5 ms·

Tools like Claude Code are the ultimate cheat code for me and have breathed new life into my desire to create I'm in my 60s and retiring this summer. I feel th

by kitd 7mo ago

Tools like Claude Code are the ultimate cheat code for me and have breathed new life into my desire to create I'm in my 60s and retiring this summer. I feel the opposite. Agents have removed most of the satisfaction and fulfilment from designing, building, testing and completing a feature or component. And if frameworks are a problem, learning to create simply and efficiently without them has its own sense of satisfaction. Maybe it's a question of expectations. I suspect weavers felt the same with the arrival of mechanised looms in the industrial revolution. And it may be that future coders learn to get their fulfilment otherwise using agents. I can absolutely see the attraction to business of agents and they may well make projects viable that weren't previously. But for this Luddite, they have removed the joy.

boringg 7mo ago
Id agree it splits both ways. I think in the short run it can be super fun but once you expand your thoughts to the long run it takes the steam out of rediscovered joy of discovery and creation. Its almost like it reignites novelty at things that were to administratively heavy to figure out. Im not sure if its fleeting or lasting.
LogicFailsMe 7mo ago
OldAF. I have more ideas than I have time to code up prototypes. Claude code has changed all that, And given it cannot improve the performance of optimized code I've written so far, it's like having a never tiring eager junior engineer to work out how to make use of frameworks and APIs to deploy my code. A year ago, cursor was flummoxed by simple things Claude code navigates with ease. But there are still corner cases where it hallucinates on the strangest seemingly obvious things. I'm working on getting it to write code to make what's going on in front of its face more visible to it currently. I guess it's a question of where you find joy in life. I find no joy in frameworks and APIs. I find it entirely in doing the impossible out of sample things for which these agents are not competitive yet. I will even say IMO AI coding agents are the coolest thing I've seen since I saw the first cut of cuda 20 years ago. And I expect the same level of belligerence and resistance to it that I saw deployed against cuda. People hate change by and large.
- Bewelge 7mo ago
  Can you elaborate on "resistance against cuda"? What were people clinging to instead?
  - MachineBurning 7mo ago
    IMO it was mostly that people didn't want to rewrite (and maintain) their code for a new proprietary programming model they were unfamiliar with. People also didn't want to invest in hardware that could only run code written in CUDA. Lots of people wanted (and Intel tried to sell, somewhat succesfully) something they could just plug-and-play and just run the parallel implementations they'd already written for supercomputes using x86. It seemed easier. Why invest all of this effort into CUDA when Intel are going to come and make your current code work just as fast as this strange CUDA stuff in a year or two. Deep learning is quite different from the earlier uses of CUDA. Those use cases were often massive, often old, FORTRAN programs where to get things running well you had to write many separate kernels targeting each bit. And it all had to be on there to avoid expensive copies between GPU and CPU, and early CUDA was a lot less programmable than it is now, with huge performance penalties for relatively small "mistakes". Also many of your key contributers are scientists rather than profressional programmers who see programming as getting in the way of doing what they acutally want to do. They don't want to spend time completely rewriting their applications and optimizing CUDA kernels, they want to keep on with their incremental modifications to existing codebases. Then deep learning came along and researchers were already using frameworks (Lua Torch, Caffe, Theano). The framework authors only had to support the few operations required to get Convnets working very fast on GPUs, and it was minimal effort for researchers to run. It grew a lot from there, but going from "nothing" to "most people can run their Convnet research" on GPUs was much eaiser for these frameworks than it was for any large traditional HPC scientific application.
    - Bewelge 7mo ago
      Thanks! It seems funny though: The advantages of GPGPU are so obvious and unambiguous compared to AI. But then again, with every new technology you probably also had management pushing to use technology_a for <enter something inappropriate for technology_a>. Like in a few decades when the way we work with AI has matured and become completely normal it might be hard to imagine why people nowadays questioned its use. But they won't know about the million stupid uses of AI we're confronted with every day :)
ACCount37 7mo ago
The divide seems to come down to: do you enjoy the "micro" of getting bits of code to work and fit together neatly, or the "macro" of building systems that work? If it's the former, you hate AI agents. If it's the latter, you love AI agents.
- teaearlgraycold 7mo ago
  I enjoy both. There’s still plenty of micro to do even in web dev if you have high standards. Read Claude’s output and you’ll find issues. Code organization, style, edge cases, etc. But the important thing is getting solutions to users. Claude makes that easier.
- kristofferR 7mo ago
  That is an amazing summary. It might not seem that amazing, but I feel like I've read pages about this, but nothing has expressed as elegantly and succinctly.
- arcanemachiner 7mo ago
  I do love the former, but it's been nice to take a break from that and work at a higher level of abstraction.
  - nineteen999 7mo ago
    Same. After 40+ years of typing code on a keyboard, my hands aren't as nimble as they were, a little pain sometimes builds up (whether it's arthritis or carpal tunnel or something, I'm not sure). Being able to have large amounts of code written with much less input is a godsend - and it's been great to learn and see what models like Claude can really do, if you can remain organized and focussed on the API's/interfaces.
    - fragmede 7mo ago
      Do you have WisprFlow or similar STT setup? It's a real Star Trek moment vocally telling my computer what to build, and then to have it build it.
cheema33 7mo ago
I am in my 50s. I agree with what others have said about your happy place. For me, it is not APIs and fine details of operator overloading. I love solving problems. So much so that I hope I never retire. Tools like Claude Code give me wings. The need for assembly programmers diminished over the decades. A similar thing will happen here.
- fragmede 7mo ago
  Or retire and realize the beach forever is not your version of retirement, and get back to it. I spent a week in the Philippines on the beach before getting bored of that and pulling out a laptop and digging into some Linux thing with Claude code, and then now I'm torn between which app to work on to launch.
darkwater 7mo ago
> I'm in my 60s and retiring this summer. Congrats! I'm in that age where I'm envying more the ones like you than the 20-something :)
0x20cowboy 7mo ago
Maybe have a play with them a bit more. LLMs are quite good at coding, but terrible at software engineering. You hear people talk about “guiding them” which is what I think they are getting at. You still need to know what you are doing or you’ll just drive off a cliff eventually. At the moment I am trying to fix a vibe coded application and while each individual function is ok, the overall application is a dog’s breakfast of spaghetti which is causing many problems. If you derive all your pleasure from actually typing the code then you’re probably toast, but if you like building whole systems (that run on production infrastructure) there is still heaps of work to do.
- bGl2YW5j 7mo ago
  I very much agree! It feels like it's going to be exceptionally challenging in the coming years to convince non-technical people of the value of true SWE; by that I mean, SWE is not just coding, it's everything around that too.
zmmmmm 7mo ago
> Agents have removed most of the satisfaction and fulfilment from designing, building, testing and completing a feature or component I highly recommend not using these tools in their "agentic" modes. Stay in control. Tell them exactly what to write, direct the architecture explicitly. You still get the tremendous benefit of being unlocked from learning tedious syntax and overcoming arcane infra bottlenecks that suck the joy out of the process for me, but you get freed from the tedious and soul crushing parts.
- fragmede 7mo ago
  But then you don't get the same gains in output that agentic modes get you. It just goes off and does stuff, sometimes for hours if you get the loop tuned right. Obviously you should do whatever you want, however you want to do it, and not just do whatever some Internet rando tells you to do, but glorified autocomplete is so 1 year ago. Everyone knows the $20/month plans aren't going to last, time will tell if the $100/month ones do. The satisfaction is now in completing a component and getting to polish it in a way you never had time for before. And then totally crushing the next one in record time. To each their own, of course, but personally, what's been lost with agentic mode has been replaced by quantity and quality.
  - zmmmmm 7mo ago
    Yes I'm not recommending "glorified autocomplete". Just shortening the cycle. Give it tasks that would involve maybe a couple of hundred lines of code at a time. I find this captures both the rewarding aspects and gets a lot of the productivity gain - and I'll argue a lot of the remainder of that "productivity gain" sits in somewhat debatable territory : how well all this code holds up that has been developed without oversight is going to be something we only really find out in a few years.
throwaway12345t 7mo ago
Scale the Lego pieces more and it’s the same. Bigger projects have more moving parts and require the same thinking.
chamomeal 7mo ago
I’m kinda in both camps. I can make multiple times more proof-of-concepts than ever before, which is awesome. Especially for internal work tools. But then I rely on it too much, and I don’t really know how the thing works, and it makes it hard to get excited about adding to it
monkey26 7mo ago
50s here. I love building and designing software to solve problems. For years now I haven’t liked the actual coding part. AI has given me a super power.
hkonte 7mo ago
[dead]
schnitsel 7mo ago
You will maybe like this platform: https://solve.it.com/ https://solve.it.com/ Their tag line: "Don't outsource your thinking to AI. Instead, use AI to become a better problem solver, clearer thinker, and more elegant coder." I have followed the course myself and it reignited my passion. During the course I built a cool side project from scratch, small steps, no vibe coding using the course's principals. It was really satisfying, I felt in control again while learning new things.
tech_tuna 7mo ago
I have mixed feelings but echo your sentiments a bit. On the one hand, I can get a lot more done and feel "unchained" so to speak. I have long hated doing frontend development and now it doesn't matter and I love that. However, I don't feel satisfaction from solving problems the same way I used to. I had one long session with Claude a few weeks ago and I told Claude I was done for the night at which point it fired back with "Sounds good, look at how much you accomplished." and I responded with you mean "look at how much you accomplished, I just told you what to do." It is still weird to me that I talk to a remote Python app but that's how we write code nowadays. Still, I felt almost mocked when Claude plauded my "accomplishments". So I'd say that I am definitely more productive than I used to be but I enjoy the work less on one level. But on another level, I feel like I can build a lot more and tackle problems I wouldn't have tackled in the past. It's a mixed blessing. It's also a WIP, I expect that the way we write code will change even more, over the next few years. I love it, I hate it, it's the Brave New World of software development.

by kitd 7mo ago

boringg 7mo ago

Id agree it splits both ways. I think in the short run it can be super fun but once you expand your thoughts to the long run it takes the steam out of rediscovered joy of discovery and creation. Its almost like it reignites novelty at things that were to administratively heavy to figure out. Im not sure if its fleeting or lasting.

LogicFailsMe 7mo ago

OldAF. I have more ideas than I have time to code up prototypes. Claude code has changed all that, And given it cannot improve the performance of optimized code I've written so far, it's like having a never tiring eager junior engineer to work out how to make use of frameworks and APIs to deploy my code. A year ago, cursor was flummoxed by simple things Claude code navigates with ease. But there are still corner cases where it hallucinates on the strangest seemingly obvious things. I'm working on getting it to write code to make what's going on in front of its face more visible to it currently. I guess it's a question of where you find joy in life. I find no joy in frameworks and APIs. I find it entirely in doing the impossible out of sample things for which these agents are not competitive yet. I will even say IMO AI coding agents are the coolest thing I've seen since I saw the first cut of cuda 20 years ago. And I expect the same level of belligerence and resistance to it that I saw deployed against cuda. People hate change by and large.

Bewelge 7mo ago
Can you elaborate on "resistance against cuda"? What were people clinging to instead?
- MachineBurning 7mo ago
  IMO it was mostly that people didn't want to rewrite (and maintain) their code for a new proprietary programming model they were unfamiliar with. People also didn't want to invest in hardware that could only run code written in CUDA. Lots of people wanted (and Intel tried to sell, somewhat succesfully) something they could just plug-and-play and just run the parallel implementations they'd already written for supercomputes using x86. It seemed easier. Why invest all of this effort into CUDA when Intel are going to come and make your current code work just as fast as this strange CUDA stuff in a year or two. Deep learning is quite different from the earlier uses of CUDA. Those use cases were often massive, often old, FORTRAN programs where to get things running well you had to write many separate kernels targeting each bit. And it all had to be on there to avoid expensive copies between GPU and CPU, and early CUDA was a lot less programmable than it is now, with huge performance penalties for relatively small "mistakes". Also many of your key contributers are scientists rather than profressional programmers who see programming as getting in the way of doing what they acutally want to do. They don't want to spend time completely rewriting their applications and optimizing CUDA kernels, they want to keep on with their incremental modifications to existing codebases. Then deep learning came along and researchers were already using frameworks (Lua Torch, Caffe, Theano). The framework authors only had to support the few operations required to get Convnets working very fast on GPUs, and it was minimal effort for researchers to run. It grew a lot from there, but going from "nothing" to "most people can run their Convnet research" on GPUs was much eaiser for these frameworks than it was for any large traditional HPC scientific application.
  - Bewelge 7mo ago
    Thanks! It seems funny though: The advantages of GPGPU are so obvious and unambiguous compared to AI. But then again, with every new technology you probably also had management pushing to use technology_a for <enter something inappropriate for technology_a>. Like in a few decades when the way we work with AI has matured and become completely normal it might be hard to imagine why people nowadays questioned its use. But they won't know about the million stupid uses of AI we're confronted with every day :)

ACCount37 7mo ago

The divide seems to come down to: do you enjoy the "micro" of getting bits of code to work and fit together neatly, or the "macro" of building systems that work? If it's the former, you hate AI agents. If it's the latter, you love AI agents.

teaearlgraycold 7mo ago
I enjoy both. There’s still plenty of micro to do even in web dev if you have high standards. Read Claude’s output and you’ll find issues. Code organization, style, edge cases, etc. But the important thing is getting solutions to users. Claude makes that easier.
kristofferR 7mo ago
That is an amazing summary. It might not seem that amazing, but I feel like I've read pages about this, but nothing has expressed as elegantly and succinctly.
arcanemachiner 7mo ago
I do love the former, but it's been nice to take a break from that and work at a higher level of abstraction.
- nineteen999 7mo ago
  Same. After 40+ years of typing code on a keyboard, my hands aren't as nimble as they were, a little pain sometimes builds up (whether it's arthritis or carpal tunnel or something, I'm not sure). Being able to have large amounts of code written with much less input is a godsend - and it's been great to learn and see what models like Claude can really do, if you can remain organized and focussed on the API's/interfaces.
  - fragmede 7mo ago
    Do you have WisprFlow or similar STT setup? It's a real Star Trek moment vocally telling my computer what to build, and then to have it build it.

cheema33 7mo ago

I am in my 50s. I agree with what others have said about your happy place. For me, it is not APIs and fine details of operator overloading. I love solving problems. So much so that I hope I never retire. Tools like Claude Code give me wings. The need for assembly programmers diminished over the decades. A similar thing will happen here.

fragmede 7mo ago
Or retire and realize the beach forever is not your version of retirement, and get back to it. I spent a week in the Philippines on the beach before getting bored of that and pulling out a laptop and digging into some Linux thing with Claude code, and then now I'm torn between which app to work on to launch.

darkwater 7mo ago

> I'm in my 60s and retiring this summer. Congrats! I'm in that age where I'm envying more the ones like you than the 20-something :)

0x20cowboy 7mo ago

Maybe have a play with them a bit more. LLMs are quite good at coding, but terrible at software engineering. You hear people talk about “guiding them” which is what I think they are getting at. You still need to know what you are doing or you’ll just drive off a cliff eventually. At the moment I am trying to fix a vibe coded application and while each individual function is ok, the overall application is a dog’s breakfast of spaghetti which is causing many problems. If you derive all your pleasure from actually typing the code then you’re probably toast, but if you like building whole systems (that run on production infrastructure) there is still heaps of work to do.

bGl2YW5j 7mo ago
I very much agree! It feels like it's going to be exceptionally challenging in the coming years to convince non-technical people of the value of true SWE; by that I mean, SWE is not just coding, it's everything around that too.

zmmmmm 7mo ago

> Agents have removed most of the satisfaction and fulfilment from designing, building, testing and completing a feature or component I highly recommend not using these tools in their "agentic" modes. Stay in control. Tell them exactly what to write, direct the architecture explicitly. You still get the tremendous benefit of being unlocked from learning tedious syntax and overcoming arcane infra bottlenecks that suck the joy out of the process for me, but you get freed from the tedious and soul crushing parts.

fragmede 7mo ago
But then you don't get the same gains in output that agentic modes get you. It just goes off and does stuff, sometimes for hours if you get the loop tuned right. Obviously you should do whatever you want, however you want to do it, and not just do whatever some Internet rando tells you to do, but glorified autocomplete is so 1 year ago. Everyone knows the $20/month plans aren't going to last, time will tell if the $100/month ones do. The satisfaction is now in completing a component and getting to polish it in a way you never had time for before. And then totally crushing the next one in record time. To each their own, of course, but personally, what's been lost with agentic mode has been replaced by quantity and quality.
- zmmmmm 7mo ago
  Yes I'm not recommending "glorified autocomplete". Just shortening the cycle. Give it tasks that would involve maybe a couple of hundred lines of code at a time. I find this captures both the rewarding aspects and gets a lot of the productivity gain - and I'll argue a lot of the remainder of that "productivity gain" sits in somewhat debatable territory : how well all this code holds up that has been developed without oversight is going to be something we only really find out in a few years.

throwaway12345t 7mo ago

Scale the Lego pieces more and it’s the same. Bigger projects have more moving parts and require the same thinking.

chamomeal 7mo ago

I’m kinda in both camps. I can make multiple times more proof-of-concepts than ever before, which is awesome. Especially for internal work tools. But then I rely on it too much, and I don’t really know how the thing works, and it makes it hard to get excited about adding to it

monkey26 7mo ago

50s here. I love building and designing software to solve problems. For years now I haven’t liked the actual coding part. AI has given me a super power.

hkonte 7mo ago

[dead]

schnitsel 7mo ago

You will maybe like this platform: https://solve.it.com/ https://solve.it.com/ Their tag line: "Don't outsource your thinking to AI. Instead, use AI to become a better problem solver, clearer thinker, and more elegant coder." I have followed the course myself and it reignited my passion. During the course I built a cool side project from scratch, small steps, no vibe coding using the course's principals. It was really satisfying, I felt in control again while learning new things.

tech_tuna 7mo ago

I have mixed feelings but echo your sentiments a bit. On the one hand, I can get a lot more done and feel "unchained" so to speak. I have long hated doing frontend development and now it doesn't matter and I love that. However, I don't feel satisfaction from solving problems the same way I used to. I had one long session with Claude a few weeks ago and I told Claude I was done for the night at which point it fired back with "Sounds good, look at how much you accomplished." and I responded with you mean "look at how much you accomplished, I just told you what to do." It is still weird to me that I talk to a remote Python app but that's how we write code nowadays. Still, I felt almost mocked when Claude plauded my "accomplishments". So I'd say that I am definitely more productive than I used to be but I enjoy the work less on one level. But on another level, I feel like I can build a lot more and tackle problems I wouldn't have tackled in the past. It's a mixed blessing. It's also a WIP, I expect that the way we write code will change even more, over the next few years. I love it, I hate it, it's the Brave New World of software development.