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Comment by brabel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

Why not say “using a computer”. gcl (my alias for git clone) is way faster to use than any prompting. Any use case I found for LLMs, I noticed that a good script or a DSL (as an abstraction) would be way more useful.

you often gcl?

A lot. I often study software I use (mostly OSS) to find how a feature is implemented.

If something is cumbersome and I find myself needing it often (or I think I will need it), I write an alias, a script, an emacs function, etc,... That's the magic of reducing lot of steps to a single button press (or a short command).

Writing unit tests. Modifying existing unit tests to achieve desired code coverage.

Do you really think you are as eager, inquisitive, and open to learning new ideas in your 40s compared to your 20s?

I am 50 and the answer is 'yes'.

Yes. Older people do not become less inquisitive and eager to learn, they just become less open to hype as they've seen whatever younger folks think is the new hot idea several times before, just in different shapes and sizes. However, with AI we're truly seeing something new that we had not seen before (the AI of the 80's, 90's and 2000's was interesting but it never managed to do anything truly generalist - it was mostly able to get good at a very narrow, specific activity, very different from today's LLMs), so I feel just as curious and eager to "learn it" as I was eager to learn, say, Functional Programming in my 20's and Neural Networks in my 30's.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...

Fluid intelligence peaks early (20s) but crystallized intelligence peaks much later (50s-60s), and it's not like you can't crystallize a desire to continue to learn, even if you're potentially less creative from a raw intelligence perspective.

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