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Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
Quick background: I used to code. Studied it in school, wrote some projects, but eventually convinced myself I wasn't cut out for it. Too slow, too many bugs, imposter syndrome — the usual story. So I pivoted, ended up as an investment associate at an early-stage angel fund, and haven't written real code in years.

Fast forward to now. I'm a Buffett nerd — big believer in compound interest as a mental model for life. I run compound interest calculations constantly. Not because I need to, but because watching numbers grow over 30-40 years keeps me patient when markets get wild. It's basically meditation for long-term investors.

The problem? Every compound interest calculator online is terrible. Ugly interfaces, ads covering half the screen, can't customize compounding frequency properly, no year-by-year breakdowns. I've tried so many. They all suck.

When vibe coding started blowing up, something clicked. Maybe I could actually build the calculators I wanted? I don't have to be a "real developer" anymore — I just need to describe what I want clearly.

So I tried it.

Two weeks and ~$100（Opus 4.5 thinking model） in API costs later: I somehow have 60+ calculators. Started with compound interest, naturally. Then thought "well, while I'm here..." and added mortgage, loan amortization, savings goals, retirement projections. Then it spiraled — BMI calculator, timezone converter, regex tester. Oops.

The AI (I'm using Claude via Windsurf) handled the grunt work beautifully. I'd describe exactly what I wanted — "compound interest calculator with monthly/quarterly/yearly options, year-by-year breakdown table, recurring contribution support" — and it delivered. With validation, nice components, even tests.

What I realized: my years away from coding weren't wasted. I still understood architecture, I still knew what good UX looked like, I still had domain expertise (financial math). I just couldn't type it all out efficiently. AI filled that gap perfectly.

Vibe coding didn't make me a 10x engineer. But it gave me permission to build again. Ideas I've had for years suddenly feel achievable. That's honestly the bigger win for me.

Stack: Next.js, React, TailwindCSS, shadcn/ui, four languages (EN/DE/FR/JA). The AI picked most of this when I said "modern and clean."

Site's live at https://calquio.com . The compound interest calculator is still my favorite page — finally exactly what I wanted.

Curious if others have similar stories. Anyone else come back to building after stepping away?

  • ikidd
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  • 4 hours ago
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Same here. Farmer now, former network engineer and software project lead, but I stopped programming almost 20 years ago.

Now I build all sorts of apps for my farm and organizations I volunteer for. I can pound out an app for tracking sample locations for our forage associations soil sample truck, another for moisture monitoring, a fleet task/calendar/maintenance app in hours and iterate on them when I think of features.

And git was brand new when I left the industry, so I only started using it recently to any extent, and holy hell, is it ever awesome!

I'm finally able to build all the ideas I come up with when I'm sitting in a tractor and the GPS is steering.

Seriously exciting. I have a hard time getting enough sleep because I hammer away on new ideas I can't tear myself away from.

20 years of ideas finally getting built — I felt that.

For me it was financial tools I'd been sketching in my head for years. Now they actually exist.

The "can't sleep" part is so real. It's like being a kid again when you first discovered you could make things with code.

And I realized something — we just want to solve problems, not spend all our time studying the techniques for solving them.

Out of all the apps you've worked on, what's one or two that you think came out really well?
Did you start farming from scratch?

Did you take over a farm?

Well in my opinion there's nothing wrong with vibe-coding. You can completely use it to make your passion projects. I draw the line when people try to sell their vibe-coded project as something huge, putting people at the risk of potential security breaches while also taking money out of them.

Every other day I see ads of companies saying "use our AI and become a millionaire", this kind of marketing from agentic IDEs implies no need for developers who know their craft, which as said above, isn't the case.

Same here. I’m an AI professor, but every time I wanted to try out an idea in my very limited time, I’d spend it all setting things up rather than focusing on the research. It has enabled me to do my own research again rather than relying solely on PhD students. I’ve been able to unblock my students and pursue my own projects, whereas before there were not enough hours in the day.
This really resonates. The setup cost was always the killer for me too — by the time you get everything working, the motivation is gone. Now I can actually go from idea to prototype in an afternoon. Cool to hear it's having the same effect on actual research.
  • ako
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  • 1 hour ago
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It’s more like AI provides the development team, and you are the key user and product manager that comes with all the requirements and domain knowledge, the lead architect reviewing the architecture, and the lead UXer reviewing the UX.
Does the "iv" in your name stand for "implied volatility" by chance? : - )
Ha, you got me!
In this sense LLMs are another wave of "end-user programming" like excel formula. This has been the recurring experience of many in these waves.
I don’t like AI for production code, but I love it for ideation and prototyping. I agree. It really allows you to quickly iterate on ideas without being blocked by implementation details.
Nice project! One small suggestion, adding a search or category filter would help simplify navigation given the number of calculators available.
Thanks! Honestly I've been feeling that too — finding stuff is getting annoying even for me. Search is coming soon. Good call.
Genuine congratulations. Ignore the unconstructive comments you’ll get (I already flagged one.)

This is a revolution, welcome back to coding :)

Congrats! I never stopped coding, but AI makes it way more productive and fun for sure.

$100 seems like a lot. I guess if you think about it compared to dev salaries, it's nothing. But for $10 per month copilot you can get some pretty great results too.

$100 did feel steep at first. I tried other models but Opus 4 with extended thinking just hits different — it actually gets what I'm trying to do and the code often works first try. Hard to go back after that.
Wait until you try Codex XHigh for $200 (with 5.2 Pro as oracle)
As I read this post I realized that a majority of my US colleagues _write exactly like that_ holy crap it’s gonna bug me all the time now.
Same. Fell out of love with programming after the first few years because the thought of spending my life staring at a screen and dealing with insignificant minutia suddenly seemed horrible. Spent a lot of years in management and LLMs gave me a way to build things I wanted again. Currently building a platformer.
  • mk12
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  • 6 hours ago
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The "knowledge base" at the bottom is 100% slop. Why? Why inflict this on people?
Yeah, you're right — that part is pretty rough. I wanted to help people actually understand compound interest (it's kind of life-changing once it clicks), but I got lazy and let AI do it without proper editing. Defeats the whole point.

I'll figure out a better way. Thanks for calling it out.

I think the words are "you're absolutely right".
You're absolutely right too.
[flagged]
  • dang
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Please don't be hostile to newcomers. That's a way to destroy this place.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

  • mk12
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How do we know if newcomers are real? I thing bigDinosaur is reacting to the fact that OP’s entire post and replies appear LLM generated.
  • ivank
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User generates a slop post for a slop website; it goes on the front page like many others. Hacker News might not survive an ongoing invasion of slop. Perhaps time to add a slop-sensitive moderator with a Pangram subscription (combined with their own heuristics) and just mercilessly delete stuff.
  • rob
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  • 6 hours ago
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Just another AI generated website with 5000 calculators thrown together that looks like every other single one. From a brand new account with a post that looks like it was also written from ChatGPT. Somehow getting enough votes to show up on my homepage.

Things are definitely changing around HN compared to when it first started.

Fair call — it did kind of explode from one calculator to 60+ I’m a real person (long-time lurker, finally posting), but I get why it looks sus. Things are changing fast, and I’m just happy to be part of the messy early wave. Thanks for the honesty.
> Thanks for the honesty.

It's impossible to tell if this is AI or not. Another version of Poe's law. The only thing to do is assume everything is AI, just like you must assume all posts have ulterior (generalluy profit-driven) motives, all posters have a conflict of interest, etc.

Maybe the only thing to do is stop trying to understand posters' motivations, stop reading things charitably, stop responding, just look for things that are interesting (and be sure to check sources).

people are hurt because something which defined them as a person can now be done by a machine; don't let them dissuade you
I would add to this: skills mean nothing if you don’t use them.

OP made a site with a bunch of calculators. Their critics didn’t make that!

We're busy building real software, not toys. I routinely write all kinds of calculators in my game development, in addition to having 100x more complex code to contend with. This task is as trivial as it gets in coding, considering computers were literally made to calculate and calculation functions are part of standard libraries. OP definitely didn't use Claude to implement math functions from scratch, they just did the basic copy-and-paste work of tying it to a web interface on a godawful JS framework stack which is already designed for children to make frontends with at the cost of extreme bloat and terrible performance. Meanwhile I actually did have to write my own math library, since I use fixed-point math in my game engine for cross-CPU determinism rather than getting to follow the easy path of floating-point math.

It's cool that ChatGPT can stitch these toys together for people who aren't programmers, but 99% of software engineers aren't working on toys in the first place, so we're hardly threatened by this. I guess people who aren't software engineers don't realise that merely making a trivially basic website is not what software engineering is.

  • dangus
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Idk, your superiority complex about the whole issue does make it sound like you’re feeling threatened. You seem determined to prove that AI can’t really make any decent output.

What’s even the point of writing out that first paragraph otherwise?

> What’s even the point of writing out that first paragraph otherwise?

I was correcting your misguided statement:

> Their critics didn’t make that!

by pointing out that we, among other things, build the libraries that you/Claude are copy-and-pasting from. When you make an assertion that is factually incorrect, and someone corrects you, that does not mean they are threatened.

You're right that this is simple compared to what real engineers build. I have a lot of respect for people like you who write things like custom math libraries for cross-CPU determinism — that's way beyond my level.

I'll keep learning and try to make this less of a toy over time. And hopefully I can bring what I've learned from years in investing into my next product to actually help people. Thanks for the perspective.

[dead]
  • maxaw
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So true. I sometimes wonder how many ai bots there really are. I often see the telltale signs but often miss.
What are you implying?. He would have had to hire a good developer at least for a full month salary to build something like this.

And if you are thinking enterprise, it would take 2-3 developers, 2 analysts, 2 testers, 1 lead and 1 manager 2-3 months to push something like this. (Otherwise why would lead banks spent billions and billions for IT development every year? What tangible difference you see in their website/services?)

5000 calculators may look excessive, but in this case it magnifies the AI capabilities in the future - both in terms of quality and quantity.

> (Otherwise why would lead banks spent billions and billions for IT development every year? What tangible difference you see in their website/services?)

Well, I don't think all those people are spending their time making simple calculators.

Twitter/X incentivizes you to get engagements because with a blue checkmark you get paid for it, so people shill aggressively, post idiotic comments on purpose trying to ragebait you. It's like LinkedIn in for entrepreneurs. Reddit or it's power hungry moderators (shadow)bans people often. The amount of popular websites that people can shill their trash is dwindling, so it gets worse here as a result I assume too.
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> Stack: Next.js, React, TailwindCSS, shadcn/ui, four languages (EN/DE/FR/JA). The AI picked most of this when I said "modern and clean."

I guess this is what separates some people. But I always explicitly tell it to use only HTML/JS/CSS without any libraries that I've vetted myself. Generating code allows you now not having to deal with it a lot more.

Cool to hear nonetheless. Can we now also stop stigmatizing AI generated music and art? Looking at you Steam disclosures.