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Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
I’m ready to retire. In my younger days, I remember a few pivotal moments for me as a young nerd. Active Server Pages. COM components. VB6. I know these are laughable today but back then it was the greatest thing in the world to be able to call server-side commands. It kept me up nights trying to absorb it all. Fast forward decades and Claude Code is giving me that same energy and drive. I love it. It feels like it did back then. I’m chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep.
Without experience, programming with AI (vibe coding, I guess) can be compared to being a rat in maze... You work your way through a project, but the dead-ends exact a high cost in terms time, attention, and ultimately cost.
With experience, you see these dead ends before they have a chance to take hold and you know when and how to adjust course. It's literally like one poster said: coding with some buddies without ego and without the need to constantly talk people out of using the latest and greatest shiny objects/tools/frameworks.
I've really enjoyed going back a revisiting old ideas and projects with the help of AI. As the OP stated -- it has restored my energy and drive.
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.
This resonates deeply. I'm 49 and spent the last 18 months building six web apps with Claude while working a full-time Director role. The experience is exactly what you describe - that feeling of staying up late not because you have to, but because you can't stop.
What changed for me was the feedback loop. Before AI tooling, I'd have an idea, realize it would take weeks to prototype, and let it die. Now I go from concept to working MVP in a weekend. The constraint shifted from "can I build this" to "should I build this" - which is a much better problem to have.
The stack that works for me: Lovable for frontend, Replit for backend, Claude API for the AI layer, Neon for Postgres. Not fancy, but it ships.
The biggest lesson: AI doesn't replace the need for experience and taste. It amplifies it. Your decades of context about what makes good software - that's the real asset. Claude is just fast hands.
I'm about a decade behind you, but I also started my programming career during the "good" COM/DCOM/MFC/ATL/ActiveX/CORBA days. Java just came out. I slept little during that time because truly, there was nothing like programming. It was the thing that pulled me awake in the morning, and pulled me from falling asleep at night. I was so spellbound, calling it Csikszentmihalyi's flow felt like it didn't do it justice.
Fast forward 30 years later, I thought those days were gone forever. I'd accepted that I'd never experienced that kind of obsession again. Maybe because I got older. Maybe those feelings were something exclusively for the young. Maybe because my energy wasn't what it used to be. Yada yada, 1000s of reasons.
I was so shocked when I found out that I could experience that feeling again with Claude Code and Codex. I guess it was like experiencing your first love all over again? I slept late, I woke up early, I couldn't wait to go back to my Codex and Claude. It was to the point I created an orchestrator agent so I could continue chatting with my containerized agents via Telegram.
"What a time to be alive" <-- a trite, meaningless saying, that was infused by real meaning, by some basic maths that run really, really, really fast, on really, really expensive hardware. How about that!
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?
Is HN dead? Why are people commenting on a vapid post by a brand new account, which reads like an ad, and they're not questioning anything..?
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.
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.
> What really matters is how well does the code performs 1 month after it goes live, 6 months, 5 years.
After 40 years in this industry—I started at 10 and hit 50 this year—I’ve developed a low tolerance for architectural decay.
Last night, I used Claude to spin up a website editor. My baseline for this project was a minimal JavaScript UI I’ve been running that clocks in at a lean 2.7KB (https://ponder.joeldare.com). It’s fast, it’s stable, and I understand every line. But for this session, I opted for Node and neglected to include my usual "zero-framework" constraint in the prompt.
The result is a functional, working piece of software that is also a total disaster. It’s a 48KB bundle with 5 direct dependencies—which exploded into 89 total dependencies. In a world where we prioritize "velocity" over maintenance, this is the status quo. For me, it’s unacceptable.
If a simple editor requires 89 third-party packages to exist, it won't survive the 5-year test. I'm going back to basics.
I'll try again but we NEED to expertly drive these tools, at least right now.
Yes, I think this is reasonable.
I have been consistently skeptical of LLM coding but the latest batch of models seems to have crossed some threshold. Just like everyone, I've been reading lots of news about LLMs. A week ago I decided to give Claude a serious try - use it as the main tool for my current work, with a thought out context file, planning etc. The results are impressive, it took about four hours to do a non-trivial refactor I had wanted but would have needed a few days to complete myself. A simpler feature where I'd need an hour of mostly mechanical work got completed in ten minutes by Claude.
But, I was keeping a close eye on Claude's plan and gradual changes. On several occasions I corrected the model because it was going to do something too complicated, or neglected a corner case that might occur, or other such issues that need actual technical skill to spot.
Sure, now a PM whose only skills are PowerPoint and office politics can create a product demo, change the output formatting in a real program and so on. But the PM has no technical understanding and can't even prompt well, let alone guide the LLM as it makes a wrong choice.
Technical experts should be in as much demand as ever, once the delirious "nobody will need to touch code ever again gives way to a realistic understanding that LLMs, like every other tool, work much better in expert hands. The bigger question to me is how new experts are going to appear. If nobody's hiring junior devs because LLMs can do junior work faster and cheaper, how is anyone going to become an expert?
Absolutely agree. But I'd push this further: the real advantage isn't just applying expertise to prompts—it's recording the problem-solving process itself.
Think about it: when you (an expert) solve a bug, you're not just generating correct code. You're making dozens of micro-decisions about scope, trade-offs, and edge cases that an LLM won't know.
The gap between "I solved this issue" and "I can explain why I solved it THIS way" is enormous. Most devs only keep the former (the code), and lose the latter (the reasoning).
In the AI era, experts need tools that capture how they think, not just what they write. That changes the game from "LLM vs human" to "LLM + augmented human judgment."
The principal engineers who will win are those who build compounding knowledge of their own decision-making patterns.
This is correct. Had lunch with a senior staff engineer going for a promo to principal soon. He explained he was early to CC, became way more productive than his peers, and got the staff promo. Now he’s not sharing how he uses the agent so he maintains his lead over his peers.
This is so clearly a losing strategy. So clearly not even staff level performance let alone principal level.
Glass half empty view? Their whole skill set built up over decades, digitized, and now they have to shift everything they do, and who knows humans will even be in the loop, if they’re not c-suite or brown nosers. Their whole magic and skill is now capable of being done by a PM in 5 minutes with some tokens. How is that supposed to make skillful coders feel?
Massive job cuts, bad job market, AI tools everywhere, probable bubble, it seems naive to be optimistic at this juncture.
> Their whole skill set
This is the fundamental problem with how so many people think about LLMs. By the time you get to Principal, you've usually developed a range of skills where actual coding represents like 10% of what you need to do to get your job done.
People very often underestimate the sheer amount of "soft" skills required to perform well at Staff+ levels that would require true AGI to automate.
The world changes. Time marches on, and the very skills you spend your time developing will inevitably expire in their usefulness. Things that were once marvelous talents are now campfire stories or punchlines.
LLMs may be accelerating the process, but definitely not the cause.
If you want a career in technology, a durable one, you learn to adapt. Your primary skill is NOT to master a given technology, it is the ability to master a given technology. This is a university that has no graduation!
Yeah well. That's what we've been doing to other industries over and over.
I remember a cinema theater projectionist telling me exactly that while I was wiring a software controlling numeric projector, replacing the 35mm ones.
> Their whole magic and skill is now capable of being done by a PM in 5 minutes with some tokens.
[citation needed]
It has just merely moved from "almost, but not entirely useless" to "sometimes useful". The models themselves may perhaps be capable already, but they will need much better tooling than what's available today to get more useful that that, and since it's AI enthusiasts who will happily let LLMs code them that work on these tools it will still take a while to get there :)
I think the key metric to good software has really changed, the bar has noticeably dropped.
I see unreliable software like openclaw explode in popularity while a Director of Alignment at Meta publicly shares how it shredded her inbox while continuing to use openclaw [1], because that's still good enough innit? I see much buggier releases from macOS & Windows. The biggest military in the world is insisting on getting rid of any existing safeguards and limitations on its AI use and is reportedly using Claude to pick bombing targets [2] in a bombing campaign that we know has made mistakes hitting hospitals [3] and a school [4]. AI-generated slop now floods social networks with high popularity and engagement.
It's a known effect that economies of scale lowers average quality but creates massive abundance. There never really was a fundamental quality bar to software or creative work, it just has to be barely better than not existing, and that bar is lower than you might imagine.
[1] https://x.com/summeryue0/status/2025774069124399363
[2] https://archive.ph/bDTxE
[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/who-says-has-it-ha...
[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-school-strike-us-mil...
^ Big this. If we take a pessimistic attitude, we're done for.
> 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.
> I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping.
This parroted argument is getting really tired. It signals either astroturfing or someone who just accepts what they are sold without thinking.
LLMs aren’t “democratising” anything. There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.
You know what’s truly “democratic” and without “gatekeeping”? Exactly what we had before, an internet run by collaboration filled with free resources for anyone keen enough to learn.
Dismissing someone with a different opinion as astroturfing is not productive.
There are loads of high performance open source LLMs on the market that compete with the big 3. I have not seen this level of community engagement and collaboration since the open-source boom 20 years ago.
If I believed it was a different opinion I wouldn’t even have written the first paragraph, or maybe the whole reply.
The issue arises from it not being that person’s opinion but a talking point. People didn’t all individually arrive at this “democratisation” argument by themselves, they were sold what to say by the big players with vested interest in succeeding.
I’m very much for discussing thoughts one has come up with themselves, especially if they disagree with mine. But what is not productive is arguing with a proxy.
> I have not seen this level of community engagement and collaboration
Nor this level of spam and bad submissions.
It is a fair note when there are a lot of people with a monetary incentive to hype up a certain piece of technology. And as gp correctly points out: "democratizing" is most commonly used in a very hostile and underhanded manner.
It is what we are talking about, hence not "counterproductive".
> There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.
LOL. Maybe you are referring to OpenAI and Anthropic? Yes they have codex and opus. But about 1-2 months behind them is Grok, Gemini, and then 2-3 months behind them are all the other models available in cursor, from chinese open source models to composer etc.
How you can possibly use this "big company takes everything away" narrative is ridiculous, when you can probably use models for free that are abour 2 months behind the best models. This is probably the most uncentralised tech boom ever.
(I mean openAI is in such a bad state, I wouldn't be surprised if they lose almost their entire lead and user base within 6-12 months and are basically at the level of small chinese llm developers).
This is technically true in a lot of ways, but also intellectual and not identifying with what the comment was expressing. It's legitimately very frustrating to have something you enjoy democratized and feel like things are changing.
It would be like if you put in all this time to get fit and skilled on mountain bikes and there was a whole community of people, quiet nature, yada yada, and then suddenly they just changed the rules and anyone with a dirt bike could go on the same trails.
It's double damage for anyone who isn't close to retirement and built their career and invested time (i.e. opportunity cost) into something that might become a lot less valuable and then they are fearful for future economic issues.
I enjoy using LLMs and have stopped writing code, but I also don't pretend that change isn't painful.
The change is indeed painful to many of us, including me. I, too, am a software engineer. LLMs and vibe coding create some insecurity in my mind as well.
However, our personal emotions need not turn into disparaging others' use of the same skills for their satisfaction / welfare / security.
Additionally, our personal emotions need not color the objective analysis of a social phenomenon.
Those two principles are the rationales behind my reply.
I appreciate that rationale, I also see the importance of those two principles and I think there's a lot of value there.
I suppose I see "any idiot" as a more general phrase, like "idiot proof", not directly meaning that anyone who uses a LLM is an idiot. However I can also see how it would be seen as disparaging.
Also, while there's a lot of examples of people entrenching into a certain behavior or status and causing problems, I also think society is a bit harsh on people who struggle with change. For people who are less predisposed to be ok with change feels like a lot of the time the response is "just deal with it and don't be selfish, this new XYZ is better for society overall".
Society is pretty much made up of personal emotions on some level. I don't think we should go around attacking people, but very few things can be considered truly objective in the world of societal analysis.
> I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping.
It was very democratized before, almost anyone could pick up a book or learn these skills on the internet.
Opportunity was democratized for a very long time, all that was needed was the desire to put in the work.
OP sounds frustrated but at the same time the societal promise that was working for longest time (spend personal time specializing and be rewarded) has been broken so I can understand that frustration..
I'm mad about Ozempic. For years I toiled, eating healthy foods while other people stuffed their faces with pizza and cheese burgers. Everybody had the opportunity to be thin like me, but they didn't take that and earn it like me. So now instead of being happy about their new good fortune and salvaged health, I'm bitter and think society has somehow betrayed me and canceled promises.
/s, obviously I would hope except I've actually seen this sentiment expressed seriously.
I would rather see regulations fixing incentives that create this problem (why does healthy food cost so much more than processed food?) than a bandaid like Ozempic that 2/3 of people can't quit (hello another hidden subscription service) without regaining their weight back.
The produce aisle has the cheapest food in the whole store. Inb4 you cite the price of some fancy imported vegetable as your excuse for eating pizza every night.
> why does healthy food cost so much more than processed food?
It doesn’t.
> why does healthy food cost so much more than processed food?
It does not. Legumes, whole grains, vegetables, and yogurt have always been cheaper than processed food.
People prefer eating carbohydrates and saturated fats.
It's the regulations and subsidies that created the very situation in the first place (in the USA, at least). Twinkies are cheap because we literally pay farmers to grow cheap carbs and sugar. It was design this way, well - lobbied.
is the result the only thing that matters? or does the journey have its place as well?
is there price to be paid for getting any desired result imaginable without effort on a press of a button?
Yeah, exactly. For the longest time those of us who were self taught and/or started late were looked down upon. Before that, same with corporate vs. open source. This is the same elitist and gatekeeping mentality. If LLM coding tools help people finally get ideas out of their head, then more power to them! If others want to yak shave to and do more serious intellectual type of programming and exploration, more power to them!
It goes past software though. That's just the common ground we share on here. A lifetime ago I was a souhd engineer, and knew how to mic up a rock band. I've since forgotten it all, but I was at a buddies practice space and the opportunity came up to mic their setup. so I dredged up decades old memories, only to take a photo and sent it to ChatGPT, which has read every book on sound engineering and mic placement, every web forum that was open to the public where someone dropped some knowledge out there on the Internet for free. So, damned if it didn't come up with some good suggestions! I wish I could say it only made wrong and stupid suggestions. A lot about mic placement is subjective, but in telling it the kind of sound we were after, it was able to tell us which direction to go to get warmer or harsher.
So it's not just software that's coming to an end, everything else is as well. But; billionaires wives will still need haircuts (women billionaires will also need haircuts), so hairdresser will be the last profession.
I remember the cosmetology department on the other side of the tech school I went to was a common target of mockery on the "tech" tech side. Life as a hairdresser isn't always easy, but it's real skill. And unlike computer touching, requires certification.
So you put these all in the same category: gaining knowledge, gaining abilities, and just obtaining things.
I gatekeep my bike, I keep it behind a gate. If you break the gate open and democratize my bike, you're an idiot.
I'm not sure how you're getting that from their post? None of the four things mentioned (book publishing, web publishing, open-source software, computer hardware) involve stealing someone's property, he's saying that the ability to produce those things widened and the cost went down massively, so more people were able to gain access to them. Nobody stole your bike, but the bike patents expired and a bunch of bike factories popped up, so now everyone can get a cheap bike.
I did have misgivings about saying that because I'm from the old "information wants to be free" school. But the subject was idiocy, and the point isn't to say that the bike was stolen, but that the bike-taker didn't do anything clever, or have much of a learning experience.
Maybe it's of value that any idiot can do this, but we're still idiots.
it is more like:
You gatekeep your bike, you keep it behind a gate, you don't let anyone else ride it.
Your neighbor got a nicer bike for Christmas, rode it by your house and now you are sad because you aren't the special kid with the bike any more, you are just regular kid like your neighbor.
Jesus that's brutal. Accurate. But I feel attacked ;p
Yeah, if you studied and mastered all of the various disciplines required for fabricating a bicycle, and then fabricated your own by hand and offered to do likewise for others, sometimes in exchange for compensation, sometimes for free (provided others could use the bike), only for some machine that mass produces bikes to (informal) spec that was built by studying all of the designs you used for the bikes you made to suddenly become widely and cheaply available.
The real litmus test is whether one would allow LLMs to determine a medical procedure without human check. As of 2026, I wouldn’t. In the same sense I prefer to work with engineers with tons of experience rather than fresh graduates using LLMs
This is a good response. Progress has always been resisted by incumbents
Democratizing? A handful of companies harvesting data and building products on top of it is democratizing?
Open research papers, that everyone can access is democratizing knowledge. Accessibile worldwide courses, maybe (like open universities).
But LLMs are not quite the sane. This is taking knowledge from everyone and, in the best case, paywalling it.
I agree in spirit that the original comment was classist, but in this context your statements are also out of place, in my opinion.
People actually value the effort and dedication required to master a craft. Imagine we invent a drug that allows everyone to achieve olympic level athletic performance, would you say that it "democratises" sports? No, that would be ridiculous.
It does technically democratize the exhilarating experiences of that level of performance. Likely also democratizes negative aspects like injuries, extreme dieting, jealousy, neglecting relationships.
That said, if we zoom out and review such paradigm shifts over history, we find that they usually result in some new social contracts and value systems.
Both good expert writers and poor novice writers have been able to publish non-fiction books from a few centuries now. But society still doesn't perceive them as the same at all. A value system is still prevalent and estimated primarily from the writing itself. This is regardless of any other qualifications/disqualifications of authors based on education / experience / nationality / profession etc.
At the individual level too, just because book publishing is easy doesn't mean most people want to spend their time doing that. After some initial excitement, people will go do whatever are their main interests. Some may integrate these democratized skills into their main interests.
In my opinion, this historical pattern will turn out to be true with the superdrug as well as vibe coding.
Some new value will be seen in the swimming or running itself - maybe technique or additional training over and above the drug's benefits.
Some new value will be discovered in the code itself - maybe conceptual clarity, algorithmic novelty, structural cleanliness, readability, succinctness, etc. Those values will become the new foundations for future gatekeeping.
>Some new value will be discovered in the code itself - maybe conceptual clarity, algorithmic novelty, structural cleanliness, readability, succinctness, etc. Those values will become the new foundations for future gatekeeping.
It's a nice idea, but I feel like that's only going to be the case for very small companies or open source projects. Or places that pride themselves on not using AI. Artisan code I call it.
At my company the prevailing thought is that code will only be written by AI in the future. Even if today that's not the case, they feel it's inevitable. I'm skeptical of this given the performance of AI currently. But their main point is, if the code solves the business requirements, passes tests and performs at an adequate level, it's as good as any hand written code. So the value of readable, succinct, novel code is completely lost on them. And I fear this will be the case all over the tech sector.
I'm hopeful for a bit of an anti-AI movement where people do value human created things more than AI created things. I'll never buy AI art, music, TV or film.
The exhilarating experience is a byproduct of the effort it took to obtain. Replace drug with exoskeleton or machine, my point is the same. The way you democratise stuff like this is removing barriers to skill development so that everyone can learn a craft, skill, train their bodies etc.
But I do agree, if everyone can build software then the allure of it along with the value will be lost. Vibe coding is only a superpower as long as you're one of the select few doing it. Although I imagine it will continue to become a niche thing, anyone who thinks everyone and their grandma will be vibing bespoke software is out to lunch.
Personally I think there is a certain je ne sais quoi about creating software that cannot be distilled to some mechanical construct, in the same way it exists for art, music, etc. So beyond assembly line programming, there will always be a human involved in the loop and that will be a differentiating factor.
It would democratize sports, while making sports worthless and unremarkable. It would collapse the market for sports.
> would you say that it "democratises" sports
Given how I've seen a lot of AI "artists" describe themselves and "their" works, yeah, probably a lot of them would.
how is 2-3 centralized providers of this new technology "democratization"?
It's _relatively_ democratic when compared to these counterfactual gatekeeping scenarios:
- What if these centralized providers had restricted their LLMs to a small set of corporations / nations / qualified individuals?
- What if Google that invented the core transformer architecture had kept the research paper to themselves instead of openly publishing it?
- What if the universities / corporations, who had worked on concepts like the attention mechanism so essential for Google's paper, had instead gatekept it to themselves?
- What if the base models, recipes, datasets, and frameworks for training our own LLMs had never been open-sourced and published by Meta/Alibaba/DeepSeek/Mistral/many more?
> - What if Google that invented the core transformer architecture had kept the research paper to themselves instead of openly publishing it?
I'm pretty sure that someone else would have come around the corner with a similar idea some time later, because the fundamentals of these stuff were already discussed decases before "Attention is all you need" paper, the novel thing they did was combining existing knowhow into a new idea and making it public. A couple of ingredients of the base research for this is decades old (interestingly back then some European universities were leading the field)
> I'm pretty sure that someone else would have come around the corner with a similar idea some time later, because the fundamentals of these stuff were already discussed decases before
I am not trying to be dismissive, but this could apply to all research ever
thats true! I meant "not somewhen accidentally in the future" but more of "relative close together on the timeline"
There are lots of open weight models
You're right! And cars when they were invented didn't give increased mobility to millions of people, because they came from just a few manufacturers.
Cell phones made communication easier for exactly zero people even though billions have been sold. Why? Because they come from just a few different companies.
Cars are a great analogy because they made mobility significantly worse for people who can’t afford them or refuse to use them for ethical reasons.
I will tell that to the billions of people who are walking and biking around at this very moment. Just give me some time.
I said worse, not impossible. Because of cars, I have to take longer routes and put myself into danger while working.
And cars now have become privacy nightmares, which we are now beholden to
> elitist in a negative way.
It's funny you say that, because I've seen plenty of the reverse elitism from "AI bros" on HN, saying things like:
> Now that I no longer write code, I can focus on the engineering
or
> In my experience, it's the mediocre developers that are more attached to the physical act of writing code, instead of focusing on the engineering
As if getting further and further away from the instructions that the CPU or GPU actually execute is more, not less, a form of engineering, instead of something else, maybe respectable in its own way, but still different, like architecture.
It's akin to someone claiming that they're not only still a legitimate novelist for using ChatGPT or a legitimate illustrator for using stable diffusion, but that delegating the actual details of the arrangement of words into sentences or layers and shapes of pigment in an image, actually makes them more of a novelist or artist, than those who don't.
Yes, both are forms of elitism.
Yeah, and one is at least plausibly justifiable (though still potentially unfounded), while the other is absurd on its face.
> 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.
> I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities.
Here's the other edge of that sword. A couple back-end devs in my department vibe-coded up a standard AI-tailwind front-end of their vision of revamping our entire platform at once, which is completely at odds with the modular approach that most of the team wants to take, and would involve building out a whole system based around one concrete app and 4 vaporware future maybe apps.
And of course the higher-ups are like “But this is halfway done! With AI we can build things in 2 weeks that used to six months! Let’s just build everything now!” Nevermind that we don’t even have the requirements now, and nailing those down is the hardest part of the whole project. But the higher-ups never live through that grind.
It reemphasizes the question of importance. Would a user accept their data needing a AI implementation of a ("manual") migration and their flow completely changing? Does reliability to existing users even matter in the companies plans?
If it isn't a product that needs to solve problems reliably over time then it was kind of silly to use a DBA that cost twice the Backend engineer and only handled the data niche. We progressed from there or regressed from there depending on why we are developing software.
What you bring to the table night be fine, but how long do you think you'll find emoloyers willing to still pay for this?
One thing is for sure LLMs will bring down down the cost of software per some unit and increase the volume.
But..cost = revenue. What is a cost to one party is a revenue to another party. The revenue is what pays salaries.
So when software costs go down the revenues will go down too. When revenues go down lay offs will happen, salary cuts will happen.
This is not fictional. Markets already reacted to this and many software service companies took a hit.
If AI completely erases the profession of software developer, I'll find something else to do. Like I can't in good faith ever oppose a technology just because it's going to make my job redundant, that would be insane.
Take that to its extreme. Suppose there was a technology that you do not own that would make everyone's job redundant. Everyone out of a job. There is no need for education, for skills to be mastered, for expertise. Would it still be insane to complain?
You still need education, skills to be mastered and expertise even in a world without jobs. How would you play any game or sport without skills?
Then society needs to collectively decide how to allocate resources. Uh oh!
The owners of the AI companies will collectively decide how to allocate resources, rather.
the resources go to the guys with the AI duh
take that to absolute extreme. Why do we even need a job? If all our physical needs are met maybe humanity can finally focus on real problems (spiritual, mental, inter personal) that no amount of "jobs" can solve...
Because greedy capitalists control the world which means that most people's most basic needs aren't met if they don't have a job.
There are bigger issues if everyone is out of a job.
Isnt' that what old-school software did for many years? It used to take jobs, just not from developers. If you implement software that takes accounting from 10 people to 2, 8 just got fired. If you have Support solution helping one support rep answer 100 requests instead of 20, you just optimised support force by the rate of 1 to 5.
I'm in the boat of SaaS myself, but feel a bit dishonesty from Senior devs complaining about technology stealing jobs. When it was them doing the stealing, it was fine. Now that the tables have turned, it's not technology is bad
There may not be a job for you in an office setting. What would you do?
That's when the problem shifts from individual to systemic, and only systemic solutions fix systemic problems.
I think that a what a lot of anti-AI folks are trying to argue without saying it explicitly is that it already is a systemic problem. They're not necessarily against the technology on its own, but against the systemic problems it would introduce if society doesn't take a stance against it.
I don't have an answer for this, and won't pretend to.
But my take on this is that accountability will still be a purely human factor. It still is. I recently let go of a contractor who was hired to run our projects as a Scrum/PM, and his tickets were so bad (there were tickets with 3 words in them, one ticket was in the current sprint, that was blocked by a ticket deep in the backlog, basic stuff). When I confronted him about them, he said the AI generated them.
So I told him that:
1. That's not an excuse, his job is to verify what it generated and ensure it's still good.
2. That actually makes it look WORSE, that not only did he do nearly 0 work, that he didn't even check the most basic outputs. And I'm not anti-AI, I expressly said that we should absolutely use AI tools to accelerate our work. But that's not what happened here.
So you won't get to say (at least I think for another few years) "my AI was at fault" – you are ultimately responsible, not your tools. So people will still want to delegate those things down the chain. But ultimately they'll have to delegate to fewer people.
In general I agree. But it’s somehow very unlikely for the AI to generate a three word ticket. That’s what humans do. AI might generate an overly verbose and specific ticket instead.
What drives that behavior is what I like to call human slop :)
>What you bring to the table night be fine, but how long do you think you'll find emoloyers willing to still pay for this?
I'm assuming that the software factory of the future is going to need Millwrights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millwright
But, builders are builders. These tools turn ideas into things, a builders dream.
Just sold a house/moved out after being laid off in mid-January from a govt IT contractor(there for 8 great years and mostly remote). I started my UX Research, Design and Front End Web Design coding career in 2009, but now I think it's almost a stupid go nowhere vanishing career, thanks to AI.
I think much like you that AI is and will just continue to destroy the economy! At least I got to sell a house and make a profit--stash it away for when the big AI market crash happens (hopefully not a 2030 great depression tho). As then it's a down market and buying stocks, bitcoin and houses is always cheaper.
Any given system will still need people around to steer the AI and ensure the thing gets built and maintained responsibly. I'm working on a small team of in-house devs at a financial company, and not worried about my future at all. As an IC I'm providing more value than ever, and the backlog of potential projects is still basically endless- why would anyone want to fire me?
Why would it need people to steer the AI? I can easily see a future where companies that don't rely on the physical world (like manufacturing) are completely autonomous, just machines making money for their owner.
Yours is a naive sight. You learn a bit about engineering and feedback control and realize that the world is too complex for that.
It's easy to imagine but there's still a vast amount of innovation and development that has to happen before something like that becomes realistic. At that point the whole system of capitalism would need to be reconsidered. Not going to happen in the foreseeable future.
> why would anyone want to fire me?
Because they can hire some "prompt engineer" to "steer the AI" for $30-50k instead of $150-$250k.
The difference between having a non-technical person and someone who is capable of understanding the code being generated and the systems running it is immense, and will continue to be so over the foreseeable future.
Anyone that only costs $30k-50k would either be doing this part-time, or have some limit that prevented them from earning $150k-250k.
Or not living in US?
"One thing is for sure LLMs will bring down down the cost of software per some unit and increase the volume.
But..cost = revenue."
That is Karl Marx's Labor theory of value that has been completely disproven.
You don't charge what it costs to build something, you charge the maximum the customer is willing to pay.
Congrats - you caused me to create an account to reply, due to the sheer density of your incorrectness.
- First, the LTV was not Marx's idea. Adam Smith held the same view, as did many many others during this era. Marx refined this idea, but there's nothing about your point that is unique to his version of it.
- Second, while LTV is not widely used today, this is not because it was "completely disproven" (can you cite anything to back this claim up?). It is because economics shifted to a different paradigm based on marginal utility. These two frameworks operate at different levels of abstraction and address different aspects of the price of goods. There is actually empirical evidence of a correlation between the cost of a good and the cost of the labour, at an aggregate level.
- Third, Marx explicitly differentiated between _value_ and _price_. LTV deals with value exclusively (in other words, what happens when externalities impacting price are accounted for). He would have had no issue accepting that externalities impacting supply and demand would impact price.
The final irony of your comment is that the commenter's claim that you are incorrectly analysing is actually also fully defensible under your (presumably) neoclassical view of economics. In competitive markets, reduced production costs lead to reduced equilibrium prices as competitors undercut each other. The proposition that in the long run, under competition, price tends toward cost is a standard result in microeconomics. The idea that "you charge the maximum the customer is willing to pay" only holds without qualification in monopoly or monopolistic competition with strong differentiation, which are precisely the conditions that increased software supply would erode.
> I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities.
Programming was already “democratized” in the sense that anyone could learn to program for free, using only open-source software. Making everyone reliant on a few evil megacorporations is the opposite of democratization.
The models will not keep betting better. We have pased "peak LLM" already, by my estimate. Some of the parlour tricks that are wrapped around the models will make some incremental improvements, but the underlying models are done. More data, more parameters, are no longer doing to do anything.
AI will have to take a different direction.
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?
> 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.
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.
>For short-sighted management, this is all desirable since the sloppy output looks nice in the short term
It was a sobering moment for me when I sat down to look at the places I have worked for over my career of 20-odd years. The correlation between high quality code and economic performance was not just non-existing, it was almost negative. As in: whenever I have worked at a place where engineering felt like a true priority, tech debt was well managed, principles followed, that place was not making any money.
I am not saying that this is a general rule, of course there are many places that perform well and have solid engineering. But what I am saying is that this short-sighted management might not be acting as irrationally as we prefer to think.
I generally agree; for most organizations the product is the value and as long as the product gives some semblance of functionality, improving along any technical axis is a cost. Organizations that spend too much on engineering principles usually aren’t as successful since the investment just isn’t worth it.
But, I have definitely seen failure due to persistent technical mistakes, as well, especially when combined with human factors. There’s a particularly deep spiral that comes from “our technical leadership made poor choices or left, we don’t know what to invest in strategically so we keep spending money on attempted refactors, reorgs, or rewrites that don’t add more value, and now nobody can fix or maintain the core product and customers are noticing;” I think that at least two companies I’ve worked at have had this spiral materially affect their stock price.
I think that generative coding can both help and hurt along this axis, but by and large I have not seen LLMs be promising at this kind of executive function (ie - “our aging codebase is getting hard to maintain, what do we need to do to ensure that it doesn’t erode our ability to compete”).
My guesses are
1. We'll train the LLMs not to make sloppy code.
2. We'll come up with better techinques to make guardrails to help
Making up examples:
* right now, lots of people code with no tests. LLMs do better with tests. So, training LLMs to make new and better tests.
* right now, many things are left untested because it's work to build the infrastructure to test them. Now we have LLMs to help us build that infrustructure so we can use it make better tests for LLMs.
* ...?
* better languages and formal verification. If an LLM codes in Rust, there’s a class of bugs that just can’t happen. I imagine we can develop languages with built-in guardrails that would’ve been too tedious for humans to use.
ChatGPT came out a little over 3 years ago. After 5-10 more years of similar progress I doubt any humans will be required to clean up the messes created by today’s agents.
Good software, bad software, and working software.
> 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.
This.
LLMs don't always produce correct code - sometimes it's subtly wrong and it takes an expert to notice the mistake(s).
As an idiot, I am very aware that Claude can help me, but also very aware I am not an experienced SWE and continue to seek out their views.
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/
Why would I need this tool if I can just say "Claude, make me a CAD drawing of XYZ"?
Not trying to be rude, just generating some empathy for the OP's situation, which I think was missed: Like them, there is something you are passionate about that there is no longer really a point to. You could argue "but people will need to use my tool to generate really _good_ CAD drawings" but how much marginal value does that create over getting a "good enough" one in 2 minutes from Claude?
I feel sorry for bringing this up, but I think you might have missed how the thing that makes this possible makes it unnecessary.
> 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.
> while retaining control of every line
What I want when I'm coding, especially on open source side projects, is to retain copyright licensing over every line (cleanly, without lying about anything).
Whoops!
Hmm. TIL: The real exposure isn't Anthropic, OpenIA claiming your code, it's you unknowingly distributing someone else's GPL code because the model silently reproduced it, with essentially zero recourse for the model owner.
I wonder why people still believe in intellectual property, it's a concept that has long since lived past its usefulness, especially technologically.
Because IP democratizes returns on the creative process.
Maybe it used to but with companies like Disney lengthening copyright times way beyond the original intention, or corporations patenting absurd things, it seems to be more of a way to entrench power than any sort of democratization. I'm glad generative AI seem to be bypassing all this and actually democratizing returns on the creative process, by flagrantly violating the concept of IP.
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
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 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...
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.
Today every single software engineer has an extremely smart and experienced mentor available to them 24/7. They don't have to meet them for coffee once a month to ask basic questions.
That said, I still feel strongly about mentorship though. It's just that you can spend your quality time with the busy person on higher-level things, like relationship building, rather than more basic questions.
How would this affect future generations of ... well anyone, when they have 24/7 access to extremely smart mentor who will find solution to pretty much any problem they might face?
Can't just offload all the hard things to the AI and let your brain waste away. There's a reason brain is equated to a muscle - you have to actively use it to grow it (not physically in size, obviously).
I agree with you about using our brains. I honestly have no idea.
But I can tell you that, just like with most things in life, this is yet another area where we are increasingly getting to do just the things we WANT to do (like think about code or features and have it appear, pixel pushing, smoothing out the actual UX, porting to faster languages) and not have to do things most people don't want to do, like drudgery (writing tests, formatting code, refactoring manually, updating documentation, manually moving tickets around like a caveman). Or to use a non tech example, having to spend hours fixing word document formatting.
So we're getting more spoiled. For example, kids have never waited for a table at a restaurant for more than 20 mins (which most people used to do all the time before abundant food delivery or reservation systems). Not that we ever enjoyed it, but learning to be bored, learning to not just get instant gratification is something that's happening all over in life.
Now it's happening even with work. So I honestly don't know how it'll affect society.
Just because you have every instruction manual doesn't mean you can follow and perform the steps or have time to or can adapt to a real world situation.
"No one particularly needs mentorship as long as they know how to use an LLM correctly."
The "as long as they know how..." is doing a lot of work there.
I expect developers with mentors who help give them the grounding they need to ask questions will get there a whole lot faster than developers without.
I have this feeling as well. At one point I thought when I got older it might be nice to teach - Steve Wozniak apparently does. But, it doesn't feel like I can really add much. Students have infinite teachers on youtube, and now they have Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT which are amazing. Sure, today, maybe, I could see myself as mostly a chaperone in some class to once in a while help a student out with some issue but that possibility seems like it will be gone in 1 to 2 years.
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.)
Sorry for the dumb question but how could you feel threatened by LLMs if you retired just a few years ago? Considering the hype started somewhere in 2022-2023.
You're right, as I say, I no longer have skin in the game.
Retired, I have continued to code, and have used Claude to vibe code a number of projects—initially I dod so out of curiosity as to how good LLM are, and then to handle things like SwiftUI that I am hesitant to have to learn.
It's true then that I am not in a position of employment where I have to consider a performance review, pleasing my boss or impressing my coworkers. I don't doubt that would color my perception.
But speaking as someone who has used LLMs to code, while they impress me, again, I don't feel the threat. As others have pointed out in past threads here on HN, on blogs, LLMs feel like junior engineers. To be sure they have a lot of "facts" but they seem to lack… (thinking of a good word) insight? Foresight?
And this too is how I have felt as I was aging-out of my career and watched clever, junior engineers come on board. The newness, like Swift, was easy for them. (They no doubt have rushed headlong into Swift UI and have mastered it.) Never though did I feel threatened by them though.
The career itself, I have found, does in fact care little for "grey beards". I felt by age 50 I was being kind of… disregarded by the younger engineers. (It was too bad, I thought, because I had hoped that on my way out of the profession I might act more as mentor than coder. C'est la vie!)
But for all the new engineer's energy and eagerness, I was comfortable instead with my own sense of confidence and clarity that came from just having been around the block a few times.
Feel free to disregard my thoughts on LLMs and the degree to which they are threatening the industry. They may well be an existential threat. But, with junior engineers as also a kind of foil, I can only say that I still feel there is value in my experience and I don't disparage it.
and they only got really good like last December.
how would you suggest someone who just started their career moves ahead to build that “taste” for lean and elegant solutions? I am onboarding fresh grads onto my team and I see a tendency towards blindly implementing LLM generated code. I always tell people they are responsible for the code they push, so they should always research every line of code, their imported frameworks and generated solutions. They should be able to explain their choices (or the LLM’s). But I still fail to see how I can help people become this “new” brand of developer. Would be very happy to hear your thoughts or how other people are planning to tackle this. Thanks!
My "taste" (like perhaps all other "tastes") comes from experience. Cliche, I know.
When you have had to tackle dozens of frameworks/libraries/API over the years, you get to where you find you like this one, dislike that one.
Get/Set, Get/Set… The symmetry is good…
Calling convention is to pass a dictionary: all the params are keys. Extensible, sure, but not very self-documenting, kind of baroque?
An API that is almost entirely call-backs. Hard to wrap your head around, but seems to be pretty flexible… How better to write a parser API anyway?
(You get the idea.)
And as you design apps/frameworks yourself, then have to go through several cycles of adding features, refactoring, you start to think differently about structuring apps/frameworks that make the inevitable future work easier. Perhaps you break the features of a monolithic app into libraries/services…
None of this is novel, it's just that doing enough of it, putting in the sweat and hours, screwing up a number of times) is where "taste" (insight?) comes from.
It's no different from anything else.
Perhaps the best way to accelerate the above though is to give a junior dev ownership of an app (or if that is too big of a bite, then a piece of a thing).
"We need an image cache," you say to them. And then it's theirs.
They whiteboard it, they prototype it, they write it, they fix the bugs, they maintain it, they extend it. If they have to rewrite it a few times over the course of its lifetime (until it moves into maintenance mode), that's fine. It's exactly how they'll learn.
But it takes time.
This answer probably feels unsatisfying and I agree. But some things actually need repetition and ongoing effort. One of my favorite quotes is from Ira Glass about this very topic.
> Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.
> All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
> But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
> Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.
> And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you're going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions.
> I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.
> —Ira Glass
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
I wouldn’t say the pessimists fall into that category.
In my experience they are mostly the subset of engineers who enjoyed coding in and of itself and ——in some cases—— without concern for the end product.
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".
> 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.
I see this at my workplace. The PMs and BAs are now completely redundant since you can prompt your way to decent specs with the right access and setup.
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.
It's more common than you might think.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
As a self teaching beginner* this is where I find AI a bit limiting. When I ask ChatGPT questions about code it is always about to offer up a solution, but it often provides inappropriate responses that don't take into account the full context of a project/task. While it understands what good structure and architecture are, it's missing the awareness of good design and architecture and applying to the questions I have, and I don't have have the experience or skill set to ask those questions. It often suggests solutions (I tend to ask it for suggestions rather than full code, so I can work it out myself) that may have drawbacks that I only discover down the line.
Any suggestions to overcome this deficit in design experience? My best guess is to read some texts on code design or alternatively get a job at a place to learn design in practice. Mainly learning javascript and web app development at the moment.
*Who has had a career in a previous field, and doesn't necessarily think that learning programming with lead to another career (and is okay with that).
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!
I'm reading The Compassionate Mind by Paul Gilbert and I find it shares many similar ideas. Also I've been interested by Buddhist concepts like impermanency for a while.
While I think rationally what you said is good and makes sense, at the same time it feels like it says you should forget your roots and be this impermanent being existing in the present and only the present. I value everything about my life, the past, my role models when I was a kid, my past and current skills, all friends from all ages, my whole path essentially. When considering current choices I have to make, I feel more drawn to think "What has been my path and values previously, and what makes sense now?" instead of forgetting the past and my ego and just hustling with the $CURRENT technology.
At least that's how I have thought about my ego when I have tried to approach it with topics like these. It might allow me to make more money in the present if I just disidentified with it, but that thought legitimately feels horrifying because it would mean devaluing my roots.
Interested to hear your take on this.
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.
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?
I mean. Sounds like the guy had existing long term goals, needed to overcome an activation threshold, and used AI as a catalyst to just get started. Seems like, behaviorally, AI was pivotal for him to learn things, even if the things he learned came from elsewhere / his own effort.
I suppose, yes, AI was like a kickstart. But the point is - he didn't just stick to AI, he realized that in terms of skill and fulfillment it's a no-go direction. Because you neither learn anything, nor create anything yourself.
I feel the same way. But this is a new economy now, software is cheap, and regarding the skill and fulfillment you derive writing it yourself, to quote Chris Farley: "that and a nickel will get you a nice hot cup of JACK SQUAT!!!"
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
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.
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.
> 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.
> Do not fall for the AI agent hype.
Problem is, it's the people in higher positions who should be aware of that, except they don't care. All they would see is how much more profit company can make if it reduces workforce.
Plenty of engineers do realize that AI is not some magical solution to everything - but the money and hype tends to overshadow cooler heads on HN.
This is exactly it. The junior and mids on my team produce Junior and mid quality level vibe code.
Too generic prompts, unaccounted edge casez, inattentive code reviews...
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.
definitely. With AI I can stop working on the painful tasks and spend much more time on things that matter most to me: building the right abstractions, thinking about the maths, talking to the customer...
But TBH, I have been a bit "shocked" by AI as well. It's much more troubling that the coming of the internet. But my hope is that having worked with AI extensively for the past 1-2 years, I'm confident they miss the important things: how to build the abstractions to solve the non-code constraints (like ease of maintenance, explainability to others, etc.)
And the way it goes at the moment shows no sign of progress in that area (throwing more agents at a problem will not help).
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.
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.
You summed up my feelings pretty well, thanks for this counterpoint to usual comments in HN
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).
> 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.
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
Compared to painting, software allows you to solve the problem once, then distribute the solution to the problem basically for free.
Market frictions cause the problem to be solved multiple times.
LLMs learn the solution patterns and apply it devaluing coming up with solutions in the first place.
Well, slightly different take: it's like telling an artist the world doesn't need another song about love, these already exist and can be re-heard as needed. Sharper formulated: a CRM or TODO-list is a solved problem in theory, right? tons of solutions even free ones to use out there. still look at what people are doing and selling - CRMs and TODO-list variations. because, in fact, its not solved, and always has certain tradeoffs that doesn't fit some people.
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.
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.
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 think "accumulated expert knowledge" was never really useful if an organisation could just replace that person with a wiki.
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.
> 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.
On the plus side you're retiring soon... imagine if your were a graduate today
At least they're young enough to re-train into something else if they want. It's the mid-career devs who are flailing at the moment.
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
CC is not nearly that good. It may never be. It's an amplifier not a replacer.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
Yeah, even just now I had to go and correct some issues with LLM output that I only knew were an issue because I have extensive experience with that domain. If I didn't have that I would not have caught it and it would have been a major issue down the line.
LLM's remove much of the drudgery of programming that we unfortunately sort of did to ourselves collectively.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I make documentation and diagrams for myself rather than writing code much of the time
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."
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.
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
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])
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.
It's only going to get harder to achieve if you keep letting your skills and resoning abilities rot from LLM reliance.
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.
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.
Why did you leave this as a comment on someone talking about how happy they were about their own experience?
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.
Really? To me it seems that quite the opposite is true - people who were never very good at writing code are excited about LLMs because suddenly they can pretend to be architects without understanding what's happening in the codebase.
Same as with AI-art, where people without much drawing skills were excited about being able to make "art".
Perhaps you are both right. People who see coding as a means to an end enjoy LLMs while people who saw it as the most enjoyable part don’t.
This is more accurate, I've written enough code in my life to never really want to do it again ....but I still love creating (code was merely the way to do it) so LLMs help with my underlying passion.
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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.
In SV probably. As a lead FE dev with 14 yoe in Munich I‘m at 85k€, thats not even enough to pay off a loan for a house around here.
Cries in federal employee wages
Uh if you worked for a top company or something. Most tech workers have made relatively ordinary salaries the last 20 years.
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.
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.
> it's like programming with a couple of buddies. Occasionally they goof off and wreck everything,
Nailed it :)
The sad part is the “buddy hackathon” is kind of redundant now
I think people can do "buddy vibecodeathons" now. :)
It's nice to be able to either just body double [1], or have some other people around to vent to when Claude goes off the rails.
[1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/body-doubling-for-adhd
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.
I think that I understand you. I started programming in the mid-1960s as a kid and now in my mid-70s I have been retired for two years (except for occasional small gigs for old friends). Nothing special about me but I have had the pleasure of working with or at least getting to know many of the famous people in neural networks and AI since the mid-1980s.
My current passion is pushing small LLMs as far as I can using tools and agentic frameworks. The latest Qwen 3.5 models have me over the moon. I still like to design and code myself but I also find it pleasurable to sometimes use Claude Code and Antigravity.
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.
> 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.
Couldn't agree more. On a large and open ended feature I sometimes struggle with where to start and end up researching something tangential. Cool learning, but not efficient.
Claude Code gives me a directory, usually something that works, and then I research the heck out of it. In that way I am more of an editor, which seems to be my stronger skill.
>>>>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.
AppleScript doesn’t have any NeXT heritage, it comes entirely from classic MacOS (debuted in System 7.1)
Sure, but you can feel some emergent philosophies that are starting to converge and there are recognizable aesthetics.
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.
Good for you. Learning is a life long thing!
> 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.
> Learning for what? That day when you write it yourself, that will never come ...
For the enjoyment, and producing better products, faster?
Why were you learning, before AI tools?
I second another fellow commenter, you are my inspiration too! Thanks for sharing.
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.”
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.
> 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.
What kind of tasks?
writing any git command, ever, writing any documentation, ever. writing comments in issue trackers, resolving issues in issue trackers, doing pretty much anything in the terminal, ever… basically every imaginable thing which takes time away from the actual job
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.
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.
And why would they not? do they have to feel they ain’t got it anymore because age?
Because they don't "got it". Asking the bot to program is the same as asking a junior engineer to write some code, and then claiming it as your own. It's not actually them programming. Just a misplaced sense of pride.
More gatekeeping, more no true Scotsman fallacies, more bitter cope.
You can absolutely take pride in having raised your own cows. But the guy down the street can also take pride in having cooked his own steak. In fact, the guy down the street might actually be a better chef than you, even though you know how to breed cattle.
You're wrong because you are making the wrong comparison.
In this analogy, The guy down the street didn't cook his own steak. He told someone else to cook the steak. And then claimed that he himself cooked it. Telling himself, "wow, I'm a great chef!". When In fact, he did not cook the steak.
Your greatness as a chef isn't measured by how well you manage restaurant kitchens. That would be a great manager. Your greatness as a chef is measured by actually cooking yourself. Claiming other chef's work as your own would be dishonest and self-deception.
If we want to stretch this analogy a bit - I believe all world-level chefs have a team of sous-chefs working for them. Doing things like chopping ingredients, prepping things, in fact probably doing a lot of th cooking. I think building with ai is pretty similar.
> 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.
Me too, only I'm "only" 42! Got my first job as a programmer at 18 and (in retrospect) burnt out at some point and thought going into managment was the fix.
If you don’t mind sharing, what does your startup do?
What is an "EM"?
Engineering Manager (as opposed to people who stick to programming, called Individual Contributor.)
Oh, how I hate these horrible job descriptions.
But thanks for the info.
And what's the problem with that?
I’m 63 (almost 64), and I’m rewriting an app (server and native client), that took a couple of years to originally write.
Been working for about a month, and I’m halfway through. The server’s done (but I’m sure that I’ll still need to tweak and fix bugs), and I’m developing the communication layer and client model, now. It took seven months to write the first version of the server, and about six months to write a less-capable communication driver, the first time.
This is not a “vibe-coded” toy for personal use. It’s a high-Quality shipping app, with thousands of users. There’s still a ton of work, ahead, but it looks like an achievable goal. I do feel as if my experience, writing shipping software, is crucial to using the LLM to develop something that can be shipped.
I’ve had to learn how to work with an LLM, but I think I’ve found my stride. I certainly could not do this, without an LLM.
The thing that most upset me, since retirement, has been the lack of folks willing to work with me. I spent my entire career, working in teams, and being forced to work alone, reduced my scope. I feel as if LLMs have allowed me to dream big, again.
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.
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.
I'll add "craftsmanship". It isn't just delivering "A" finished product, you want to deliver a "good", if not "the best", finished product.
I guess if you're in an iterative MVP mindset then this matters less, but that model has always made me a little queasy. I like testing and verifying the crap out of my stuff so that when I hand it off I know it's the best effort I could possibly give.
Relying on AI code denies me the deep knowledge I need to feel that level of pride and confidence. And if I'm going to take the time to read, test and verify the AI code to that level, then I might as well write most of it unless it's really repetitive.
I don't think AI coding means you stop being a craftsman. It is just a different tool. Manual coding is a hand tool, AI coding is a power tool. You still retain all of the knowledge and as much control over the codebase as you want, same with any tool.
It's a different conversation when we talk about people learning to code now though. I'd probably not recommend going for the power tool until you have a solid understanding of the manual tools.
Meanwhile Linus argued against Debuggers in 2000: https://lwn.net/2000/0914/a/lt-debugger.php3
But then he changed his tune? Even on LLMs...
It can be a power tool if used in a limited capacity, but I'd describe vibe-coding as sending a junior construction worker out to finish a piece of framing on his own.
Will he remember to use pressure treated lumber? Will he use the right nails? Will he space them correctly? Will the gaps be acceptable? Did he snort some bath salts and build a sandcastle in a corner for some reason?
All unknowns and you have to over-specify and play inspector. Maybe that's still faster than doing it yourself for some tasks, but I doubt most vibe-coders are doing that. And I guess it doesn't matter for toy programs that aren't meant for production, but I'm not wired to enjoy it. My challenge is restraining myself from overengineering my work and wasting time on micro-optimizations.
That's a really good point. And I agree that kind of confidence in craftsmanship is something that's missing from agentic coding today... it does make slop if you're not careful with it. Even though I've learned how to guide agents, I still have some uneasiness about missing something sloppy they have done.
But then it makes me ask if the agents will get so good that craftsmanship is a given? Then that concern goes away. When I use Go I don't worry too much about craftsmanship of the language because it was written by a lot of smart people and has proven itself to be good in production for thousands of orgs. Is there a point at which agents prove themselves capable enough that we start trusting in their craftsmanship? There's a long way to go, but I don't think that's impossible.
I would argue that craftsmanship includes a thorough understanding and cognitive model of the code. And, as far as I understand it, these agents are syntactic wonders but can not really understand anything. Which would preclude any sort of craftsmanship, even if what they make happens to be well-built.
I can see where this idea is coming from, but I don't agree with the conclusion at all. As someone who loves solving puzzles and learning new things, AI has been a godsend. I also very much like creating things, but even more than that, I like doing all three at once.
I think of AI like a microdose of Speed Force. Having super speed doesn't mean you don't like running; it just means you can run further and more often. That in turn justifies a greater amount of time spent running.
Without the Speed Force, most of the time you were reliant on vehicles (i.e. paying for third-party solutions) to get where you needed to go. With the Speed Force, not only can you suddenly meet a lot more of your transportation needs by foot, you're able to run to entirely new destinations that you'd never before considered. Eventually, you may find yourself planning trips to yet unexplored faraway harsh terrains.
If your joy in running came from attempting to push your biological physical limits, maybe you hate the Speed Force. If you enjoy spending time running and navigating unfamiliar territory, the Speed Force can give you more of that.
Sure, there are also oddballs who don't know how to run, yet insist on using the Speed Force to awkwardly jump somewhere vaguely in the vicinity of their destination. No one's saying they don't exist, but that's a completely different crowd from experienced speedsters.
You may be an exception, but most businesses and many individuals pay for a laundry list of commercial software products. If you count non-monetary forms of payment (i.e. data and/or attention to ads), that expands to virtually everyone with access to a computer.
I think I'd add a #4 to this list, and that's helping people. I like making things that people can use to make their life easier. That's probably my number one.
The "creating something" idea... That's more complex. With agentic coding something can be created, but did I create it? Using agentic coding feels like hiring someone to do the work for me. For example, I just had all the windows in my house replaced. A crew came out at did it. The job is done, but I didn't do anything and felt no pride or sense of accomplishment in having these new windows. It just happened. Contrast that to a slow drain I had in my bathroom. I took the pipes apart, found the blockage, cleared it out, and reassembled the drain. When I next used the sink and the water effortlessly flowed away, I felt like I accomplished something, because I did it, not some plumber I hired.
So it isn't even about learning or solving puzzles, it's about being the person who actually did the work and seeing the result of that effort.
Yes! Good points! I think what I meant for point 1 was more "outputting something" vs "creating something". In my mind that encompasses materializing something into the world to achieve whatever you wanted, whether you were aiming to help others, solve a problem you alone have, or scratch some other sort of itch. It's about achieving some end. And helping somebody can be achieved indirectly and still be satisfying.
The inherent value of creating is something I was missing. Solving puzzles might be part of that, but not all. It's the classic Platonic question about how we value actions: for their own sake, for their results, or for both.
I think we agree that coding can be both, and it sounds like you feel the value for its own sake is lackluster in agentic coding -- It's just too easy. And I think that's the core sliding scale: Do you value creation more for its own sake or for its results? Where you land on that spectrum probably influences how people feel about agentic coding.
That being said, I also think that agentic coding can give enough of a challenge to scratch the itch of intrinsic value of creating. To a certain degree I think it's about moving up the abstraction chain to work more on architecture and product design. Those things can be fun and rewarding too. But fundamentally it's a preference.
It's kind of a weird thing. I spent 2 days working one some code, which in a way was the process of working out the requirements and functionality that was required. I then told Claude to look at it in and refactor it.
I did put in 2 days of work to come up with what Claude used to ultimately do what it did... but when I look at the resulting code, I feel nothing. Having the idea isn't the same as being the one who actually did the thing. I plan to delete the branch next week. I don't want to maintain what it did, and think it should be less complex than it made it.
> If you are primarily motivated by seeing a finished product of some sort, then I think agentic coding is transcendent
As someone who enjoys technology, and using it, and can just barely sort-of code but really not, agentic coding must be wonderful. I have barely scratched the surface with a couple of scripts. But simply translating "here's what I want, and how I would have done it the last time I used Linux 20 years ago, show me how to do it with systemd" is so much easier than digging through years of forum posts and trying to make sure they haven't all been obsoleted.
None of it is new. None of it is fancy. I do regret that people aren't getting credit for their work, but "automount this SMB share from my NAS" isn't going to make anyone's reputation. It's just going to make my day easier. I really did learn enough to set up a NAT system to share a DSL connection with an office in the late 1990s on OpenBSD. It took a long time, and I don't have that kind of free time anymore. I will never git gud. It's this, or just be another luser who goes without.
You're forgetting that (1) brings a sense of pride. "I built this". That's not true in many ways if you ask something else to do it
I'm squarely into #1, but it usually requires #2 (at a high level) and has #3 as a side effect. But there's also #0 which kicks it all off: the triggering problem/question.
Like just yesterday I started to notice the increasing pressure of an increasingly hard-to-navigate number of Claude chats. So I went searching for something to organize them. I did find an extension, but it's for Chrome, and I'm a Firefox person, so I had Claude look at it with the initial idea of porting to Firefox. Then in the analysis, Claude mentioned creating an extension from scratch, and that's what I went for.
I've never really used JavaScript, let alone created a Firefox extension before, but in a few minutes I was iterating on one, figuring out how I wanted it to work with Claude, and now I have a very nice and featureful chats organizer. And I haven't even peeked at the code. I also now have a firm idea of this general spec of how I want arbitrary list-organizing UI to look+behave going forward.
I think your comment really captures some of the reasons behind the differences between people’s reactions to Claude pretty well.
I will add though, on 2 and 3, during most of the coding I do in my day job as a staff engineer, it’s pretty rare for me to encounter deeply interesting puzzles and really interesting things to learn. It’s not like I’m writing a compiler or and OS kernel or something; this is web dev and infra at a mid sized company. For 95% of coding tasks I do I’ve seen some variation already before and they are boring. It’s nice to have Claude power through them.
On system design and architecture, the problems still tend to be a bit more novel. I still learn things there. Claude is helpful, but not as helpful as it is for the code.
I do get the sense that some folks enjoy solving variations of familiar programming puzzles over and over again, and Claude kills that for them. That’s not me at all. I like novelty and I hate solving the same thing twice. Different tastes, I guess.
I find there are still opportunities to solve puzzles. Claude Code might build something in an unsatisfying or inelegant way, and you can suggest a better approach. You can absolutely write core components — the fun parts you crave — of the code and give it to an LLM to flesh out the rest.
One of the recent joys I’ve had is having CC knit together separate notebooks I’d been updating for a couple of years into a unified app. It can be a fulfilling experience.
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
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.
> I’m a builder!
I‘m a builder too.
I built a house. Ok, I said an architect what I want and he showed me the plans and I gave him feedback for adjustments and then the plans were given to the construction crew and they built the actual house.
But is was my prompt, so I‘m a builder.
Also, half of the rooms in the house can’t be accessed because they don’t have a door. And when it starts raining, the house collapses.
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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.
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.
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.
I disagree. I need to be able to support what I ship and answer to the details of what it does and why it does it. I can only truly do that if I write it myself.
There should also be a symbiotic relationship at a job. Yes, they get something from me, but I should also get something… learning and some amount of satisfaction… in addition to the paycheck. I can get a paycheck anywhere.
It’s not the “new norm” unless employees accept it as the new normal. I don’t know why anyone would accept a completely one-sided situation like that.
> I need to be able to support what I ship and answer to the details of what it does and why it does it. I can only truly do that if I write it myself.
How do you function on a team, where you have to maintain code others have written?
We talk to each other. If someone wrote something I don't understand, I defer to them. If someone wrote something who is no longer with the company, we trying to make sense of it, and in some cases end up re-writing some things.
There are only 3 or 4 of us working on most of the code I touch. 3 of us have worked together in some form or another for close to 20 years.
> I can only truly do that if I write it myself.
That's where you're wrong. AI can debug code better than humans. I put it on a task that I'd spent months on: debugging a distributed application which had random errors which required me to comb through MBs of logs. I gave Claude the task, a log parser (which it also wrote), and told it to find what each issue was. It did the job in a few minutes. This is a task that was, frankly, just a bit above my capacity with a human brain as it required associating lots of logs by timestamps trying to reconstruct what the heck was going on.
My new worry is that I need to make sure the code AI is writing is more comprehensible not to other humans, but to other AIs in the future, since there's very little chance humans will be doing the debugging by themselves given how bad we are at that compared to LLMs even now, let alone in a few years.
> but I should also get something
What do you want beyond a pay check? If you want to get better at your job, the most important technique you can improve right now is hands down how to interact with an AI to solve business problems. The learning you're thinking of, being able to fully understand code and actually debug it in your head, is already a thing of the past now. In a few years, no one will seriously consider building software that's not entirely AI-written except for enthusiasts, similar to the people currently participating in C obfuscated code competitions. I say this as someone who reluctantly started using AI in anger only a few months ago after hating on it before that for the laughable code it was producing just around 6 months ago (it probably was already good by then but I was not really giving it a chance yet).
> I’m probably going to go back and redo everything with my own code.
Why? Did Claude do a bad job?
> 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.
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 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?
My CEO is fine as long as the project is profitable, which is part of my responsibility, and they are actually on board with us delivering the best quality we can under that constraint, not only because our clients do notice quality, but also as a matter of principle.
It’s not just about speed today. It’s about the speed to make changes, to understand the minutia of the code to more quickly troubleshoot when something goes wrong, to better understand the implication of future changes…
Just yesterday I was on a call where someone was trying to point to my code as a problem when we suspected a DNS issue. If I didn’t know the code inside and out, I could have easily been steam rolled, because as we know, “it’s never the network”. We found out today it was in fact DNS.
If someone only ever worries about is speed, they’ll likely get tripped up and fall. One guy on my team is all about delivering quickly. He gives very optimistic timelines and gets things out the door as fast as possible. Guess what, the code breaks. He is constantly getting bug reports from everyone and having to fix stuff. As he continues to run into this, he is starting to become a bit more mature and tactical, but that is taking time.
I think the CEO would much rather see the production code be fully tested and stable. I write the frameworks everyone else on the team uses. If my code breaks, everyone’s code is broken. How much will that cost?
Why would I give a rat’s ass what my CEO thinks. I do my job the way I want to in a way that allows me to keep going. If the CEO wants it a different way he can fire me, and pay me 10 months worth of wages while I look for a different job.
I know the code I produce is damn good, and I take pride in my extremely low defect rate. I will not be rushed. I will not be pushed. And I will do so until the day I retire.
Your choices are not limited to one extreme or the other.
I have seen more reactions of people about this tech than actual implementations made possible which pushed the boundaries further. It is an amplifier of technical debt in mostly naive(people experienced in bad patterns) user base.
Take anthropic for example, they have created MCP/claude code.
MCP has the good parts of how to expose an API surface and also the bad parts of keeping the implementation stuck and force workarounds instead of pushing required changes upstream or to safely fork an implementation.
Claude code is orders of magnitude inefficient than plainly asking an llm to go through an architecture implementation. The sedentary black-box loops in claude code are mind bending for anyone who wants to know how it did something.
And anthropic/openai seems to just rely of user momentum to not innovate on these fundamentals because it keeps the token usage high and as everyone knows by now a unpredictable product is more addictive than a deterministic one.
We are currently in the "Script Monkey" phase of AI dev tools. We are automating the typing, but we haven't yet automated the design. The danger is that we’re building a generation of "copy-paste" architects who can’t see the debt they’re accruing until the system collapses under its own weight.
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.
++1
Was able to build a large financial application just with the 20 USD subscription in the last 12 month - without Claude, I would have required 5 - 6 people and at least 1 year of funding.
This was by far my best investment in my whole life 12x20 USD vs. 750.000 salary :-)
It is especially inspiring since it brings you usually a few new ideas into your context; also just joking around with it can yield new inspirations.
I'm wondering how long it will stay at 20 USD for the smallest subscription, no chance that they can keep this price, I'd say? Its impressive that they are giving it away for nearly free.
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.
> a large financial application
Those could mean anything. Some people think 5k likes is large. Others think 100k is small.
Oh well, at least they didn't say "complex".
"large" in a sense of functionality for the given/required usecase.
LOC is currently around 200k, so for sure: Its not Microsoft-scale :-D
Also, they didn't say how accurate or secure it is.
i think its all about caring and knowing what you want to make and willing to iterate on the result until it is actually good. If you want the ai to do your job for you its probably not going to work, but if youre really good at using its advantages you almost certainly will be winning
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!
Its a financial asset management system, and its for proprietary use only. Maybe Im doing some YT insights in the future.
> I find it very hard to believe anyone could code anything complicated with Claude that 5-6 competent developers could do. <
I should have put a disclaimer - Im not layman, instead 25y+ IT experience. Without my prior experience, I think this project wouldnt have come into existence.
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.
Yes, its for proprietary use among friends; its not for sale, instead I get a cut of their returns for providing support & maintenance.
It is not 100% vibe code, by far not! I use cloud for method-by-method or simple class instructions and integrate in the app manually, I do not use any of the API integrations, I just use the standrad WebUI for discussing, planing & implementation.
Hyper-individualized software is what LLMs are best for IMHO. They lower the bar so much that it's becoming perfectly feasible and reasonable to amase a large amount of software which is fit to your exact personal needs and preferences.
Exactly: The app can do only one thing, and does this one thing very well. Other approaches are not implemented or planned. Its like a specific dentist-tool that you need for one specific task.
Yeah, I have a dozen random tools that do specific things I need that wouldn't be useful to anyone else, and that I wouldn't share in their current state anyway. But they're fine for me, and without LLMs, I wouldn't have spent the time to build them.
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?
The explanation is simple:
a) Speed - it included a lot of boring stuff, esp. in the beginning on when I was in the discovery phase and had to figure out some basics relevant for the context
b) I think I would have given up very early on, esp. of all these boring things, which are required but take long headache time to develop (e.g. The app has a somewhat complex data rendering component, containing hundres of GDI+ calls; the file is currently around 5000 lines, writing this by hand woul have taken very long and would have been very frustrating)
c) Debugging - Sometimes bugs are so deep down in some components and after 1h you stop seeing the forrest because of all single trees: The LLM can greatly help here
d) Fresh ideas: If there is a pyramid of know how in this niche, then Im currently working in "the first floor", basicly; discussions with the model about enhancing and more complex things helps to see the next island where you could swim
Yes, I could have done it without the models - but it would have taken sooo much much more time, that I wouldnt have taken the route.
Novelity: The app does one specific thing and is designed only for that specific usecase - I do not know how novel it is but since its a niche, maybe you could achieve the same thing with with existing solutions and their plugins (but then I would have had to learn how to edit/change those)
Background: 25y+ IT experience, Master degree and some other certs
These models making bad / tasteless decisions about what dependencies to pull in is one of the main reasons they work best in the hands of experienced developers. You've got to know what you want it to use and tell it, and anticipate what shortcuts it will want to take and tell it not to do those things. For these reasons we're not yet at the point where inexperienced non-programmers can get high quality software out of these tools. I do think this will improve with time though.
You need to tell the model what to do and what not to do: The dependency thingy is an issue, yes, but you can tell the model not to do so - and you should always know which result the prompt should create: For sure you must be able to read/understand/judge the code - completely fire and forget is not possible (to my experience), though I see many people saying "I had one mega prompt and after 2 days the app was ready", I take those always with a grain of salt.
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!
Its for proprietary use only.
Regarding prompts: a) In general I clean up the work space on a regular base, so I do not store prompts
b) Overall, Id say so far above 200 - 300 initial prompts for the code developed with the LLM (and then 2 - 50[?] follow up prompts to change & update things)
c) The initial prompts are always long and very elaborative, like 60-70% of screensize
d) The model is always aware of the source files used for a given prompts (in Claude you can create project workspaces and put your stuff in)
e) I always tell the model the current state, where want to go and which steps are necessary according to my opinion and I specify the result as detailled as possible
f) I give contraints in the prompts, telling what not to do etc.
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.
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.
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?
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.
And it doesn't freak you out that you're relying on thousands of lines of code that you've never looked at? How do you verify the end result?
I wouldn't trust thousands of lines of code from one of my co-workers without testing
It's thousands of lines of variation on my own hand-tooling, run through tests I designed, automated by the sort of onboarding docs I should have been writing years ago.
I've been doing agentic work for companies for the past year and first of all, error rates have dropped to 1-2% with the leading Q3 and Q4 models... 2026's Q1 models blowing those out the water and being cheaper in some way
but second of all, even when error rates were 20%, the time savings still meant A Viable Business. a much more viable business actually, a scarily crazy viable business with many annoyed customers getting slop of some sort, with a human in the loop correcting things from the LLM before it went out to consumers
agentic LLM coders are better than your co-workers. they can also write tests. they can do stress testing, load testing, end to end testing, and in my experience that's not even what course corrects LLMs that well, so we shouldn't even be trying to replicate processes made for humans with them. like a human, the LLM is prone to just correct the test as the test uses a deprecated assumption as opposed to product changes breaking a test to reveal a regression.
in my experience, type errors, compiler errors, logs on deployment and database entries have made the LLM correct its approach more than tests. Devops and Data science, more than QA.
Do you trust the assembly your compiler puts out? The machine code your assembler puts out? The virtual machine it runs on? Thousands of lines of code you've never looked at...
None of that is generated by an LLM prone to hallucination and is perfectly deterministic unless there's a hardware problem.
And yes, I have occasionally run into compiler bugs in my career. That's one reason we test.
> None of that is generated by an LLM
How did you verify that?
> prone to hallucination
You know humans can hallucinate?
> is perfectly deterministic
We agree then that you can verify, test, and trust the deterministic code an LLM produces without ever looking at it.
> That's one reason we test
That's one way we can trust and verify code produced by an LLM. You can't stop doing all the other things that aren't coding.
I get there's a difference. Shitty code can be produced by LLMs or humans. LLMs really can pump out the shitty code. I just think the argument that you cant trust code you haven't viewed is not a good argument. I very much trust a lot of code I've never seen, and yes I've been bitten by it too.
Not trying to be an ass, more trying to figure out how im going to deal for the next decade before retirement age. Uts going to be a lot of testing and verification I guess
> How did you verify that?
The compiler works without an internet connection and requires too little resources to be secretly running a local model. (Also, you can’t inspect the source code.)
> You know humans can hallucinate?
We are talking about compilers…
> We agree then that you can verify, test, and trust the deterministic code an LLM produces without ever looking at it.
Unlike a compiler, an LLM does not produce code in a deterministic way, so it’s not guaranteed to do what the input tells it to.
Compiler theory and implementation is based on mathematical and logic principles. And hence much more provable and trustworthy than a LLM thats stitching together pieces of text based on ‘training’
"Trust"? God no. That's why I have a debugger
Also you really do have to know how the underlying assembly integer operations work or you can get yourself into a world of hurt. Do they not still teach that in CS classes?
It's also usually from people who stopped coding and haven't kept their skills up.
Or have no more skin in the game, retirement.
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.
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.
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.
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
For me, learning Elixir did this. I was going to change careers into commercial real estate about 9 years ago and then I binge read “Programming Phoenix” over a weekend.
Walked into work Monday morning, bleary eyed and told everybody, “This is the solution. This is how you build rapidly and bypass all of the long term maintenance issues that we always have to fix in every other codebase. It makes the hard things easy, it makes perfect sense and it’s FUN.”
I know a guy who first tried programming at uni using a mainframe. He handed in his first program and was told to retrieve the result the next day. The following day he went to pick up his results and got an error listing. He decided coding wasn't for him. A few years later, he saw a C64 and started coding in BASIC and it turned into a career.
I started out with an 8 bit micro so I really enjoy tinkering and coding. AI doesn't seem attractive at all.
It's not only about what you do, but also about how you do it.
Me too - I am 65 and coding all hours. At least half the time on tooling to encode the way I want to do things. I have ideas and implement them. I think it is fun as you make more progress. I do think it is a temporary phase and not sure if the next one will be as much fun or once I have drained the accumulated ideas that would be nice to do someday.
I feel selfish in that I am towards the end of my career rather than right at the start.
- 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.
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?
You're looking for something like Vercel or Firebase
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).
I'm curious what you mean by that. Tools I use include git and jj. I don't think I want my own versions of those. I use VSCode and Sublime Merge and gg. I'd be curious how far I could LLM code those. It'd be certainly easy to pull up Electron with Monaco but I'd probably just LLM code extensions. And I use lots of software via the browser (maps, google docs, chat, slack, discord, ...), I don't I'd want to make those. iIterm2, XCode, zsh, I don't think I want to LLM code a shell but that might be cool.
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.
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.
I retired in 2024 after a four decade career, mostly programming avionics systems but with a decade of Ruby on Rails towards the end. I am now sitting here eating popcorn and watching the disaster unfold. I am happy to be out of it. So long as it doesn't affect my pensions and the local shops still have food...
I'm sorry, I know you mean well, but your comment reads like a typical boomer parody.
Very similar here. I am 68.
While I have never developed software professionally, in the four decades I have been using computers I have often written scripts and done other simple programming for my own purposes. When I was in my thirties and forties especially, I would often get enjoyably immersed in my little projects.
These days, I am feeling a new rush of drive and energy using Claude Code. At first, though, the feeling would come and go. I would come up with fun projects (in-browser synthesizers, multi-LLM translation engines) and get a brief thrill from being able to create them so quickly, but the fever would fade after a while. I started paying for the Max plan last June, but there were weeks at a time when I barely used it. I was thinking of downgrading to Pro when Opus 4.5 came along, I saw that it could handle more sophisticated tasks, and I got an idea for a big project that I wanted to do.
I have now spent the last two months having Claude write and build something I really wanted forty years ago, when I was learning Japanese and starting out as a Japanese-to-English translator: a dictionary that explains the meanings, nuances, and usages of Japanese words in English in a way accessible to an intermediate or advanced learner. Here is where it stands now:
https://www.tkgje.jp/
https://github.com/tkgally/je-dict-1
It will take a few more months before the dictionary is more or less finished, but it has already reached a stage where it should be useful for some learners. I am releasing all of the content into the public domain, so people can use and adapt it however they like.
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.
Thanks! The strength of my dictionary, I hope, is how the information on each word is chosen and presented with the needs of English-speaking learners in mind, especially the explanations of meanings, usages, and nuances. Dictionaries that mainly give glosses can mislead learners, as it is rare for the meanings of words to map one-to-one between languages.
Compare the following pairs of entries from TKG and Jisho.org:
https://www.tkgje.jp/entries/03000/03495_chousen.html
https://www.tkgje.jp/entries/11000/11013_charenji.html
https://jisho.org/search/挑戦
https://jisho.org/search/チャレンジ
While the two from Jisho.org have more information, they do not make clear the important differences between challenge in English and the two Japanese words. Claude, meanwhile, added this note:
‘In English, "challenge" often implies confrontation or difficulty. In Japanese, チャレンジ carries a strongly positive connotation of bravely attempting something new or difficult. It is closer in meaning to "attempt" or "try" than to "confront." ’
The entries for my dictionary are being written one at a time by Claude based on guidelines for the explanations, the length and vocabulary of the example sentences, etc. Those guidelines (which you can see in the prompts and Claude skills in the GitHub repository) were developed by me and Claude with a particular purpose in mind: helping a learner encountering an unfamiliar word get a good basic understanding of what it means and how it is used. In my experience, at least, it is very helpful to get explanations, not just glosses.
The Jisho site does do a good job of linking together a lot of different databases. They are welcome to add links to entries in my dictionary, too, if they like.
Opposite here. I was excited by writing code and worked on open source side projects consistently. Somehow, I've not done anything since around August 2025.
I have a sense that AI could have something to do with it.
AI is degrading the status of our profession; its perception in the public eye.
At the same time, it is stealing our work and letting cretins pretend to be software engineers.
It's a bad taste in the mouth.
Is it only possible to have success with paid versions of these LLMs?
Google's "Ask AI" and ChatGPT's free models seem to be consistently bad to the point where I've mostly stopped using them.
I've lost track of how many times it was like "yes, you're right, I've looked at the code you've linked and I see it is using a newer version than what I had access to. I've thoroughly scanned it and here's the final solution that works".
And then the solution fails because it references a flag or option that doesn't even exist. Not even in the old or new version, a complete hallucination.
It also seems like the more context it has, the worse it becomes and it starts blending in previous solutions that you explained didn't work already that are organized slightly different in the code but does the wrong thing.
This happens to me almost every time I use it. I couldn't imagine paying for these results, it would be a huge waste of money and time.
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.
PS: The cheapest still very useful alternative I've found is GitHub's Copilot at €10/m base price, with multiple models included. If you pick manually between cheap models for low complexity and save Opus 4.6 for specific things, you can keep it under budget.
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.
Similar story. I’m a bit younger, but Amiga BASIC/VB3/VB6/ASP/.NET was my path. There was a joy when “Visual Studio” meant “you can visually drag a component on and that is the app” instead of editing text files. But gradually we learned you need to be in the code. Sure you have figmas and low code tools today. But industry has gravitated back to editing curly brackets and markup in text files. And for good reasons I think.
I landed on GitHub Copilot. I now manage a team, but just last night snuck away to code some features. I find my experience and knowing how to review the output helps me adopt and know how much to prompt the agent for. Is software development changing? Absolutely. But it always has been. These tools help me get back to that first freedom I felt when I dragged a control onto a VB6 designer, but keep the benefits of code in text files. I can focus on feature, pay attention to UX detail, and pivot without taking hours.
You have never been on HN before and yet you feel the need to tell the community something vague and useless but which happens to align with LLM hype?
I like theconcept of being able to quickly turn thoughts into actionable projects but I do miss the financial strain, years of study, trials and tribulations and the blood sweat and tears of the old school journey that created those life-long memories of that aha moment you spent months, if not years trying to achieve. ~Respect The Grind~
I tried to execute a project in 1986 and was told it was impossible. Every few years as tech has improved I tried again, but it was still impossible. CD-ROM, CD-I, Web, Wiki, even AI a few years ago... But 2 weeks ago I taught myself to vibe code, and I built it. 40 years of planning and a few days of work. I'm freakin' thrilled.
I'm 45 and I feel exactly the same way.
Such a big part of coding becomes mundane after a while. Constantly solving variations of the same kinds of problems.
Now Claude does it at my direction and I get so much more done!
But maybe even more important: It gets me to go outside my comfort zone and try things I wouldn't normally try because of the time it would take me to figure it out.
Like: Wat if I used this other audio library? I don't have to figure it out, I just pass in the interface I need to implement and get 90% of a working solution.
AI augmented programming couldn't have come at a better time and I'm really happy with it!
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/
> I’m ready to retire. ... Fast forward decades and Claude Code is giving me that same energy and drive. I love it. It feels like it did back then. I’m chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep.
Of course you love it, you don't have to worry about retirement anymore.
Give me your 401k, then tell you feel about Claude Code.
I feel this so, so much. It is a very exciting time. I have had a very specific goal in mind and I could work out large parts on my own. But there is a lot that I didn't have any basis or time to build expertise on. Using Claude Code to fill out those gaps and educate me along the way has meant I've gotten little sleep in the last two months. And I managed to make the thing I was envisioning: https://gridpaper.org/examples/ :)
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 do understand this sentiment. But I wish these experts would see that they too are novices in literally every other field that they are not explicitly trained or experienced in. It is fun to explore curiosities even in spaces you don't know well.
> I’m chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep.
Let’s get you to bed, gramps, you can talk to your French friend tomorrow.
I am 60 in October, I have a couple of PyQt projects that were desktop apps, specialised tools I use for Electrical Engineering and Control/Safety Systems design and build.
So I decided that I wanted web apps, something that is probably beyond me in any reasonable time, if at all, if I was to code myself by hand.
For my coding AI "stack" I am now running OpenClaw sitting on top of Claude Code, I find the OpenClaw can prompt Claude Code better and keep it running for me without it stopping for stupid questions. Plus I have connected OpenClaw to my Whatsapp so I can ask how it is going or give instructions to the OpenClaw while not at the keyboard.
One app was a little complex with 35,000 loc, plus libraries etc. I reckon I had spent maybe 2500 hours on it over some years, but a significant part of that was developing the algorithm/workflow that it implemented - I only knew roughly what I wanted when I started, writing several to throw away at the beginning.
AI converted it to a webapp overnight, with a two sentance prompt, without intervention of any kind.
It took me another 15 minutes and a couple of small changes, mostly dependancies issues, and I had a working version of the same app that was literally 95%+ of the original, in terms of funcitonality and use.
I have a bunch of ideas for things I want to make that I probably never would have been able to otherwise.
I am just totally unable to fathom people that just make a blanket proclamation that AI is good for nothing. I can accept that it is not good for everything, it may cause some social disruption and the energy use is questionable, but improving, but not useful? Wake up.
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'm 64 years old. I'm on an airplane _right now_ vibe coding in C#. I have written code professoinally every day for over 40 years, and now I'm invigorated! It's the same thrill as when I wrote my first Fortran or IBM BAL programs back in 1979.
I like thec concept of being able to quickly turn thoughts into actionable projects but I do miss the financial strain, years of study, trials and tribulations and the blood sweat and tears of the old school journey that created those life-long memories of that aha moment you spent months, if not years trying to achieve. ~Respect The Grind~
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.
And transparent 1 pixel gifs :-)
don't forget VRML there are dozens of us
Need to align something. Simple! :)
I'm 51. I use codex rather than claude code. But, I sure am using it a lot. It's more or less my default at this point. I lean heavily on my decades of experience to make sure things are done right and to correct the generation process. That seems critical. You can get anything you ask for but if you don't know how to ask for the right things, it will happily create a big stinking mess instead. There's some skill to this.
I'm now dealing with a lot of stuff via codex, including technical debt that I identified years ago but never had the time to deal with. And I'm doing new projects. I've created a few CLIs, created a websites on cloudflare in a spare half hour, landed several big features on our five year old backend and created a couple of new projects on Github. Including a few that are in languages I don't normally use. Because it's the better technical choice and my lack of skills with those languages no longer matters.
I also undertook a migration of our system from GCP to Hetzner and used codex to do the ansible automation, diagnosing all sorts of weirdness that came up during that process, and finding workarounds for that stuff. That also includes diagnosing failed builds, fixing github action automation, sshing into remote vms to diagnose issues, etc. Kind of scary to watch that happen but it definitely works. I've done stuff like this for the last 25 years or so using various technologies. I know how to do this and do it well. But there's no point in me doing this slowly by hand anymore.
All this is since the new codex desktop app came out. Before Christmas I was using the cli and web version of codex on and off. It kind of worked for small things. But with recent codex versions things started working a lot better and more reliably. I've compressed what should be well over half a year of work in a few weeks.
It's early days but as the saying goes, this is the worst and slowest its ever going to be. I still consider myself a software maker. But the whole frontend/backend/devops specialization just went out of the window. But I actually enjoy being this empowered. I hate getting bogged down in grinding away at stupid issues when I'm trying to get to the end state of having built this grand thing I have in my head. There definitely is this endorphin rush you get when stuff works. And it's cool to go from idea to working code in a few minutes.
I'm much younger, just 42, but due to other medical problems, my attention span was being reduced. I've been programming profesionally for about 25 years, but the last years I was putting myself more into other roles, because being able to focus on code for a few hours uninterrupted is a luxury that I don't have anymore. I was honestly thinking I'll have to retire early. That was until I've tried Claude Code last year. It feels like a superpower. I can guide it, I can review it, I don't need it for thinking, I need it for writing code and under very strict guidance, it does that well. I feel like this extends the years I can do software well into to the future. In a way, I welcome masses thinking AI can produce software on it's own, it gives me hopes for more earning in the future for me.
A real-life scene that made me chuckle last weekend…
“Oh shit, Hey Babe did you close my laptop?”
My not-very-technical friend as we returned home from a Sunday afternoon trip to the park with the kids to find his Claude Code session had been thwarted.
happened to my friend too! an overkill but working solution for this is "sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1"
Getting real oldschool runescape runecrafting vibes here
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
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!
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.
Same here! I'm working on a simple game and I use Claude Code to make it with Phaser, and I am not a game dev. I used Claude to plan it (with a chat for 3 hours), it made a document to describe everything I wanted in the game (the spec). Next I use Claude Code to implement every aspect of the game step by step. I didn't know the framework Phaser, but after each step I review the code and learn a lot. I don't think I would have it working so fast without Claude Code. I can focus on the spec and learn the framework. I code maybe 5% of it, everything is made by Claude Code.
I’m not quite as old as you, but I am old enough to know what a COM component is and to have ready the Byte Magazine article that likely described this ancient stone tablet tech. Codex has me absolutely stoked again. I can finally have fun with the youngsters, knowing that the latest new hotness no longer has a learning curve.
I've always dabbled in electronics, as a hobbyist. I've never had any formal courseware or training in it.
But I have been haranguing Claude/Gemini to help me on an analog computer project for some months now that has sent me on a deep dive into op-amps and other electronics esoterica that I had previously only dabbled a bit in.
Along the way I've learned about relaxation oscillators, using PWM to multiply two voltages, integrating, voltage-following…
I could lean on electronics.stackexchange (where my Google searches often lead) but 1) I first have to know what I am even searching for and 2) even the EEs disagree on how to solve a problem (as you might expect) so I am still with no clear answer. Might as well trust a sometimes hallucinating LLM?
I guess I like the first point above the best—when the LLM just out of the blue (seemingly) suggests a PWM multiplier when I was thinking log/anti-log was the only way to multiply voltages. So I get to learn a new topology.
Or I'm focused on user-adjustable pots for setting machine voltages and the LLM suggests a chip with its own internal 2.45V reference that you can use to get specific voltages without burdening the user to dial it in, own a multimeter. So I get to learn about a chip I was unfamiliar with.
It just goes on an on.
(And, Mr. Eater, I only let the magic smoke out once so far, ha ha.)
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.
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!
This resonates. The emotional side of returning to coding is real.
With Claude Code specifically, I've noticed that the longer it runs autonomously, the more cost anxiety creeps in. You stop thinking about the problem and start watching the token counter.
What finally let me stop worrying and just build again was building a hard budget limit outside the app — not just alerts, but an actual kill switch.
Glad you found the spark. It's worth protecting.
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
As a business/product person it's pretty addictive (gotta watch the token spend!). This week with a few workmates we had an idea in a pub, on train back I wrote a short spec and fired up some agents to start building. The next day, by evening, whist doing our day jobs we had a functional application working, not a poc. Few years ago this would be unthinkable.
It doesn’t matter where you get that passion for getting back into the swing of programming, I’m not far from your age, and truly everything becomes more monotonous over time in this life, and what was once a passion becomes something hard to achieve. In my case, AI helped me handle the tedious part of things and just kept the fun stuff of finding the solution and just tell it how to solve it, and it helps me achieve it much faster than ever before. Keep going and going! Who knows what you’ll achieve tomorrow. Keep the channel open with updates.
Please think further than just the passion of code, mind implication of your projects and what you work on, in particular in regards to climate change and energy crisis. Coding, like any other form of engineering, cannot be done just for self interest and without ethics or conscience.
Same! 61, been at it since 18. I can't put the prompting stick down. I have way too many projects at one time to keep up with.
Let's gooooo !!!
I wish I have the same energy once I am your age !
This sounds super cool.
What does your dev stack look like?
It's a lot of fun. I'm also an old timer.
I think it's also somewhat addictive. I wonder if that's part of what's at play here.
A coworker that never argues with you, is happy to do endless toil... sometimes messes up but sometimes blows your mind...
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.
The whole 'software craftsmanship' thing was hilarious from the get-go. Software is not furniture, where the best examples will stand the test of time. It all ends up, good or bad, in a figurative landfill. But if it is a thing, AI is going to soon be a ten armed very skilled octopus. If you weren't having fun all this time, well, the joke's on you. Might as well use the new tools to start having fun now.
As a father of 4 children who’s married, I haven’t had time in years to pursue any of my software hobbies. The nights playing with arch Linux, fussing with half built oss projects - I can’t justify the time anymore but I still Enjoy them. The cloud and Kubernetes came along, I told my wife this was something I had to learn and throw myself at. Despite spending tons of family time instead in my lab in my basement and trying to push those techs at work - I got my butt handed to me - felt like a young man’s game for every interview I went to.
At home, this has changed. Claude helped me setup a satellite dish, tune it, recompiled goesrec, for me and built a website to serve it - and my family dynamic was only “slightly interrupted” (daddy are you working still?). But it worked! And now I log in and tend to my projects with terminus instead of blindly go through the news or social media. Amazing! I’m still throwing myself at a new tech but way less invasve to my personal/family time.
At work though, i have been made into an absolute powerhouse. I invested the time years ago fussing with those oss projects and arch Linux or setting up lan parties and fixing my buddies rigs - toiling through terrible codebases at companies, deploying bad infrastructure, owning it and learning the hard way how to succeed - and it all is paying off and now 10x. AI can’t replace my judgement in the context of my org - maybe in time as the org shifts, but not for a few years.
The existential threat is not to me, at least for 5y - it’s when I’m asked - how do we get more features out the door?
* More headcount? Not unless they’re rockstars - more tokens.
* offshore talent? No, context switching and TZ - just more tokens.
* fly by night software startup xyz? No I’ll just write my own fault injection framework for $5 tailored to this project.
* consultants? Nope - pretty easy to try and fail fast and rewrite - again building to suite - software is disposable.
* oh no it was written in language xyz or deployed to cloud provider abc - no sweat, we’ll make it work on our cloud provider for $8.
Junior devs and offshore talent are the real losers here - I worry about them. Unless you’re die hard, I’d just assume do the work myself. But how do you accumulate this level of skill without getting paid to do it? I look back - I never got beyond baby projects or hobbies at home. I had to have someone roll the dice on me at a real job cause - rent and shit like that.
For those of you just starting out - I don’t have a great answer for you on how to start out, but - I can say you can install arch Linux, any oss project you want and all the things I did to get started in an afternoon - this is the new normal and embrace it.
For the rest of us it is our cloud moment - use the free tier - get your feet wet - we’re about to go for a hell of a ride. If you stick to the “took ur derbs” and want to keep treating your craft like artisian soap - go ahead, we’ll need those but don’t expect to survive on that
I had my real-deal moment recently.
I was getting Claude to implement a popular TS drag and drop library, and asked it to do something that, it turns out, wasn't supported by the library.
Claude read the minified code in node_modules and npm patched the library with the feature. It worked, too.
Obviously not ideal for future proofing but completely mind blowing that it can do that.
Claude Code is definitely stoking the tiny ember that’s almost went out completely.
I am only 43, but on the last year of my career, suddenly my level of care in big corporate politics nose dived to almost zero. To the point that I happily retired myself.
After messing around with some hard subjects, with the help of Claude Code, the little boy who used to love programming so much is waking up again.
as a 22 year old it's interesting to see how things are going to span out. o've 0 idea what i spend my time building my expertise on.
luckily i'm trusting my gut that staying away from cheap dompamine and following what's cool might just land somewherere
Almosts same history here. 61 years, 40 as developer. More passionate and productive than ever thanks to those tools.
Great timing on this post. I’ve been working on NeoNetrek, bringing Netrek into the browser with a modernized server and 3D web client. It’s the kind of project I’d started and abandoned a few times over the years because the complexity always piled up faster than the fun. Claude changed that. The gap between “idea” and “working thing” collapsed in a way I haven’t felt since the early days. I stopped fighting infrastructure and started just building. Three decades of accumulated complexity just faded away.
LFG Grandpa
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!
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 introduced my dad to claude code. He doesn’t even code, but now it’s a more welcoming and rewarding experience from the get-go. He’s happy, became more comfortable with linux.
Occasionally I remote in to help fix something, but the coding agent really takes a load off my back, and he can start learning without knowing where the endpoints are.
Same at 42. I've been making software for 30 years and the gap between what I can envision and what I can code in a single day is so huge that it takes all the steam out of me. With agentic coding I can move at a pace that feels right again.
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!
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.
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.
The English language has the ability to be ambiguous, but I bet AI use will change the way we use the English language colloquially, to say more specifically what we mean. I worked as a home inspector for a while. Writing for an LLM is very similar to writing a home inspection report or legal brief (or talking to a group of teenagers). Navigate the minefield with very specific intention.
Bwahaha! I'm 55 and just started grad school at an R1 because I can't compete. Fucking scary as hell! My lab partner is 23, I get up as my peers are going to bed, and I work hard to not say, "In my day..." BUT, I love being enrolled. The resources are incredible and networking is in high gear again.
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.
Veterans unite!
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.
Retire at 60! Lucky one. In my country it's 67!
It'll be 75 by the time gen Z get there, they just keep raising the threshold.
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.
im 58 and Cluade has given me everything i wanted to do in my 20's and on, and that is coding, I have some programming skills and understand making software, but with claude, i am building much faster and it is crazy how do the stuff is,
62, similar path, same renewed passion combined with my entrepreneurial mindset. These are good times for us old codgers.
I'm writing this at 4am on a Friday night (Saturday morning now I guess), hacking up a next-gen Faxing platform. Had it on my mind for years and never had the time for the coding or the research I needed to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.
Claude has made my coding sessions WAY more productive and helps me find bugs and plan features like never before.
I'm also dealing with some career bullshit, so having a tool like this has helped me re-discover what I love about computing that capitalism has beaten out of me.
> I’m chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep.
I am saying this in all seriousness, what difference is this to addiction?
This is something already talked about [1]. You are getting the sugar (results) and none of the nutrients (learning).
[1]https://quasa.io/media/the-hidden-dangers-of-ai-coding-agent...
https://hils.substack.com/p/help-my-husband-is-addicted-to-c...
Curious, what are you building?
exactly need some goal here ;)
Re-calibrate your bot
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.
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.
I'm enjoying the new era of agentic-coding all your ideas, but it's been obvious to me for a while that jobs are going to tend towards ones where you're liked by the decisionmaker or capital owner and kept around to be the middleman decider-delegator to others/AI/robots.
Have warned my friends about this already.
What I think is lost on ones like OP, is that yes, they are financially secure in the current climate. But if the future that everyone seems to be ushering in does come true, even ones like OP will be in a different state of security.
How does the saying go again? "It takes a village to reach financially secure retirement"
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.
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.
This and a lot of similar HN comments, often by fresh accounts, just read like viral marketing. Not least because of the capitalisation.
Claude Code sure is great. Claud Code and my Codex reignited my passion for programming. Codex and Claude.
Ugh.
I can not read or write code, always wanted to thou, in last three months I have made a couple of web apps, love how lego like coding is when the blocks are made for you by LLMs.
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
I think a lot of people have a biased idea of writing code. When you're a good programmer, you will be able to prompt a pretty good concept and navigate through any missteps.
When you have no fucking idea what you're talking about, you cannot fix those issues. Simply telling opus "its broken, fix it" wont help. Sure, eventually it comes with a solution, but you have no idea if it's good.
Its like renting a bunch of construction tools and building a house. Unless you know what's important, you have no idea if your house will fall down tomorrow. At the end of the day, companies will always need an expert to sit there and confirm the code is good.
I've never built anything outside of a python notebook before, but Claude Code felt like magic to me.
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.
viagra for swe
I've heard this from so many greybeards... including me!
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?
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.
53 here, coded in Assembler in late 80s, then C, Turbo Pascal - you know the route. 30 years later i am finishing all the products i started and never could finish because i for the love of god can not wrap my head around Frontend Design.
My first finished product: ZIB, a RSS Reader inspired by Innoreader, just free ;)
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.
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 have had the opposite experience.
When it was just asking ChatGPT questions it was fine, I was having fun, I was able to unblock myself when I got non-trivial errors much quicker, and I still felt like I was learning stuff.
With Codex or Claude Code, it feels like I'm stuck LARPing as a middle manager instead of actually solving problems. Sometimes I literally just copy stuff from my assigned ticket into Claude and tell it to do that, I awkwardly wait for a bit, test it out to see if it's good enough, and make my pull request. It's honestly kind of demoralizing.
I suppose this is just the cost of progress; I'm sure there were people that loved raising and breeding horses but that's not an excuse to stop building cars.
I loved being able to figure out interesting solutions to software problems and hacking on them until something worked, and my willingness to do the math beforehand would occasionally give me an edge. Instead, now all I do is sit and wait while I'm cuckolded out of my work, and questioning why I bothered finishing my masters degree if the expectation now is to ship slop code lazily written by AI in a few minutes.
It was a good ride while it lasted; I got almost fifteen years of being paid to do my favorite thing. I should count my blessings that it lasted that long, though I'm a little jealous of people born fifteen years earlier who would be retiring now with their Silicon Valley shares. Instead, I get to sit here contemplating whether or not I can even salvage my career for the next five years (or if I need to make a radical pivot).
Are you 60?
No, I'm in my mid 30's. Unless I win the lottery (which seems unlikely considering I don't buy lottery tickets), or I managed to get some obscenely lucky with shares at a startup, I realistically will need to work for at least twenty more years before retiring.
Same here, 60 and few months and I'm excited about AI
Building things as I read this.
Congratulations! Are you still coding VB using Claude? Or something else.
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.
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".
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.
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 get hate on only using cli. Glad someone else see's a different perspective
Met too - I'm 50 and have spent the past 3 years building AI startups, some successfully and in the last two months I've built two side projects with ccode..its amazingly good in past month with Opus
Another +1 from me at 62 years. My problem is this has led to me feeling like I am tech lead for a team of a dozen excellent developers, but I have no task for them!
I expect to have at least 15 more years in the workforce and I hate that I have to live through this "revolution". I worry about what will be final balance of lives improved vs lives worsened.
Glad to see this. I was tired of seeing posts that are on the extremes - "death of software by AI" vs "AI can't do this and that".
I took a break from software, and over the last few years, it just felt repetitive, like I was solving or attempting to solve the same kinds of problems in different ways every 6 months. The feeling of "not a for loop again", "not a tree search again", "not a singleton again". There's an exciting new framework or a language that solves a problem - you learn it - and then there are new problems with the language - and there is a new language to solve that language's problem. And it is necessary, and the engineer in me does understand the why of it, but over time, it just starts to feel insane and like an endless loop. Then you come to an agreement: "Just build something with what I know," but you know so much that you sometimes get stuck in analysis paralysis, and then a shiny new thing catches your engineer or programmer brain. And before you get maintainable traction, I would have spent a lot of time, sometimes quitting even before starting, because it was logistically too much.
Claude Code does make it feel like I am in my early twenties. (I am middle-aged, not in 60s)
I see a lot of comments wondering what is being built -
Think about it like this, and you can try it in a day.
Take an idea of yours, and better if it is yours - not somebody else's - and definitely not AI's. And scope it and ground it first. It should not be like "If I sway my wand, an apple should appear". If you have been in software for long, you would have heard those things. Don't be that vague. You have to have some clarity - "wand sway detection with computer vision", "auto order with X if you want a real apple", etc.. AI is a catalyst and an amplifier, not a cheat code. You can't tell it, "build me code where I have tariffs replacing taxes, and it generates prosperity". You can brainstorm, maybe find solutions, but you can't break math with AI without a rigorous theory. And if you force AI without your own reasoning, it will start throwing BS at you.
There is this idea in your mind, discuss it with ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude. See the flaws in the idea - discover better ideas. Discuss suggestions for frameworks, accept or argue with AI. In a few minutes, you ask it to provide a Markdown spec. Give it to Claude Code. Start building - not perfect, just start. Focus on the output. Does it look good enough for now? Does it look usable? Does it make sense? Is the output (not code) something you wanted? That is the MVP to yourself. There's a saying - customers don't care about your code, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't. In this case, make yourself the customer first - care about the code later (which in an AI era is like maybe a 30min to an hour later)
And at this point, bring in your engineer brain. Typically, at this point, the initial friction is gone, you have code and something that is working for you in real - not just on a paper or whiteboard. Take a pause. Review, ask it to refactor - make it better or make it align with your way, ask why it made the decisions it made. I always ask AI to write unit tests extensively - most of which I do not even review. The unit tests are there just to keep it predictable when I get involved, or if I ask AI to fix something. Even if you want to remove a file from the project, don't do it yourself - acclimatize to prompting and being vague sometimes. And use git so that you can revert when AI breaks things. From idea to a working thing, within an hour, and maybe 3-4 more hours once you start reviews, refactors, and engineering stuff.
I also use it for iterative trading research. It is just an experiment for now, but it's quite interesting what it can do. I give it a custom backtesting engine to use, and then give it constraints and libraries like technical indicators and custom data indicators it can use (or you could call it skills) - I ask it to program a strategy (not just parameter optimize) - run, test, log, define the next iteration itself, repeat. And I also give it an exact time for when it should stop researching, so it does not eat up all my tokens. It just frees up so much time, where you can just watch the traffic from the window or think about a direction where you want AI to go.
I wanted to incorporate astrological features into some machine learning models. An old idea that I had, but I always got crapped out because of the mythological parts and sometimes mystical parts that didn't make sense. With AI, I could ask it to strip out those unwanted parts, explain them in a physics-first or logic-first way, and get deeper into the "why did they do this calculation", "why they reached this constant", and then AI obviously helps with the code and helps explain how it matches and how it works - helps me pin point the code and the theories. Just a few weeks ago, I implemented/ported an astronomy library in Go (github.com/anupshinde/goeph) to speed up my research - and what do I really know about astronomy! But the outputs are well verified and tested.
But, in my own examples, will I ever let AI unilaterally change the custom backtesting engine code? Never. A single mistake, a single oversight, can cost a lot of real money and wasted time in weeks or months. So the engine code is protected like a fortress. You should be very careful with AI modifying critical parts of your production systems - the bug double-counting in the ledger is not the same as a "notification not shown". I think managers who are blanket-forcing AI on their employees are soon going to realize the importance of the engineering aspect in software
Just like you don't trust just any car manufacturer or just any investment fund, you should not blindly trust the AI-generated code - otherwise, you are setting yourself up to get scammed.
I don't play games anymore. I just work on whacky ideas with LLMs. I even nuked my gaming PC and installed ollama+rocm to play with local models, run openclaw there to experiment with that too. It's a lot of fun. I feel like agents are particularly useful for people who are ADD and want to work on 10 things at once.
I’m on my 40s and building a platform to support my late cognitive decline. Tools that shaped human existence.
I would also like to hear more!
Would love to hear more, if you are happy sharing!
I'd like to hear more
Everything in this post is proof that Anthropic will kill it when they go public. I believe in it, so does everyone else.
"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in"
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.
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.
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.
The ageism in this comment is revolting.
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