There’s this Tell HN discussion on HackerNews—I’m 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion.
This comment from burnstek.
50 here. 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 – 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.
Tools like Claude Code are the ultimate cheat code for me and have breathed new life into my desire to create. I know more than enough about architecture and coding to understand the plumbing and effectively debug, yet I don’t have to know or care about implementation details. It’s almost an unfair unlock.
It’ll also be good to see leetcode die.
This comment from bartread.
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.
It is an interesting insight for me to see how the older generation of programmers who got tired of the ever updating tech stack, especially in web development, are now perceiving the latest AI coding assistants.