contaminated by unpleasant work environments and uninteresting projects.

Having that passion reignited isn't something given to all people.

I'm mostly reading the comments section thinking "wow, anthropic is putting a lot of work into astroturfing Hacker News right now in reponse to the new ChatGPT release"

Honestly, software engineering as a career only went down hill for me from when I began to when I retired.

(And I hesitate to even air that view in front of others that are already in the field because I am a kind of Pollyanna and don't want to foment bad vibes.)

But since I retired a few years ago it was clearly not LLMs that precipitated the decline of my enjoyment of the profession. Instead it was the slow erosion of agency and responsibility that did that.

I'll drop the euphemisms and just say outright that the inmates ran the asylum when I began in the 90's (at Apple, FWIW). The only one that really told me what to do was the tech-lead on the team. Not my manager—for sure not marketing or the CEO (ha ha — Jobs had not yet returned).

In effect, I and all other engineers were told, "Here's your sandbox, here's your shovel: you go make your sand castle however you want—so long as it does X, Y and Z. We'll ship it but you'll own it. You'll fix it, expand it…"

(A coworker whose sense of humor I always enjoyed said to me, perhaps seriously, "When someone drops code in my lap and says, 'It's yours now' the first thing I do is rewrite it." Yeah, that's what happens to someone's code when they moves on—becomes someone else's sandbox and they are free to knock down the castle, build another—Chesterton's Fence not withstanding, ha ha.)

To that end I feel a little bad for anyone that missed that era. I mean unless you enjoy writing unit tests, having code reviews, style guidelines, etc.—and I have certainly met younger engineers that have come on board that seem to enjoy those aspects of the these-days profession.

I admit that when I began it was in fact a bit intimidating when you realized that code you were writing, were responsible for, was going to ship on millions (in 1995? maybe?) of machines. The responsibility though also came with agency—the combination came to give me a sense of freedom, the power of using my discretion, and finally a sense that I was a valued contributor.

You can infer from the above what I disliked about the profession as I was aging out of it. My general sense is that the industry became too big though and too much money riding on it for management to entrust it to the "funny farm". But of course we cowboys who came up in that ward liked it the way it had been.

>You are reading HN, the survivorship bias and groupthink is just as high as any other self-calibrating online community

Agreed. To expand IMHO and somewhat tangentially: recognizing the importance of software/technology and using it as tool is the hallmark of a person with balanced mental makeup. Someone who has ever had 'passion' for software (or in general technology) extended beyond a few weeks can be considered to have something abnormal going on - for example autism. This is like a carpenter becoming obsessed with his chisel and deriving his entire sense of purpose and happiness from delving into the minutiae of chisels.

Thanks, I needed this.

There doesn't seem to be a place for me in the future of software/tech: I like sitting quietly, alone, solving problems, writing code, and reading it. I like in code much of what I like in art: the fruits of human labor and the results of human ingenuity. Being excited about AI/LLMs makes no sense to people like me. If you're excited because LLMs let you make something, great, good for you. Have fun.

If the tools become a mandatory part of the job, I'll change careers. Spending my days talking to chipper robots and describing what I want rather than making it myself sounds unbearable.

As for you, OP, I have no idea why age is a factor to consider to this.

This is one only data point but my dad was a programmer and frequently complained about cognitive decline once he hit his mid 50s. From talking to him, he remained sharp at a conceptual and high level, knowing what he wanted to do and how it would be done, but struggled with the tooling, the logistical details, etc. He didn't make it to the AI era, alas, but AI could be a god send for people who have the proven technical chops and background but find juggling a lot of minutiae is becoming difficult.

You feeling that way is the world telling you you’re doing it wrong.

It is more fun to treat them as coding buddies, usually using them one at a time a time, it is fair to race them at debugging a bug or spend waiting time looking at docs or something.

The real bottleneck is how much you can hold in your head simultaneously to be sure about quality as a moral subject.

I was in school when GPT came out and there is a strong generational divide. It reminds me of when i was young teachers said you couldn’t use Wikipedia because it isn’t guaranteed to be correct, but we did anyway. Same thing with LLMs. It’s a faster way to do things so eventually everything will be done that way.

The opposite of this has been my experience.

HN comments bias far more negative towards technology, tech companies, and current politics than the people I know in real life. People who mostly don’t work as professional software engineers, at least not anymore. And the (employed) engineers I know are all having a lot of fun too.

Been coding since 13, now 44 working in FAANG.

Love AI explaining code

Dislike AI for writing code (that was my fun part)

I think both opinions are pretty well-represented here, but the people who aren't so happy about generated code are well into the acceptance phase at this point. (Myself included.)

If you're "proofreading" the agents' work in detail, you're doing it wrong. You need to invest that time productively into planning out what the agents are going to do (with AI help, of course) then once the plan has gotten detailed enough you can set the agent to work and treat the result as something to just read through and quickly accept/revise/reject (upon which rejection you go back to an earlier stage of planning and revise that instead). Planning out at the outset keeps you in the driving seat and avoids frustration; the agents are just a multiplier that operates downstream of your design decisions.

Good point regarding “ survivorship bias and groupthink” here.

> there's an extremely high survivorship bias because people who are into this LLM craze have a higher probability of browsing HN.

I've worked in professional software development for more than 20 years. I'm pretty well connected and well aware of what is going on in the industry. If you think that coding agents are not widely used and just a bubble on HN, you are very much mistaken. At this point I'd suggest more than 50% of professional developers are using them. Within a few years it will be 90%.

The reason is, they are actually good, despite what some people really want to believe.

Personally, I've been typing characters into a text editor or IDE for a long, long time. I'm very happy that I have a an automated junior programmer to do it for me now while I guide it and tell it when it is getting things wrong, and fix up mistakes. I did the manual way for a long time, I'm enjoying this new way. I understand this isn't for everyone though.

This is neat that you had fun making this.

What are some good examples of where your app excels? I've currently got https://jisho.org bookmarked.

This is a propaganda/marketing post.

1) What 60 year old in tech his entire life only makes a HN account in the last 17 hours?

2) Assuming he wasn't aware of it. What brought the site to his attention and why now?

3) Did not engage with the thread at all after his initial post. Has not engaged with anything else since. You'd think someone introduced to a tech community would be eager to look around and contribute??

I completely understand your sentiment though and it's exactly what makes the OG post so tone deaf.

You’re right that LLMs are going to push out jobs at the low end of the market. “Code monkey” type jobs are going to be displaced the same way computers displaced a lot of basic clerical and computational jobs.

But that doesn’t mean there won’t be entry level jobs, they will just have a different set of qualifications and expectations. Just like it’s hard to get a job doing arithmetic today without some other knowledge of the application, future jobs in computing are going to require people to understand things outside of the realm of programming alone. They are going to need to know more about the application of the code they write. It’ll be bad for developers who “just close Jira tickets” but problem solvers in a specific field will be okay.

I find this baffling tbh as I regularly ask Claude for basic components and they come out completely broken, wrong and buggy.

The last: I asked for a quick TCP server in C++ that handled just a single client (disconnecting the existing client when a new client connected), with a send() that I could call from another thread. It was holding mutexes over read(), and trying to set the SO_REUSEPORT port socket option on a socket that had already been bound. Subtley broken garbage.

It would literally be better to copy and paste a solution off Stack Overflow, because at least there's a chance it'd have been reviewed by someone who knows what they're doing.

Are you using this large financial application just for yourself?

I think the difficult task is/will be to sell vibe coded software from the lone developer to anyone.

Would you have needed 6 people? I find that Claude, Codex etc. are able to output so much because they do a lot of reinventing the wheel whereas a human, given constraints, would make much more pragmatic choices around which technology to use. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and regardless, you’ve been able to achieve something you’re happy with, which is what matters. But, I’d still like to hear more about what it has done that you think you couldn’t have done in a year yourself by choosing existing technologies. E.g: what is novel in your application? What background do you have?

What is this app and what does it do? Can we see it?

I find it very hard to believe anyone could code anything complicated with Claude that 5-6 competent developers could do.

I am currently working on a relatively complicated UI on an internal tool and Claude constantly just breaks it. I tried asking it to build it step by step, adding each functionality I need piece by piece. But the code it eventually got was complete garbage. Each new feature it added would break an existing one. It was averse to refactoring the code to make it easier to add future features. I tried to point it in the right direction and it still failed.

It got to the point where I took a copy of the code, cut it back to basics and just wrote it myself. I basically halved the amount of code it wrote, added a couple of extra features and it was human readable. And if I started with this, it would have took less time!

Can you provide a link to this app? Or alternately, share a few of the prompts by which you built it? I only ask because, if it's really that easy/simple, I'd like to do the same thing!

I understand your sentiment. I personally would never use a textbook for anything code related, if there's no proper documentation online then I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole, haha.

However, even though I've never worked with CassandraDB, I feel pretty confident that I could do it with Claude Code. Not just "do it for me", but more like "I have done a lot of database migrations in my time, but haven't worked with CassandraDB in particular. Can you explain to me the complexities of this migration, and come up with a plan for doing it, given the specifics of this project?"

That question alone is already a massive improvement over a few years ago. I don't feel like I was using my "critical thinking muscles" when I tried to figure out how the hell to get hadoop to run on windows, that was just an exercise in frustration as none of the documentation matched the actual experience I was getting. Doing it together with Claude Code would be so much easier, because it'll say something like "Oh yeah this is because you still need to install XYZ, you can do that by running this line here: ...".

Now I'm not saying that Claude Code, and agentic in general, isn't taking away some of my critical thinking: it really is. But it also allows me to learn new skills much more quickly. It feels more like pair programming with someone who is a better programmer than me, but a much worse architect. The trick is to keep challenging yourself to take an active role in the process and not just tell it to "do it", I think.

You are definitely not alone, and it’s unfortunate when people pushing AI ignore that legitimate fear and talk past it.

You are right, there is something you lose, but for what it’s worth, I don’t think the loss is necessarily critical thinking - I think it’s possible to use AI and still hone your critical thinking skills.

The thing you start to lose first is touching the code directly, of course, making the constant stream of small decisions, syntax, formatting, naming, choosing container classes, and a large set of other things. And sometimes it’s the doing battle with those small decisions that leads to deeper understanding. However, it is true, and AI agents are proving, that a lot of us have to make the same small decisions over and over, and we’re frequently repeating designs that many other people have already thought through. So one positive tradeoff for this loss is better leveraging of ground already covered.

Another way to think about AI is that it can help you spend all of your time doing and thinking about software design and goals and outcomes rather that having to spend the majority of it in the minutiae of writing the code. This is where you can continue to apply critical thinking, just perhaps at a higher level than before. AI can make you lazy, if you let it. It does take some diligence and effort to remain critical, but if you do, personally I think it can be a lot of fun and help you spend more time thinking critically, rather than less.

Some possible analogies are calculators and photography. People were fretting we’d lose something if we stop calculating divisions by hand, and we do, but we still just use calculators by and large. People also thought photography would ruin art and prevent people from being able to make or appreciate images.

Software in general is nearly always automating something that someone was doing by hand, and in way every time we write a program we’re making this same tradeoff, losing the close hands-on connection to the thing we were doing in favor of something a touch more abstract and a lot faster.

Database migrations are hard and inductive and often fail in some aspect. Why would you want to spend time doing them when you can spend time building the important thing after the migration is done.

Secondly - AI helps with happy path tasks for a migration. But most database migrations are complex beyond what an LLM can just spit out. There is so much context outside the observable parts of the database AI has access to. So I don’t think you have to worry about vibe coding eating the entire migration project.

Oh, you are screwed. I feel badly about that. More about the environmental disaster and student loan screw job that AI than AI.

I am retired and am nearly equaling my salary with side jobs and only working a few hours a day. I don't see any reason you can't do that so stop whining and start learning.

Because it is an interesting topic. The original post is not relevant. The conversations is. Lighten up.

It's such a blatant astroturf/shill post, but the comments are also all in the same vein so I guess anthropic is just running another one of their "organic" marketing campaigns

He's probably getting a buzz from the novelty of it, just like that buzz you get when you buy a new car. It wears off though and it isn't long before you are back in the showroom again, looking at new models.

I'm also in my sixties and retired and decided not to use these tools. I'm a year into my current project and I am enjoying the struggle. I've learnt a lot about the domain and the language I'm using. There is satisfaction coming from the fact that I do all of the work.

It's not that these tools aren't very good. They have come a long way in the last year and are impressive. It's just that I don't have any of the problems that they solve. I don't need to be more productive. I don't need to get features or fixes out quicker. I can spend the time to learn new things.

I agree. This seems more like an excitement or joy after getting a new toy more that actual process of creating something. Particularly when person uses LLM in a pure vibe code approach where they have no idea what's happening in the code.

Bummer of a first post!

> At 67 I'm refreshing my calculus, linear algebra, and statistics

Does anyone else find this messaging from Anthropic's marketing department silly? AI ultimately devalues human knowledge by commoditizing it, which ought to make one less motivated to go out of their way to acquire it, not more. Yet if these comments are to be believed, it's the exact opposite, with (as of now) 72 instances of the word "learning" in this thread. This, as we barrel headlong towards a world where having a strong back and the ability to turn a wrench or swing a hammer is going to be more remunerative than being able to solve differential equations or follow some arXiv preprint about frontier models. (At least until robotics is solved.)

And transparent 1 pixel gifs :-)

You can't speak this kind of truth on hacker news!

But, uh, yeah... I've been noticing a growing divide between people like OP who are either already retired or are wealthy enough that they could if they wanted to who absolutely love the new world of LLMs, and people who aren't currently financially secure and realize that LLMs are going to snatch their career away. Maybe not this year, but not too far out either.

Yeah this is some level of entitled selfish boomer talk here. Senior, stable, everything's fine for me, all of the ensuing impacts be damned.

Just checked out MoveOMeter.com Great idea - and I get how pitching to "an old coot" like my parents would get a laugh out of them before an insulting hurtful pass. Very clever positioning - I'd lean in on that. Your audience is there and waiting - which is tricky since your customer is actually the sales person and you need to give them the training up front to close the deal with their elder. Nice work!

The thing is, so far you've probably done a bunch of work on the 80%. Now you need to do the remaining 80% to finish the project, launch it, create a stable customer base.

If you're only vibe coding, it's going to be an interesting long term experiment.

I had dinner with Marvin Minsky once. Learned to program a Symbolics machine. We share a little history, I think. I've been interested in AI for the last forty years.

I decided that applications of AI were where I am going. I feel the pull of small LLMs. The idea of local is very appealing. But, at our age (I also started in the sixties), I've learned that too many irons in the fire means I get nothing done.

Congratulations on retaining your spirit. Many of my age-appropriate friends cannot comprehend the idea of working so hard for fun.

I am a professional for forty five years.

Your description of the experience tells me that you have not figured out how to do it correctly.

I NEVER have bad experiences like that. I absolutely DO create production grade software reliably every day.

Treat it as collaborator instead of as a servant. You will get much better results.

How much more blatant can you get?

Half the comments in here are also along the same lines

Almost like we are making devs dependent on the tool. Not because of its capabilities but because there lacks an understanding of the problem. Like an addiction dependency. We are all crack addicts trying to burn more tokens for the fix.

Exactly! The feeling of creating something just because you want to, not because you have to, is rare. It's worth holding onto.

It depends.

Google's AI that gloms on to search is not particularly good for programming. I don't use any OpenAI stuff but talking to those that do, their models are not good for programming compared to equivalent ones from Anthropic or google.

I have good success with free gemini used either via the web UI or with aider. That can handle some simple software dev. The new qwen3.5 is pretty good considering its size, though multi-$k of local GPU is not exactly "free".

But, this also all depends on the experience level of the developer. If you are gonna vibe code, you'll likely need to use a paid model to achieve results even close to what an experienced developer can achieve with lesser models (or their own brain).

I personally didn't get good results until I got the $100/mo claude plan (and still often hit $180/mo from spending extra credits)

It's not that the model is better than the cheaper plans, but experimenting with and revising prompts takes dozens of iterations for me, and I'm often multiple dollars in when I realize I need to restart with a better plan.

It also takes time and experimentation to get a good feel for context management, which costs money.

Yes, unfortunately the free version of Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT coding models can't compare with the paid ones, and are just not that useful. But, there are alternatives like GLM and Grok that can be quite useful, depending on the task.

At least from what I’ve seen, yes you do have to pay for anything useful. But just the cheaper plans seem worth the price.

I think coding can be an endurance sport sometimes. There are a lot of points at which you have to bang your head against a wall for hours or days to figure out the smallest issue. Having an agent do that frustrating part definitely lowers the endurance needed to stay productive on a project.

Can’t fathom why people would downvote this.

I'm sorry, I know you mean well, but your comment reads like a typical boomer parody.

Even though I almost posted a comment like yours earlier ("I'm an African-American lesbian with a seizure disorder, and ChatGPT is finally enabling me to finish my novel!"), I'm not sure how many of these comments are bots, since many are from quite old accounts, e.g., this one replying in a bot-like manner to a fairly obvious bot actually registered in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286976

But when you inspect Mr. "AI girlfriend's" post history, even ignoring the AI promotion, it's all superficial: short, unargumentative, inoffensive posts. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a black market for HN accounts similar to reddit accounts.

I don't even think it's bots, it's like the LinkedIn lunatics broke containment again or something. Cause HN is such an irrelevant platform who bothers botting it?

definitely something odd going on in this thread, but lets say it is an ad, what would the ad be? i cant imagine it being for claude code since everyone here would already be well aware of it

The promise/potential of ever-refining skills and agents drives this compulsion for me. "NEXT time it will be even better. And NOW it's set up to avoid the pitfalls I faced last time." You can feel the exponential engine-building.

I'm not a SWE. I'm a mechanical engineer who spends his life in excel. So when I first made my own node editor app and then asked Claude to read that for my workflow in my second project.... I felt like God herself.

happened to my friend too! an overkill but working solution for this is "sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1"

Nice project. That must have been fun to make. Congratulations.

Opinions differ: hobby coders love it, but domain expert secretly despise it because it narrows the gap between the skills they spent years honing and the average Claude, I mean Joe, that just uses this mental exoskeleton.

I’ve been trying to learn a lot about domain driven design, I think knowledge crunching will be a huge part of the new software development role.

Was chatting with a friend about this:

"I used to write java code and the compiler turned it into JVM bytecode.

Now I write in English and the LLMs compile it into whatever language I want."

Although as one HN commenter pointed out: English is a pretty bad programming language as it's way more ambiguous than most programming languages.

This might just be the single most worthless, non-sensical post that I've read in my twelve years of using HN.

Congratulations.

My wife calls Claude my girlfriend.

I do a ton of programming but I also use it to learn all kinds of stuff. I'm into physics, history and philosophy and have done wonderful explorations.

Now I tell it what I had for breakfast just to see what it says. Half the time it says something interesting and I end up exploring another new thing.

"My people" for sure and everyone is mad at me because I think that.

Also, I don't care what they think. I am all about the fun.

140 year old here just to chime in -- Wowee Claude Code™® sure is magic and giving me back all the passion I've lost in my life now that I can Code Anything I want! It's not just a tool, it's a revolution!! Hell yeah brother let's go Code Some Stuff With Claude!!!!

It's really fucking absurd. This thread is such low quality garbage and it's somehow a top article with hundreds of bot comments all reading from the same template, what a joke.

The middle-of-the-road approach is to write: "Figure out a good high-level plan for building X". If you're a junior, the plan is going to have things you don't understand all that well. Ask the AI about them.

exactly need some goal here ;)

Would love to hear more, if you are happy sharing!

I would also like to hear more!

I'd like to hear more

The bot owner of Claude C. Shannon (shannoncc) is still working on a reply feature. It will take four weeks of vibe coding and $20000 in tokens.

Sounds pretty grim to me, why are they sending you slack messages when you’re on a trip with family?

A thing I think a lot in the conversations about AI is this:

You don't have any choice. Good or bad. It's here. Get over it.

I know that back in the day, people said automobiles were bad and evil and costing the buggywhip makers their jobs. Unfortunately for them, the decision to use cars had already been made.

I do AI with fervor because I live in the real world and the decision has already been made. You can't stop AI by pretending it's optional.

Adapt or die.

what do you mean by "the industrial times"?

It'll be 75 by the time gen Z get there, they just keep raising the threshold.

All that rhetoric and no output. Enjoy the hamster wheel.

This guy created this account three minutes ago in order to drag on this post. Creep.

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I have been making web apps for years. A few year ago I converted my base stack into a scaffold that lets me spin up a full working project with API, CLI and UI.

I use NodeJS with a highly structured ExpressJS app for the API. It uses an npm module, tools-library-dot-d to implement a carefully scooped plugin structure for endpoints, data model and data mapping. It has built-in authentication and database (sqlite).

Nuxt/Vue/Vuetify/Pinia for the UI. It has a few components that implement things (like navigation) the way I like. It supports login and user editing.

The stack includes a utility that looks at a directory for executable CLI tools (usually NodeJS or BASH) and adds them to the session PATH. The API stack has boilerplate to treat CLI apps as data-model services.

Does that help?

It sounds doable. An AI can be made to keep modifying a game's codebase. I imagine it'd be easiest to separate out a scripting layer for game mechanics & behavior that AI can iterate quickly on, although of course it could more riskily modify the engine itself.

Then you could open voting up to a community for a weekly mechanics-change vote (similar to that recent repo where public voting decided what the AI would do next), and AI will implement it with whatever changes it sees fit.

Honestly, without some dedicated human guidance and taste, it would probably be more of a novelty that eventually lost its shine.

I'm with you so much. I had to buy the big Max plan. My wife calls Claude my new girlfriend. (Good thing she's ok with being in a cyber-thruple .)

I'm having more fun than I've had in years.

The brainstorming, investigation and planning are so much fun, aren't they?

Having an infinitely patient, super smart colleague available all the time is amazing.

Are you 60?

Every time I try to use Claude Desktop, I quickly feel like it's like trying to type wearing mittens. No bueno, at least for me.

Seems Claude is also writing the comments for you?

LLM-ass comment.

If I was 60 and still had to do any work like this I'd consider myself a failure.

The ageism in this comment is revolting.