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

> it depends on what you enjoy: the journey or the destination

This has been 100% my experience. I enjoy the puzzle solving and the general joy of organizing and pulling things together. I could really care less about the end result to meet some business need. The fun part is in the building, it's in the understanding, the growth of me.

I have coworkers who get itchy when they don't see their work on production, and super defensive in code review but I've never really cared. The goal is to solve the puzzle. If there's a better way to solve the puzzle, I want to know. If it takes a week to get through code review, what do I care, I'm already off to the next puzzle.

Being forced to use Claude at work, it really just took away everything that was enjoyable. Instead of solving puzzles I'm wrangling a digital junior dev that doesn't really learn from its mistakes, and lies all the time.

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

It's the best thing to happen to systems engineering.

14 years ago hearing Dan Pink talk on motivation (https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc) catalyzed the decision to change jobs.

One of the three motivators he mentions is mastery. And cites examples of why people waste hours with no pay learning to play instruments and other hobbies in their discretionary time. This has been very true for me as a coder.

That said, I enjoy the pursuit of mastery as a programmer less than I used to. Mastering a “simple” thing is rewarding. Trying to master much of modern software is not. Web programming rots your brain. Modern languages and software product motivations are all about gaining more money and mindshare. There is no mastering any stack, it changes to swiftly to matter. I view the necessity of using LLMs as an indictment against what working in and with information technology has become.

I wonder if the hope of mastering the agentic process, is what is rejuvenating some programmers. It’s a new challenge to get good at. I wonder what Pink would say today about the role of AI in “what motivates us”.

(Edited, author name correction)

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

I found my peace with AI aided coding during the last three months. I started development of an environment for programming games and agent simulations that has its own S-expression based DSL, as a private project. Think somewhere between Processing and StarLogo, with a functional style and a unique programming model.

I am having long design sessions with Claude Code and let it implement the resulting features and changes in version controlled increments.

But I am the one who writes the example games and simulations in the DSL to get a feel for where its design needs to change to improve the user experience. This way I can work on the fun and creative parts and let Claude do the footwork.

I let Claude simultaneously write code, tests and documentation for each increment, and I read it and suggest changes or ask for clarification. I find it a lot easier to dismiss an earlier design for a better idea than when I would have implemented every detail of the system myself, and I think so far the resulting product has largely benefited from this.

To me, now more than ever it is important to keep the love for programming alive by having a side project as a creative outlet, with no time pressure and my own acceptance criteria (like beautiful code or clever solutions) that would not be acceptable in a commercial environment.

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

If you enjoyed coding for the sake of coding it hasn't gone anywhere. People still knit for themselves when they can go buy clothes off the rack. People still enjoy chess and Go even though none of them can beat a machine.

If you enjoyed that you could do something the rest of the world can't - well yeah some of that is somewhat gone. The "real programmers" who could time the execution of assembly instructions to the rotation speed of an early hard drive prob felt the same when compilers came around.

It has rekindled my joy however. Agentic development is so powerful but also so painful and it's the painful parts I love. The painful parts mean there is still so much to create and make better. We get to live in a world now where all of this power is on our home computers, where we can draw on all the world's resources to build in realtime, and where if we make anything cool it can propagate virally and instantly, and where there are blank spaces in every direction for individuals to innovate. Pretty cool in my view.

I have decided that I will only write artisanal code. I’m even thinking of creating a consultancy agency where people can hire me to replace AI generated code.

I’ve given AI a try and found the destination felt empty.

I’ve made the choice to not go full bore into AI as a result. I still use it to aid search or ask questions, but full on agentic coding isn’t for me, at least not for the projects I actually care about and want/need to support long-term.

Doesn't AI just replace the coding that other people have done many times? That is, we don't have to do repetitive work because of AI. Yes, I don't know how to write a React app even though I can vibe code it quickly, but that's repetitive nonetheless. It's just that it is another person who has repeated the code before. That said, there are a ton of code to write by hand if we push the envelop. The 10 algorithms that I no one has build for production. This concurrency library that no one has built in my favorite language. That simulation that Claude Code just can’t get right no matter how much prompts/context engineering/harness engineering I do. The list can go on and on.

I’ve made a bunch of tools to help me get around file system limitations on modern Macs (APFS) and treating my entire legacy file collection as CMS challenge and have cranked out more binaries in 3 months than in the 10 years before the arrival of these tools. If you know how to use these tools and how to think like an architect and not a hobbyist Claude is truly in the technological lead.

I am a bit, but not much, younger than 60 and have been coding since Apple II days.

These tools are pretty close to HAL 9000 so of course GIGO as always has been the case with computer tech.

Almost everything is in Go except an image fingerprinting api server written in Swift. The most USEFUL thing I’ve written is a Go based APFS monitor that will help you not overfill your SSD and get pained into corner by Time Machine.

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

I think it's perfect understandable that some people feel dreaded while others feel excited. But whatever the outcome, we have to adapt.

For people who feel that AI kills a passion, I'd recommend finding another hobby. Especially at the age of 60, when you don't have to work, you can plan retirement -- the next 20+ years as if it is your second childhood, and do whatever you want. I encourage you to search for greater meanings. After all, programming is just a man-made wonder, and the universe is full of grandeur.

I'm completely the opposite. 100% the opposite. I wrote code because it was the only way to make the lights blink. I saw code as an impediment to completing a project. There was a lot of friction between the design and the final result. AI reduces that friction substantially.

The remaining friction is fundamentally the same as that which existed when writing code manually. The gap between what you envision for your design/solution and the tools for implementing that vision. With code, the friction encountered when implementing your vision is substantial; with AI, that friction is significantly reduced, and what's left is in areas different from what past experience would lead you to expect.

Well, I'm 55 - and have been a pentester for the past 15 years, but I am having a blast. CC is so enabling - I build something new most weekends (this is my best project so far - which is a site which collects and writes stories for all the latest AI security research: https://shortspan.ai/). All sorts of projects I have had on the back burner are now coming to life. I have 4 kids, so wouldn't have time without Codex/Claude Code. Maybe I have an hour here or there, and that is enough to make something or improve something

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

Claude code made a much slower coder for a good reason.

Now I can find out the gaps, corner cases and motivates me more on craftmanship and perfecting the artifacts i delivered.

What do you all think about the "Solve It" method by the Answer dot AI folks?

It's more like iterating on the REPL with AI in the loop, meaning the user stays in control while benefitting from AI, so real growth happens.

Interesting thing to consider, in a couple of years, will there be a differentiator between people who are good at driving company-specific AI tools and those who are generally better by having built skills the hard way ground up with benefit of AI?

Those who say they enjoy "building" with AI instead of coding are just outsourcing the coding part (while training the AI for outsourced company). It's nothing to enjoy, but yeah, you get the product, which is probably what people enjoy. Getting the product. It's like buying a IKEA furniture and you think you made it by merely assembling it. If you don't know IKEA effect, it's having a greater value for something than it actually is, because you were partly 'involved' in creating/assmebling it.

I feel you. For me it was a love of problem solving. Now that’s been taken away from me and people keep telling me how happy I should be about it.

The friction is the feature for journey-focused builders. When AI removes the cognitive resistance—debugging a parser, wrestling with state management, naming things—it also removes the scaffolding that forces you to really understand what you're building. You end up in implementation details faster, which feels productive until you realize you're solving problems you wouldn't have encountered if you'd thought harder upfront.

I think this is really honest and the reason we see this big divide. On the one hand people that never enjoyed coding but enjoy to see their ideas realized are celebrating. But the group of people who enjoyed coding in itself and never saw it just as a means to a result feel cheated. I think a lot of the polarization you seen online is revolving around this difference in character. I am of two minds about this really. because I've certainly enjoyed the puzzle and the journey in the past. But I also enjoy to get to see ideas I've had for a while but never had the time for, realize quickly. I also don't think its just a distinction between enjoying the journey or the destination, but I think its enjoying a very specific type of journey, e.g. slow methodical etc. Whereas people with a different temperament find the speed and the ease of experimentation and the sometimes surprising results more appealing.

Do you stop gardening because farms exist? Do you stop playing chess because engines have surpassed every human grandmaster? Do you stop driving because cars can drive themselves?

The tool doesn’t invalidate the craft. If anything, what we’re mourning when AI “kills the passion” might be about identity.

Many programmers spent decades defining themselves as the person who knows how to do hard things

And it’s disorienting when that thing becomes easy.

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

In my field which involves large legacy codebases in C++ and complex numerical algorithms implemented by PhDs. LLMs have their place but improvements in productivity are not that great because current LLMs simply make too many mistakes in this context and mistakes are usually very costly.

Everyone `in the know' appreciates this, but equally in the current environment has to play along with the AI hype machine.

It is depressing, but the true value of the current wave of LLMs in coding will become more clear over time. I think it's going to take some serious advances in architecture to make the coding assistant reliable, rather than simply scaling what we have now.

There is some joy in catching the LLM in a house of cards misunderstanding of how something works. They’ll weave really convincing fictions about from a bit of debugging. Then the Socratic probing of that can be fun. In part because the LLM tries to use big words to often seem smart.

Then you hopefully capture that information somehow in a future prompt, documentation, test, or other agent guardrail.

So I finds fun in the knowledge engineering of it all. The meta practice of building up a knowledge base in how to solve problems like this codebase.

I feel you and at a much younger age. I started programming professionally full time around 2011-2012. Documentation was good but practical applications where you could see what you want to achieve in action were very limited. At the time I found myself writing drivers for fiscal printers using RS-232. The documentation provided by the manufacturer was absolutely horrible. "0x0b -> init, 0x23 -> page", literally code -> single word. Although I hated having to effectively brute force it, the feeling at the end was amazing. I tried AI code on several occasions and I hate it with a passion: full of bugs, completely ignoring edge cases and horrible performance. And ultimately having to spend more time fixing the slop than it takes me to sit down, think it through and get it done right. And I see many "programmers" just throw in a prompt in insert AI company here and celebrate the slop, patting themselves on the back.

It's the programming equivalent of those tiktok videos split in half, top half being random stock videos, bottom being temple run and an AI narration of a mildly wtf reddit post.

In a way I am lucky that I work at a place where everyone gets to choose what they want to use and how they use it. So my weapons of choice are a slightly tweaked, almost vanilla zsh, vim and zed with 0 ai features. I have a number of friends/former coworkers working at places where the usage of ai is not just allowed or encouraged but mandated. And is part of their performance score - the more you slop-code, the better your performance.

I can totally get what you are feeling so much, that I actually wrote a whole novel about it

https://leanpub.com/we-mourn-our-craft

I'm 62 years old, and LLM coding agents had ignited my passion again. I'll soon unarchive older projects which were too hard to continue. With Opus this will be finally doable.

Adding a jit to perl, inlining, ssa, fixing raku,... Endless possibilities. Just fixing glibc or gcc is out, because people.

It depends on what you enjoy more — building the pieces or putting the pieces together in clever ways.

I'm more on the second group so LLMs let me get to that part faster without having to get bogged on in the "small stuff".

But I do get the people that enjoy the craftsmanship of the finer details instead.

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

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

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

for me the journey is the things i can do through creating various things in various contexts and authoring the code itself is a small step in the journey.

if it the puzzle solving metaphor, i'm taking solved puzzles as pieces to solve a more meta puzzle ... and i enjoying the journey at that level.

i try to practice tracing all the way down the stack and learning about new things added to the stack, but i'm not in it for the sake of the stack or its vagaries and difficulties.

I think a lot of the push back comes from people who haven’t yet been directly affected. Those later in their careers often have little at stake and may not notice—or care—how it impacts juniors. People who feel it’s helping them now are just lucky that their roles and knowledge haven’t been disrupted yet. Eventually, it will catch up, and the discussion will shift to adapting or moving on—just like every other wave of "AI makes what I enjoy obsolete".

I don't really feel it's taking anything away, and in fact, it is providing me with something I've never done after 25+ years in IT doing everything BUT - development.

I've always done networking (isp, datacenter, large enterprise), security (networking plus firewall, vpn, endpoint), unix/linux admin, even windoze stuff with active directory, but never any development or programming directly. I was just never wired for it, though I can do ip/cidr/bgp/acl stuff in my head for days. I missed out on higher ed entirely after high school, and I learned along the way what I did after 45 years of tinkering with pc's from apple II on i life.

Right now I'm taking my network and security knowledge in writing an mcp to do network and security tasks enabling agents like claude-code, claude-desktop, codex, openclaw a means of accessing resources indirectly via my mcp, and it's something I could have never done before the advent of AI as I "don't do code". Now I can tell it intimately everything I need/want it to do, and it just literally does it. It's extremely effective too, if not at times aggravating/infuriating.

My biggest gripe is it does everything half ass, but nothing I haven't seen time and again from outsourcing. It feels like the usual contractor slop you might get hiring wipro/infosys or any other offshore development effort, but at least without human idiocy.

AI in general really needs a "don't do half-ass work" option, as it typically feels like I'll get "good enough for government work" sort of results until I kick and slap it at least twice to fix its shortcomings. It invariably feels like it always only gives me half of what I ask for. You can almost tell it's built to not give you everything up front, instead make you work for it.

It's a trap, as a wise man once said.

Why can you not enjoy both the journey and the destination? Surely you find some sub-disciplines of writing code more pleasant than others - can't you just keep doing those manually and offload/automate the rest to the machine?

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

Code to me has always been a solution. And I have always found problem definition the more interesting side of that coin. Luckily, it seems problem definition has become more important with Claude et al.

just eat taco bell it help me

> I have always enjoyed the journey

Don't take it personally, but those are the worst kind of engineers in any real world business context. I watched those type of people ruining projects, companies by overengineering them to death.

On the bright side, such traits can make a positive impact in academic or research context.

The other post was obviously astroturf bullshit, you can tell because they always mention CLAUDE CODE specifically like it's fucking Coca Cola.

I was never a coder, but I can understand this frustration. For some, the efficiency is probably really exciting, but for those who really enjoyed solving the puzzles, something is lost. For me personally, AI and vibe-coding have opened up a whole new world (I built a mobile app), but I get why it's killing the passion for some.

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

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

I don't buy this journey vs destination binary I keep hearing. I always considered myself lucky to be 44 and still writing code all day. I love the journey - the mental satisfaction of creating something complex yet elegant. The perfectionism that leads you to ask yourself can this be simpler, faster etc. But I also now love creating things that frankly I was never going to find the time for.

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

Yet your passion to spread negativity is thriving. Here you thought negativity is a destination, but turns out it’s a whole new journey for you! Passion reignited indeed.

I think AI Coding allows more people to do more things, which is why for most people it "ignited their passion" because now they have the tools to build their ideas

it depends on what you enjoy: the journey or the destination This has been 100% my experience. I enjoy the puzzle solving and the general joy of organizing and pulling things together. I could really care less about the end result to meet some business need. The fun part is in the building, it's in the understanding, the growth of me.

I have coworkers who get itchy when they don't see their work on production, and super defensive in code review but I've never really cared. The goal is to solve the puzzle. If there's a better way to solve the puzzle, I want to know. If it takes a week to get through code review, what do I care, I'm already off to the next puzzle.

Being forced to use Claude at work, it really just took away everything that was enjoyable. Instead of solving puzzles I'm wrangling a digital junior dev that doesn't really learn from its mistakes, and lies all the time.

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voxleone 9 hours ago | parent | next [–]

I've been coding since I was about 15 and still love it. These days I mostly build tailored applications for small and medium companies, often alone and sometimes with small ad-hoc teams. I also do the sales myself, in person. For me, not using LLMs would mean giving up a lot of productivity. But the way I use them is very structured. Work on an application starts with requirements appraisal: identifying actors, defining use cases, and understanding the business constraints. Then I design the objects and flows. When possible, I formalize the system with fairly strict axioms and constraints. Only after that do LLMs come in, mostly to help with the mechanical parts of implementation. In my experience it's still humans all the way down. The thinking, modeling, and responsibility for the system are human. The LLM just helps move the implementation faster.

I also suspect the segment I work in will be among the last affected by LLM-driven job displacement. My clients are small to medium companies that need tailored internal systems. They're not going to suddenly start vibe-coding their own software. What they actually need is someone to understand the business, define the model, and take responsibility for the system. LLMs help with the implementation, but that part was never the hard part of the job.

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jantb 5 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

I’m doing the same as you and even though I was producing coding a lot of the actual products I estimated the coding part just to be about 20% of the work. The rest is figuring out what and how to build stuff and what stakeholders really need, and solving production issues in live event driven systems. Agentic coding is just faster at the 20% part, and I can always sit down and code the really hard stuff if I want to or feel I need to if the LLM gets stuck. If it produces something not understandable I either learn from it until I understand it og makes it do a pattern I know instead. So all in all, not so worried. reply

finaard 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

> This has been 100% my experience. I enjoy the puzzle solving and the general joy of organizing and pulling things together. I could really care less about the end result to meet some business need. The fun part is in the building, it's in the understanding, the growth of me. Quite a few of the projects I always wanted to do have components or dependencies I really don't want to do. And as a result, I never did them, unless they eventually became viable to do in a commercial setting where I then had some junior developer to make the annoying stuff go away.

Now with LLMs I have my own junior developer to handle the annoying stuff - and as a result, a lot of my fun stuff I was thinking about in the last 3 decades finally got done.

One example from just last week - I had a large C codebase from the 90s I always wanted to reuse, but modern compilers have a different idea of how C should look like. It's pretty obvious from the compiler errors what you need to do each case, but I wasn't really in the mood for manually going through hundreds of source files. So I just stuck a locally running qwen coder in yolo mode into a container, forgot about it for a week, and came back to a compiling code base. Diff is quick to review, only had a handful of cases where it needed manual intervention.

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throw-the-towel 8 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]

Note that you are able to choose freely what parts of the work get done by Claude, and what parts you do yourself. At work, many of us have no such luxury because bosses drunk on FOMO are forcing agent use. reply

sktrdie 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

You still care about end result though: in your case, the end result being the puzzled you solved. AI can make that process still enjoyable. For instance I had to build a very intricate cache handler for Next.js from scratch that worked in a very specific way by serializing JSON in chunks (instead of JSON.parse it all in memory). I knew the theory, but the API details and the other annoyances always made it daunting for me.

With AI I was able to thinker more about the theory of the problem and less about the technical implementation which made the process much more fun and doable.

Perhaps we're just climbing the ladder of abstraction: in the early days people were building their own garbage collection mechanisms, their own binary search algorithms, etc. Once we started using libraries, we had to find the fun in some higher level.

Perhaps in the future the fun will be about solving puzzles within the realm of requirement definitions and all the intricacies that stem from that.

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specproc 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]

One hundred percent. I came back into tech professionally over the last decade. Always been into computers, but the first decade or so of my career was in humanitarian amin. Super interesting sector, super boring day-to-day.

This argument doesn't make sense to me. did airplanes kill road trips? AI lets you go faster, but you don't have to use it at all, or can use it in select ways to collab with. Unless you're somehow bothered by how other people code, you've only got more options now.

Its just a different rate of travel.

Using AI is not mandatory.

I very much enjoy the journeys I take with AI. It helps me undertake journeys I would never dare to without it. Because I took many before myslef and I know how long they are and how tired they made me feel. It lets me solo take the journeys I knew I'd need a team for. AI is a truck for my brain. I still enjoy walking the walk myself. But I take different journeys by walking than by a truck.

Just… keep coding?

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