I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion

FunSociety

I'm not sure I understand... why not simply ignore AI and keep coding the way you always have? It's a bit like saying motorboats killed your passion for rowing.

snayan

Can't you continue to do what you've been doing? What specifically about the existence of AI is killing the passion out of curiosity?

RALaBarge

I'm 42 years old and it has re-ignited mine. I've spent my career troubleshooting and being a generalist, not really interested in writing code outside of for systems and networking usage. It's boring to type out (lots of fun to plan though!) and outdated as soon as it is written. I've made and continue to make things that I've been thinking about for a while, but the juice was never worth the squeeze. Bluetooth troubleshooting for example -- 5 or 6 different programs will log different parts of the stack independently. I've made an app calling all of these apps, and grouping all of their calls based on mac address' and system time of the calls to correlate and pinpoint the exact issue. Now I heard the neckbeards crack their knuckles, getting ready to bear down on their split keyboards and start telling me how the program doesn't work because AI made it, it isn't artistic enough for their liking, or whatever the current lie they comfort themselves with is. But it does work, and I've used it already to determine some of my bad devices are really bad. But there are bugs, you exclaim! Sure, but have you seen human written code?? I've made my career in understanding these systems, programming languages, and people using the systems -- troubleshooting is the fun part and I guess lucky for me is that my favorite part is the thing that will continue to exist. But what about QA? Humans are better? No. Please guys, stop lying to yourselves. Even if there was a benefit that Humans bring over AI in this arena, that lead is evaporating fast or is already gone. I think a lot of people in our industry take their knowledge and ability to gatekeep by having that knowledge as some sort of a good thing. If that was the only thing you were good at, then maybe it is good that the AI is going to do the thing they excel at and leave those folks to theirs. It can leave humans to figure out how to maybe be more human? It is funny to type that since I have been on a computer 12h a day since like 1997...but there is a reason why we let calculators crunch large sums, and manufacturing robots have multiple articulating points in their arms making incredible items at insane speeds. I guess there were probably people who like using slide rules and were really good at it, pissed because their job was taken by a device that can do it better and faster. Diddnt the slide rule users take the job from people who did not have a tool like that at first but still had to do the job? Did THEY complain about that change as well? Regardless, all of these people were left behind if all they are going to do is complain. If you only built one skill in your career, and that is writing code and nothing else, that is not the programs fault. The journey exists for those who desire to build the knowledge that they lack and use these new incredible tools. For everyone else, there is Hacker News and an overwhelmingly significant crowd that are ready to talk about the good ole days instead of seeing the opportunities in expanding your talents with software that helps you do your thing better than you have ever dreamed of.

beardyw

I'm even older, I've been coding for over 50 years. Now I just do it as a passtime and I use AI to complete lines of code I would have written anyway. It's the structure and the approach which interests me and it's all mine.

techblueberry

To me I think it just changed the destination. Now the journey is about the domain - experimenting with how ideas fit together. Yes I can type in a few words and have more working code than I did before, but not a product or suite or game or capability or whatever it is I’m building towards.

sylware

Hello, I cannot tell if this is true or not, since I have not been able to really test the ability of Claude AI to code. I am looking for a web API I could use with CURL, and limited "public/testing" API keys. Anyone? I am very interested in Claude code to test its ability to code assembly (x86_64/RISC-V) and to assist the ports of c++ code to plain and simple C (I read something from HN about this which seems to be promising).

Art9681

I enjoy the journey too. The journey is building systems, not coding. Coding was always the most tedious and least interesting part of it. Thinking about the system, thinking about its implementation details, iterating and making it better and better. Nothing has changed with AI. My ambition grew with the technology. Now I don't waste time on simple systems. I can get to work doing what I've always thought would be impossible, or take years. I can fail faster than ever and pivot sooner. It's the best thing to happen to systems engineering.

zackify

I just built two projects where one dogfooded the other and setup a fully working slack bot all in 1 hour. If you still want to manually do things you can. AI can answer questions about common topics way faster than searching docs. Idk why this kills peoples passions. Especially of you're old enough to not need a salary

ZenoArrow

You do know you don't have to use AI, right? I don't use it for coding (or much at all outside of coding). I'm free to code just like I did before, and so are you.

markus_zhang

My trick is to let AI help the journey but not hold on it. Use it for discussion, not implementation. It is even surprisingly good for kernel level projects.

g051051

As I commented in the other post, it killed mine at work, because my boss is pushing "AI" really hard on the devs. Fortunately, he's now seeing enough evidence to counteract the hype, but it's still going to be present and dragging down my work. But it my off time, I only experiment with LLMs to see if they're getting better. Spoiler alert: they aren't, at least not for the kind of things I want to do.

heraldgeezer

I love AI but never used Claude Code. I just use the chat interface to study and do one-off scripts. I love having 4-5 bots open and spam the same questions then reading the answers. For everything. Feels like I am doing something, like video games. It has elevated my wardrobe and music tastes but I still had to have a baseline ofc. They are way too agreeable still.

donatj

> it depends on what you enjoy: the journey or the destination This has been 100% my experience. I enjoy the puzzle solving and the general joy of organizing and pulling things together. I could really care less about the end result to meet some business need. The fun part is in the building, it's in the understanding, the growth of me . I have coworkers who get itchy when they don't see their work on production, and super defensive in code review but I've never really cared. The goal is to solve the puzzle. If there's a better way to solve the puzzle, I want to know. If it takes a week to get through code review, what do I care, I'm already off to the next puzzle. Being forced to use Claude at work, it really just took away everything that was enjoyable. Instead of solving puzzles I'm wrangling a digital junior dev that doesn't really learn from its mistakes, and lies all the time.

helsinkiandrew

The original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282777

bvan

Very well said. Slow code for me. I fully understand what I build. The AI magic bus will come crashing down at some point.

lambdathoughts

I can totally get what you are feeling so much, that I actually wrote a whole novel about it https://leanpub.com/we-mourn-our-craft

foldr

If it's a personal project, I just get AI to do the boring bits and write the fun bits myself. I enjoy coding in general, but every project has its share of boring boilerplate code, or utility functions that you've already written 100 times. Also, LLMS are pretty good at code review, which is very beneficial when you are working on something solo.

kreicer

The sad truth of life. This story reminded me of the time when I tried my first MMO - at first it felt like a fairy tale, something unknown, something that could still surprise you. And then you get familiar with all the mechanics, and the magic disappears. Now it’s just a “tool.”

Rochus

For me (60 too) it's both, the journey and the destination. LLMs not only help me get around the boring stuff so I have more time for the things I really want to design and build, but they also open areas for me in which I always wanted to go but for which it was very time consuming or difficult to get the required knowledge (e.g. tons of academic papers which are neither well written nor complete and sometimes just wrong). The LLMs help me to explore and find the right way through those areas, so these adventures suddenly become affordable for me, without doing a PhD on each subject. And even if the LLM generates some code, it still needs a "guiding hand" and engineering experience. So for me, no, AI doesn't kill my passion, but offers a very attractive symbiosis, which makes me much more efficient and my spare-time work even more interesting. I find myself watching fewer and fewer streaming videos because exploring new areas and collaborating with the LLM is much more entertaining.

the__alchemist

I will offer an orthogonal take: Spend less time on social media, news, forums etc. They are giving you a skewed view of what's important.