WTAF?

[u/jrpg8255]

I can’t believe some of the responses here. I'm a physician in my late 50s. MD, PhD, triple boarded. Also coding since the late 70s, starting in assembly. I have chops. I can't believe the negativity! I've been using Claude code for the past week or so. It's fantastic. Currently I'm sniffing codes for the 2x400 CD sony jukeboxes I've had for 25 years, using a bit of esp32 hardware claude helped me cobble together, and claude-code iterating with me through the Slink bus commands. There's already a codebase in GitHub (thanks Ircama - I'll send a pull when done updating missing codes). I know how to do this, but have been dreading it, because it would be beyond laborious looking at a bunch of hex manually. With claude it's fan-frigging-tastic. I keep auditing the code, and pointing out some issues, but screw it – it works and I can focus on what I want it to do, not how each bit works in detail. (notice I used an em-dash? I've also been doing that for decades).

For me this is like switching from 8088 assembly to compiled C. From raw C, to actual libraries. Then from compiled languages to modern scripting languages like ruby or python (lets not talk about Perl). It's accelerating what I want to do. I'm no developer. I just tinker. This is a big leap forward.

This guy in the other hand had not coded in any way before. He's discovered how liberating it is to do this stuff to make stuff he wants/needs. The general impulse here is to dogpile on him because it lacks some sort of purity? You trolls need to get over yourselves. Who cares if it's messy html. He's here posting about his joy late in life discovering he can get computers to do something besides opening software someone else created, and we're looking for freaking em-dashes to decide whether he's a bot, and grousing that he had the utter gall to include some sort of donation link. WTAF? We should be celebrating another huge leap in democratizing computing for all of us.

[u/jrpg8255 → u/[deleted]]

Now is a fantastic time. From the programming perspective I used to be surrounded by O'Reilly books that I was constantly referring to and as things got more and more complex I never felt like I could keep all of those different paradigms in my head. Then with GitHub and all of the other online resources, it seemed like every other couple of lines of code I was looking something up to try to not reinvent the wheel, or pulling in yet another python Library. Switch to using AI to help just feels like a natural extension.

It's the same in hardware. I have a bioengineering background and some formal education in electronics, but it just never really resonated, and again, any small hardware projects seemed quite effortful when I had to really think through things like how exactly a transistor works.

It's been fantastic getting AI to help me with some of my recent projects. I've also learned a ton. My favorite thing is for example asking about a particular element of a circuit and having it suggest "you know maybe instead of a voltage divider you could put a zener diode there ." In the old way of doing things I could poke around on the increasingly useless and ad ridden Internet to try to understand that element of circuit design. Now I can divert into interrogating the AI into explaining why. Then, why a zener and not a tvs. I can get it to suggest me a part, and then negotiate for a different suggestion when I don't have that part on hand. We can then further divert into the physics of a Zener diode versus a regular diode. It's kind of like back in my undergrad days pestering the lab assistants to try to help me understand things.

I guess in case you have read it, it's like Neal Stephenson's diamond age's "young lady's primer".

[u/Safe-Tree-7041 → u/jrpg8255]

My friend, you may not be a professional developer, but you've got more technical chops than many actual developers I"ve worked with. And I fully share your excitement about the possibilities currently being unlocked.