Hey there! I have a coworker who’s in his mid-50s. He’s a mathematician, an incredibly skilled developer, and genuinely one of the most competent people I’ve worked with when it comes to understanding complex technical problems. But the reality is, he’s already been left behind. While our younger developers have embraced Claude Code and dramatically accelerated their workflows, he hasn’t used AI for development at all. Not ChatGPT, not Claude Code, nothing. And the gap is becoming increasingly noticeable. The problem isn’t his technical ability. He’s extremely capable. But some of his work is foundational to what other developers are building, so people regularly end up waiting for his changes before they can integrate their own code. He became a bottleneck, and management wants him gone. We’ve encouraged him to explore AI tools, take some courses, and get familiar with modern AI-assisted development. And the thing is, he’s not against it. He genuinely wants to learn, but he just can’t seem to get started. My impression is that he’s reached a point where the entire topic feels so overwhelming that he doesn’t even know where to begin. Every week there’s another model, another tool, another workflow, another YouTube tutorial telling you everything has changed. I suspect he feels so far behind that even taking the first step has become intimidating. So I talked to management and convinced them to give him a few fully paid days dedicated exclusively to learning AI-assisted development. Our CEO agreed and basically told me: “Find him a good course.” That’s where I need your help. I want to introduce him to Claude Code specifically, because that’s what we’re using and I believe it could genuinely make a difference for him. I’m looking for something structured, practical, and approachable for someone who: Has decades of development experience and doesn’t need to learn programming. Has essentially zero experience with AI coding assistants. Is extremely intelligent but currently overwhelmed by the whole AI ecosystem. Would benefit from a clear starting point rather than 50 different resources. Needs to experience firsthand how much these tools can help with actual development work. I’ve seen some courses and GitHub repositories offering Claude Code training, but I have no idea which ones are actually good for someone in his situation. If you had 3 paid working days to help an experienced developer go from zero AI experience to being genuinely productive with Claude Code, how would you approach it? Would you recommend a specific course, a GitHub-based tutorial, a hands-on workshop, or something completely different? And if you’ve successfully helped an experienced, somewhat overwhelmed developer make this transition, I’d especially love to hear what worked. I’m not trying to turn him into an AI power user overnight. I just want him to have that first moment of “Oh, NOW I get it” and build enough confidence to continue learning on his own. He’s too good at what he does for us to lose him simply because the tooling landscape changed so quickly. Any advice, course recommendations, or personal experiences would be massively appreciated. submitted by /u/PASTOR-MARTIN-SSEMPA
Originally posted by u/PASTOR-MARTIN-SSEMPA on r/ClaudeCode