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

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.

[flagged]

Curious, what are you building?

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.

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 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 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".

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

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.

“Hell-ya brother”

100% agree even with half your experience.

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

The split seems to be of at least a couple mindsets.

AI haters trend towards affection for the jargon, languages, and falling down that rabbit hole. They love Ruby, web apps, SaaS... the ecosystem of syntaxes. They love their job.

Those that dig AI see code as a historically necessary tool to get a machine to do a thing. I fall in this category.

I find the syntax and made up semantics boring, and doing interesting things with the machine interesting.

Ymmv but both online and in the real world I have only encountered these two schools of thought, as they say, when AI comes up.

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.

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.

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.

Building things as I read this.

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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/