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

Hey, I'm nearly 80 years old. I haven't written a line of code in over 10 years. But I'm coding now, with the help of Claude & Gemini, and having a great time. Each block of Python or Applescript that they generate for me is a much better learning tool than a book - I'm going through the code line by line and researching everything. And I'm also learning how to deal with LLMs and their strengths & weaknesses. Correcting them from time to time when they screw up. Lots of fun.

Same here - it's like programming with a couple of buddies. Occasionally they goof off and wreck everything, but we put it back together and end up with a finished project. I'm literally going through my backlog of projects from the early 80s! There are parts of each of these projects that were black holes for me - just didn't know enough to get a toe hold. With Karl (that's my agent) he explains everything I don't understand, does stuff, breaks stuff, and so on. It's really a blast.

As a principal engineer I feel completely let down. I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued. Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software. I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon. Talk about a rug pull!

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

I'm 38 years old, and as a manager, it's gradually become difficult to find joy in coding. Claude Code has helped me rediscover that pleasure. Now, all I want to do is code every day and use up my quota.

This comment about the OpenClaw guy hits a little too close to home:

“Peter Steinberger is a great example of how AI is catnip very specifically for middle-aged tech guys. they spend their 20s and 30s writing code, burn out or do management stuff for a decade, then come back in their late 40s/50s and want to try to throw that fastball again. Claude Code makes them feel like they still got it.”

I spent the last 2 days primarily using Claude instead of coding things myself at work. I felt the exact opposite way. It was so unfulfilling. I’d equate it to the feeling of getting an A on a test, knowing I cheated. I didn’t accomplish anything. I didn’t learn anything. I got the end result with none of the satisfaction and learned nothing in the process.

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

I'm over 50 now and feel like this as well. Haven't used Claude yet but used Codex a bunch, and it's been SO MUCH fun going over all the old perl & shell scripting stuff that I used to do years ago before I got into healthcare time and morphed to a hobby sysadmin.

Staying up and re-learning what I used to love long ago has given me a new found passion as well. Even if I do vibe code some scripts, at least I have the background now to go through them and make sure they make sense. They're things I'm using in my own homelab and not something that I'm trying to spin up a Github repo for. I'm not shipping anything. I'm refreshing my old skills and trying to bring some of them up to date. An unfortunate reality is that my healthcare career is going to be limited due to multiple injuries along the way, and I need to try to be as current as I can in case something happens. My safety net is limited.

  So excited to be getting to my backlog of apps that I've wanted but couldn't take the time to develop on my own.  I'm 66 and have been in the software field in various capacities (but programming mostly as a hobby).  Here's a partial list of apps I've completed in the last few months:

- Media Watch app to keep a list of movies and shows my wife and I want to watch

- Grocery List with some tracking of frequent purchases

- Health Log for medical history, doc appointments and past visits

- Habits Tracker with trends I’m interested

- Daily Wisdom Reader instead of having multiple ebooks to keep track of where I'm at

- A task manager similar to the old LifeBalance app

- A Home Inventory app so that I can track what I have, warranty, and maintenance

- An ios watch app to see when I'm asleep so that it can turn off my music or audiobook

- An ios watch chess tactics trainer app

- some games

Many of these are similar to paid offerings, but those didn't check off all the features I really wanted, so I vibe-coded my own. They all do what I want, the way I want it to.

Maybe the internet has made me too cynical, and I'm glad people seem to be having a good time, but at time of posting I can't help but notice that almost every comment here is suspiciously vague as to what, exactly, is being coded. Still better than the breathless announcements of the death of software engineering, but quite similar in tone.

As a solo dev, using LLMs for coding has made me a better programmer for sure!

I can ask an LLM for specific help with my codebase and it can explain things in context and provide actual concrete relevant examples that make sense to me.

Then I can ask again for explanations about idiomatic code patterns that aren't familiar for me.

Working on my own, I don't get that feedback and code review loop.

Working with new languages and techniques, or diving into someone else's legacy code base is no longer as daunting with an LLM to ask for help!

I’m a 13 year lurker, first time commenter (Not sure why this post compelled me). I don’t think this is a genuine take. I don’t see how a 60 year old has any kind of joy for actual software creation suddenly from llms. It might be a joy in seeing software automatically be created but it’s definitely not doing the work. (I may be biased, I left the field 5 years ago) I doubt he’s spending any time fixing the software to make it near usable for anyone besides himself and the semi-working state the llm gave him. Meaning he’s going to have 10 or more half-finished projects again.

Yes! Although 60 is still a decade away, I've spent a fair few evenings vibe-coding a FOSS dependency-free raw git repo browser.[1] Never would have even started such a project without LLMs because:

* Implementing a raw Git reader is daunting.

* Codifying syntax highlighting rules is laborious.

* Developing a nice UI/UX is not super enjoyable for me.

* Hardening with latest security measures would be tricky.

* Crafting a templating language is time-consuming.

Being able to orchestrate and design the high-level architecture while letting the LLM take care of the details is extremely rewarding. Moving all my repositories away from GitLab, GitHub, and BitBucket to a single repo under my own control is priceless.

[1]: https://repo.autonoma.ca/treetrek/

A great thing you can do with LLMs:

"in (language I'm familiar with) I use (some pattern or whatever) what's the equivalent in (other language)?"

It's really great for doing bits and then get it to explain or you look and see what's wrong and modify it and learn.

I remember before style sheets existed. Webites were all nested tables and font tags. I built a video website before YouTube be even existed. Claude code and AI is definitely an exciting time.

From what I've seen, and of course the models get better everyday, if you have very simple grunt work that needs to be done. Coding agents are basically magic. The moment something gets either difficult or subjective, coding agents love to add completely incorrect solutions.

Try to tell Claude Code to refactor some code and see if it doesn't just delete the entire file and rewrite it. Sure that's cute, but it's absolutely not okay in a real software environment.

I do find this stuff great for hobbyist projects. I don't know if I'd be willing to put money on the line yet

51 year old electrical engineer here, same thing! (minus the retiring part cause finances)

It's given me the guts to be a solo-founder (for now). I

As a parent to two young kids and in more of a leadership position at work, Claude allows me to grind through my backlog of ideas in minutes between other tasks, and see which ones take flight.

I see many comments here about Claude and I get the same feeling I get when I see comments about MacOS: it's nice that you're content with it, but I don't trust Apple/Anthropic for a fraction of an angstrom.

Wake me when we have ethically trained, open source models that run locally. Preferably high-quality ones.

I'll be 38 next month. I always wonder what I'm do in 30 more years and I cannot see myself NOT coding. Happy to see that spark is alive and well within you.

Getting claude to build mathematical models for me and running simulations really got me back into doing sciency things too. It's the model that's important, not the boilerplate each time!

Same! After years in engineering management I'm building so many small side projects thanks to Claude Code. I'm creating at a breakneck pace. Claude Code has mostly raised the level of abstraction so I can focus much more on the creative aspect of building which has been so much fun.

There are definitely a lot of limitations with Claude Code, but it's fun to work through the issues, figure out Claude's behavior, and create guardrails and workarounds. I do think that a lot of the poor behavior that agents exhibit can be fixed with more guardrails and scaffolding... so I'm looking forward to the future.

I've also been loving the speed Claude has enabled me to move at, and now agree that the coding part of SWE has become LLM-wrangling instead. I now see interacting with an LLM, to build all parts of software, as the new "frontend".

Following this idea, what do people think "backend" work will involve? Building and tweaking models, and the infra around them? Obviously everyone will shift more into architecture and strategy, but in terms of hands-on technical work I'm interested in where people see this going.

btw how good are any of these tools for embedded programming? we need a new era for hardware enthusiasts. my dad made plenty of fun things in the 80s but it was at the tail end of the newess that came from radiokits and other gadgets that flooded the market due to the uchip

Same, early 50s and this is like the heyday of coding where you could rapidly iterate on things and actively make leaps and bounds of progress. Super fun.

It's taken over my life, I am in a leadership position at faang but i'm daydreaming about getting back to my claude sessions at work.

“Hell-ya brother”

100% agree even with half your experience.

all the insane and/or speculative projects that i never did because they would require heavy lift but with vague outcomes are now in progress. it's glorious.

I'm so excited to be able to continue build things when I'm living on the streets. I'm glad to know that drive to create will always be with me and keep me warm during winters.

I’m on a field trip chaperoning my kid. I get a couple slack messages asking for some tweaks to a UI. I type a couple words into a Github AI Agent Session while riding the bus. Fixes are deployed to our staging env in 10 minutes.

Fucking wild.

I am 37;

Claude Code and it's parallels have extinguished multiple ones.

I was able to steer clear of the Bitcoin/NFT/Passport bros but it turns out they infiltrated the profession and their starry puppy delusional eyes are trying to tell me that iteration X of product Y released yesterday evening is "going to change everything".

They have started redefining what "I have build this" actually means, and they have outjerked the executives by slinging outrageous value creation narratives.

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

You are 60; go spend some time with your grand-kids, smell a flower, touch grass forget chasing anything at this age cause a Tuesday like the others things are gonna wrap up.

Absolutely sincerely.

try asking claude to write in VB6. Make some Active Server Pages. Use COM components. Why not? We can do things "better" now, but what does that matter when you can do the same things as before, but better?

I have bipolar disorder. The more frustrating aspects of coding have historically affected me tenfold (sometimes to the point of severe mania). Using Claude Code has been more like an accessibility tool in that regard. I no longer have to do the frustrating bits. Or at the very least, that aspect of the job is thoroughly diminished. And yes - coding is "fun again".

Curious, what are you building?

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

I have this idea that probably violates some law of computing but I am really stubborn to make it happen somehow.

I want a game that generates its own mechanics on the fly using AI. Generates itself live.

Infinite game with infinite content. Not like no mans sky where everything is painfully predictable and schematic to a fault. No. Something that generates a whole method of generating. Some kind of ultra flexible communication protocol between engine and AI generator that is trained to program that protocol.

Develop it into a framework.

Use that framework to create one game. A dwarf fortress adventure mode 2.0

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

My main worry is: what is the license on the code produced by Claude (or any other coding agent)? It seems like, if it was trained using open-source software, then the resulting code needs to be open-source as well and it should be compatible with the original source. Artwork produced by an AI cannot be copyrighted, but apparently code can be?

If the software produced is for internal use, the point is probably moot. But if it isn't, this seems like a question that needs to be answered ASAP.

Building things as I read this.

Older here, equally excited. It's like programming with a team of your best buddies who are smarter than you but humble and eager to collaborate.

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

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

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