Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to bring out one side or other.
As for why the community is divided, there's always a temptation to come up with HN-specific explanations, but society as a whole is divided about AI. Surely that is the only explanation one needs. As I've been saying for years, HN can't be immune from macro trends: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Thoughtful comment, and I'd like to add another angle: However meaningful it is to say the community is divided, I also think that individuals are "divided" on the question as well.
I can speak from myself as an example (although n=1): I am incredibly open to machine learning and the advances it brings. On the other hand I am extremely conscious of the fact that the current LLMs do often write bad code, which becomes especially obvious once projects go much beyond "private toy" size. For me personally the consequence is that I try to make my projects even more modular, and the modules even more clearly delineated. With proper guidance, current LLMs work mostly fine when working on isolated modules. That doesn't mean they don't sometimes fail even there, but they also on rare occasions come up with surprisingly clever solutions when you let them loose on a code base, as long as the problem you want them to fix is mostly isolated in a couple of modules.
So long story short, you can be all for LLMs and still be conscious of their shortcomings, and that just vibe coding applications you intend to let loose on unsuspecting customers is probably a bad idea, and possibly outright immoral. We have already seen more than enough examples of vibe coded applications dumping sensitive user data into the lap of anyone who is inclined to pick up a stick and prod them a little bit.
Yes, I’m in this camp. I’ve been pushing forward some personal projects lately using LLMs. At first, I was delighted at how productive I was, prompting. But over time a lot of cracks have started to show. Claude is good at programming “in the small”. It’s good at getting self contained, well scoped tasks done. But it’s bad at large scale system thinking. Over time, every project I’ve gotten Claude to write has become riddled with poor design choices layered on top of one another until even Claude struggles to make forward progress. And at that point, what do you do? You’ve gotta read all its code. Something I’ve learned I should just do from the start to save myself a lot of time later on.
It’s also strangely bad at correctness. You can ask it to write unit tests for a project. Unless you’re careful with your prompting, it will only write the unit tests that it knows will pass.
Generally, these models are amazing tools. But they cannot be trusted to make correct, maintainable software. At least not yet. Maybe in another year or two.
That does not seem like it should be controversial. I have known for quite a long time that a motivated high school kid could learn to code well enough to be perfectly useful. Especially with popular languages like Python.
This is just an object lesson for everyone who thought all that software guys did was write code that there is just a little bit more to the job than that. Actual developers should already have known.
I've spent an obscene number of hours learning how to get reliably good quality code out of these things. I'm actually very happy with where the tech is right now and can't imagine ever going back to typing code by hand.
But I absolutely hate how companies and society at large are acting because of this stuff. It feels like all rationality has flown out the window. So I'm just staying in my sandbox with my little toys and hoping the mass psychosis blows over at some point.
The argument is dialectical. In other words both sides are right.
There is a really important question that is been lost between the anti and pro AI camps which is really answering what AI is good at and what AI is bad at, and what is the root cause of the weaknesses. Is it intrinsic to the models that LLM's use, or the way thy have been trained. In this knowledge is where the gold mine is for the next start up.
For example AI is very good at answering well defined questions, but suffers from premature closure. It will not know if it has all the information to answer the question. So whilst AI will score better than a doctor or a lawyer on a domain question it will not necessarily gather all the evidence needed to answer the question properly. Knowing this whilst using a LLM is a super power.
There is also a large gap Usability issue in that often the LLM does not really know the humans context, in other words a context collapse. It does not know if you specilised in your domain or just asking for fun.
> There is a really important question that is been lost between the anti and pro AI camps which is really answering what AI is good at and what AI is bad at, ...
I think some of this pro/anti AI discussion is really a proxy for something else though. There is another unstated, societal disagreement about personal responsibility and the behaviors of the AI tool users.
It isn't entirely new, as people have always been blaming abstractions which lack agency (society, bureaucracy, "the machine", "the process", "the game", etc.) to conduct themselves in an ethically or logically flawed manner and then shirk responsibility. But, I think it is accelerating dramatically with the way AI agent usage is being adopted. I don't see how this can possibly continue to be normalized without leading to a catastrophic outcome.
Right now, AI tool usage is being applied in ways that would have been considered misconduct, negligence, or fraud if the actors were doing the same thing via traditional outsourcing. People who have a contractual and ethical responsibility to apply analysis, judgement, and oversight are rapidly turning into dumb pipes who just relay content. They essentially phone it in, trying to take credit for apparently moving KPIs "up and to the right". They pretend to themselves and others that they are reviewers and still in control, but when things go wrong they expect forgiveness and for others to lean in and clean up their rapidly spreading mess.
In software circles, many of us are appalled by this slop that is poisoning the well for our existing organizations. It seems like a massive, toxic externality. To us, people aiming their AI agents into our existing collaborations are pretty much flipping a switch to "roll coal", or worse.
And this is why I'm glad we don't have full continuous learning AGI at this point. Humanity is not ready. We neither have the legal system nor the responsibility of handling something that would be capable of agency when turned on.
I don't know if that's specific to AI. It seems accountability levels are in hell right now. Consider anything the president has done and how that would have gone if any other president ever did it. Or anything AI companies do. Or anything Tesla does. Or X.
Don't bring politics into it. We can literally see the software being produced getting worse very quickly since the introduction of LLMs for coding. I expect a wave of data breaches to come soon when the hackers realize how many new holes have been created lately and adjust their tactics.
I haven't had the patience or mentality to really absorb "ok but how is this useful" until that thread and your highlighted references. Thank you for the curated highlights, however brief it may be, because it's very hard to find such diamonds without dedicating far too much time wading through the abstract gatekept comments on the topic, in most cases. Real world examples give me much hope!
Lemme give another. I was formerly quite anti-AI but bought a cheap Claude plan just to play around with it a bit. First thing I built with it was this - https://github.com/tylereaves/onscreen-piano, in about an hour and maybe 10 prompt cycles. It replaced, for my specific use case, the 10% of the functionality of an increasingly-unreliable commercial app. That's including building the website, setting up actions for mac and windows builds...
My next project was a 2d game with random terrain, physics, sound, music, multiple levels, a day/night cycle with transitions high score tracking... (not uploaded anywhere, but it works, and I refined it a good bit.). That was more like 8 hours and maybe a 100 prompts.
One thing that I have found to make a pretty big difference is using both the latest models and higher thinking levels. Opus 4.8 with thinking on Extra or even Max is genuinely mind blowing. The thing I hadn't really appreciated, having a sort of naive impression formed mainly from using free early versions of stuff like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion was sort of that "Type a big ass prompt and it craps out a result" experience. But Claude is really great at refining from feedback, and it's way more flexible and responsive than I would have ever expected. I can do something like take a screenshot of a small portion of the running app or website or whatever and just say "This button needs to be bigger" or "make this red" or something like that, or even sometimes just "fix this", and Claude both correctly identifies what I'm talking about, and actually does the thing.
here I've found it really, incredibly game changing is my health. I have a pretty, to put it mildly, complex medical profile at this point. I haven't worked in over a year and pretty much every sign is pointing towards permanent disability at this point. Tons of symptoms, long med list, and I live in a smaller town with not great access to care. I'm also autistic and have not the greatest verbal communication, especially under stress or time pressure. I dumped all my info at it, in bits and bobs over several days (Side note... it's memory is pretty limited, but it will quite happily right out everything it knows from a session into a markdown file it can later re-read. I've found it very good for things like screening for drug interactions, or talking through and logging symptoms (and it can log those into human readable markdown files too). Biggest win (other than having unlimited time and interactions) is that it thinks across specilaties, versus the "real world" where the gastro only wants to deal with gastro stuff, neurology only wants to do neuro.
I certainly don't (and wouldn't) use it as a replacement for a doctor, but as an adjunct it's phenomenal. For instance, it flagged a possible drug interaction with a symptom I was having, and then offered to draft a portal message to my GP about it. I have poor executive function so lowering the friction from "type up a message and send it" to "copy and paste" is actually a pretty big deal. Turns something (I probably won't do) later into something I will do now.
It wouldn't surprise me if my very direct, literal, autistic communication style is particularly well suited to interacting with AI. I actually find talking to it rather refreshing as, while of course it's not perfect, it tends to actually respond to what I say rather than the all the assumed subtext NTs tend to expect/react to.
Your last paragraph hit home with me. I also find it refreshing to be clear and direct, have the intent be directly understood, and have a pleasant, good faith, high signal conversation as a result. I hardly ever experience that with humans (I recognize that that’s not ‘everyone else’s fault’ of course).
I am very optimistic about people using LLMs to explore their medical issues. Human bodies are complex and doctors are time- and intelligence- limited. An LLM can be a really useful partner.
I think the community is divided. But I think it’s less A/B and more a spectrum. There are plenty of more balanced comments rolling in from people who’ve been using it for a while and have experienced both the advantages and disadvantages.
E.g., agentic development is great for solo projects and prototyping, but can become overwhelming alarmingly quickly when you’ve got multiple devs involved, especially if they’re not all super-disciplined and consistent about how they use their agents. And we’re all learning how to deal with that.
Thanks for putting it this way. I have to admit I was really astonished by the question as I feel like HN is very much pro-AI at least in the sense that there is more AI promotion on HN than there is AI acceptance among people in the real world. It's been months if not years since most of the posts are about genAI, and in a largely favorable way. It's actually quite fascinating that for some people it feels like the opposite.
I hang around a few developer-centric communities, and my gut feeling is that HN is by far the most pro-AI. It's somewhat rare to find people all-in on "developers just got replaced by AI, pick a different career field guys" anywhere but here. Maybe there are just more developer-adjacent types on HN.
I do find it somewhat amusing to read the commentary here and ponder why some of these people are wildly enthusiastic about making software development a dead field but simultaneously don't think it's also going to put them out of work. Programmers may be a lucrative target, but LLMs are "good enough" at many other knowledge disciplines too.
I think generally, extremist views tend to echo further than nuanced ones. This goes for any major topic really: whether it's politics, religion, arts, etc.
The AI discussion on HN is exhilarated by the fact that it can have a tangible impact on people's lives on this forum. You add to this the possibility of a minority extracting an unfathomable amount of wealth from the hype train and we lose all hope for a moderate discussion.
My own views on this are rather boring. After having tried various models, I've reached the conclusion that it adds minor benefits to my workflows, but I don't have to lose sleep from Claude reaching singularity anytime soon..
I'm using Claude Code at this moment to do some work for me. It's doing a pretty great job, if I'm being honest. It's going faster than I would, overall, but it's not some kind of 10x magic. It does things faster and in some cases better on the first shot, but it misunderstands and needs guidance on plenty of things, tweaks, etc. Even if I don't necessarily tweak the actual code and just ask Claude to go clean up it's shit, that still takes time.
I think the folks who say 20-40% faster is typical are definitely in the right ballpark. And that's best case. There are plenty of times where my biggest blockers are not anything Claude will ever be able to fix.
Maybe the result of this whole experience will be grudging appreciation from management that software developers aren't just coders. Maybe. I'm an optimist, though. And my manager already knew that.
I find it somewhat encouraging to hear that the devoted AI shills have not managed to generate the artificial consensus / synthetic consent that they seem to have been intending to.
While I agree that it's "divided", I wouldn't say "simply". Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023. It is the only subject where, when I have shared that I built something with it, I have gotten derogatory comments claiming I am inexperienced, unintelligent, and that the thing I built (a hobby project) is unimpressive or embarrassing. This has never happened in the decade+ I have previously been on HN, happily sharing other things I built with other interesting technology -- and many of those things were much worse than what I built with AI!
I did see your thread earlier today and I admit was pleasantly surprised. Maybe HN is turning over a new leaf? I hope so. I honestly considered switching to X it was getting so bad :P
I would say that HN was at least as sharply negative during the cryptocurrency craze. I recall various submissions asking "Why is HN so anti-crypto?" as well.
The false equivalency in this explanation is off the scale.
It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift; it was that you didn't need to be an experienced developer to confirm that 99% of the "web 3.0" nonsense that what was being thrown around literally made no technical sense.
You might reject LLMs on principle, or find that they don't work for you. But I think we're well past any debate of whether they do anything at all, which is exactly where crypto was sitting at peak hype.
Was it universally obvious? Hindaight is 20/20 There were many block-chain startups funded, and even FAANG got caught up in the hype. FWIW, I was a crypto sceptic, but I had many arguments with believers online and in my social circles. Side note: a crypto enthusiast colleague bought a house off their crypto gains, it may be a grift, but a small number of crypto-believwrs got really wealthy, and you're not going to convince them.
Crypto is the best way to pay for illegal things online, which is a really big business.
In fact as the act of paying itself has become more restricted, it's often also a good way to make illegal payments for completely legal goods and services.
Crypto also obviously does something at all. If anyone was saying it didn't, they were just as delusional as people saying that AI does nothing at all.
Crypto has no technological merit compared to earlier solutions, except "permissonlessness", which enables the circumvention of rules and regulations (at huge expense). But, sure, enabling crime is "doing something".
It solves a CS problem called the Byzantine Generals problem. That problem was thought to have no solution before blockchains were created. The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.
Enabling crime is massive. You have to remember that "crime" includes things like "selling abortion pills", "selling LSD", "selling ivermectin" and of course "supporting Palestine Action"
I say "simply" because, as I mentioned, it's an invariant—possibly the most consistent phenomenon we've observed on HN [1]. I admit I didn't add anything to substantiate that! it would have been too much of a digression. (Not that that ever stopped me before...)
The interesting question is, if it's so consistent, how can it go unnoticed for so long (as you've reported) and/or get perceived as one-sided ("HN is so anti-A!") when in fact it is almost always two-sided ("HN users are divided on A")?
The answer is that what you notice depends on how you feel [2]. If you like A, or (more precisely) if you dislike anti-A, you are far more likely to notice anti-A posts. Not only that, but you will weight them more heavily, meaning they will make a stronger impression on you than the median post—even the median pro-A post.
These two variables, frequency and impact, combine to produce a strong picture of the site as anti-A—so strong that people often use universals like "always" and "never" when describing it. In reality, HN is a statistical cloud, but your pre-existing feelings determine which datapoints you happen to notice (i.e. frequency) and how strongly they affect you (i.e. impact). [3]
This is why people with opposing views feel the same about how biased HN is, but in opposite directions: A is certain that the site is anti-A, and B is equally certain that it's anti-B. It's simply (<-- that word again!) that their feelings cause them to notice different datapoints. Abstract out the directional bit (pro- or anti-A or B), and their perceptions become isomorphic.
Unfortunately for us, HN is more afflicted by this than other sites of comparable or larger size, because all the others organize the community into silos [4], meaning they're sharded by social group (e.g. Twitter's follow lists), or by content (e.g. Reddit's subreddits), and so on. HN is non-siloed, meaning everyone is in the same place: all the As, all the anti-As, all the Bs, all the anti-Bs - we're all roaming the same threads and bumping into each other. Where you are more likely to run into datapoints you find disagreeable, you are more likely to feel that the community is biased against your view, and - what's worse - more biased the more strongly you feel!
Once or twice a year, some reply I'm writing gets hijacked by my sadness about this and turns into a digressive lament. Why? because although I believe that in reality HN is somewhat (<-- not to exaggerate!) more thoughtful and tolerant than other communities of the same or greater size, the dynamic I've just described means it ends up being perceived as less so. [5]
I believe this is why one so often hears about how toxic, nasty, negative HN is—not that it isn't those things! but the relative level of them gets distorted. Humans simply can't take very much of what we dislike and disagree with before resorting to generalization and other internal barriers. This is essentially an immune response. It often takes only a handful of datapoints (3, or 2, or maybe even just 1) before the impression burns into the retina and becomes permanent [6].
This is most painful when the topic is close to one's heart—for example, when one's own work is being discussed. In cases like that, it doesn't take much before one feels wounded, and such impressions rarely go away.
In one case I saw, some people were agreeing about how terrible and mean Hacker News is, and to prove the point, one of them linked to a vile reply he had received. That reply, however, was from Twitter—not from HN at all! He hastened to add "HN is the same"—somewhat self-refutingly, since if it were true, an actual example would not have been hard to find. In reality, while such vile comments do show up on HN, the community quickly flags most of them, and moderators eventually flag most of the rest.
That is an example of the skew in perception I'm talking about, and even though I felt terrible about it, I don't mean to be critical, because I understand where it comes from. It comes from fundamentals [7]: specifically, how HN's design interacts with human hard-wiring. Because those are fundamentals, this is not going to change, nor can it be affected by argument.
Or rather, it could only change if we changed the foundation of HN's design—in this case, by sharding the site into silos—but (a) I'd be scared to tamper with DNA at that level, and (b) if the above is correct, then it's good for the world that this place exists. It just can't expect to be perceived as such [5]. Thus ends this season's lament.
IMO it's because AI outputs don't pass "is this corpses" test and trigger uncanny valley response. There's something in AI that instantly cause unsuspecting viewers to become alert and hostile.
At the same time, cut raw steaks don't alert people in the same way as corpses do, and that is a double standard, in a way, I guess.
It is just a few people. Any time people are unpleasant to others or post in an uninteresting way I add them to a personal list that filters out their comments. Rapidly the site becomes more usable. The negativity is from a few highly polarized individuals.
I know others also do this - though often they are kind enough to auto-fold.
> ... I add them to a personal list that filters out their comments.
I think this would be a very useful feature to add to HN itself. I nearly emailed dang a few weeks ago to suggest it myself rather than roll my own browser extension to do it, though maybe it's my own responsibility to roll my own software too.
The Gearspace forums (vBulletin based?) have an "Ignore User" feature that helps make that forum vastly more tolerable.
There's probably a lot to say about it's merits or problems, but given the demographics (or my perception of them) is largely "software people" can you really be that surprised or angry given that this could snuff out a _lot_ of people's livelihoods like nothing we've probably seen in our lifetimes?
At least in my case, I don't think that's where the anger is coming from.
If LLMs were truly able to replace me, I'd be disappointed, sure - I've spent 30 years developing mastery of a craft, it's sad to see it go. But I'd resign myself and move on.
But that's not what makes me mad.
I get angry because I simply don't believe it is true. I have a reasonable math and tech background to where I grok how this stuff works at a fundamental level, and I'm utterly unconvinced that it is performing any sort of reasoning.
Call it a stochastic parrot, a token extrusion machine, whatever, but these things are not thinking or reasoning.
That doesn't mean they aren't useful- they clearly are very useful for many tasks.
My anger comes from the global attempt to replace things that require human reasoning with LLMs.
There's this push to use this stuff way past the point of "helpful accelerator" to "why do we need programmers/doctors/lawyers/etc..."
I think it's incredibly dangerous.
So while the tool is useful, I don't think we've figured out how to use it appropriately. For all the short term appearance of productivity boost it provides (whether this is real in a total-cost sense is still an active question), I think the risks to skill development and quality outweigh those benefits in many cases, and are being overlooked.
I think there's definitely groups on both sides, and I feel like it's similar to cryptocurrency a few years back. There's people really into it, and in response there's people really against it. On a smaller scale, see for example rust. In contrast there isn't as much vitriol against, say, world hunger because there isn't people very obviously pro-that to push against.
Same experience. But that's simply because you think you're experienced but the OP knows that you're just deluding yourself. Just kidding.
More seriously, I think this is a true reflection of a cultural phenomena. All discussions have become more polarized. There is a more of a generational divide in perception and discussion. I would also say there is a loss of nuance.
To complicate this even further there is a real diversity of experiences depending on many factors.
I mean we had flame wars on USENET but somehow it feels to me that most discourse even on controversial topics was civil. When we had tabs vs. spaces flamewars (or whatever the fun topic of the day was) everyone knew they were in a flame war (and often acknowledged that). Or maybe I'm just being nostalgic/biased.
I see the anti-AI sentiments in my work place. I think people are genuinely worried/concerned and don't know how this is going to change our world or even where we are exactly. This is also spilling into adjacent areas where people have strong emotional responses to (the rich, the economy, job market, politics, environment etc.).
And then AI leaders go around to commencement speeches to rub it in.
This is a good example of anti-AI bias.
This didn’t happen. Out of thousands of commencement speeches across the country, a handful of speakers, none of whom are “AI leaders”, mentioned AI in passing and students booed.
I'm specifically saying that AI leaders didn't go around making pro-AI commencement speeches. At all.
The absolute closest example is Schmidt, who was last CEO of Google more than a decade before ChatGPT launched, and is now CEO of an aerospace company. No other "AI leaders" gave commencement speeches where they were booed.
So you're blatantly lying and spreading misinformation to feed a negative narrative about the companies and executives in the AI space, then doubling down when called out. Reminds of Vance saying that he's willing to "create stories" in order to draw media attention to his cause-du-jour.
For the record, besides Schmidt being booed, there was Gloria Caulfield (property development), and Scott Borchetta (music production). Then Jeremy Scott (fashion) tore up his AI-written speech and got cheered for that, and Ronny Chieng (The Daily Show) got cheered for saying "fuck AI" several times.
Pretending he has any real insight into AI is also a bit goofy. Listen to him speak. Even his own stories about his time at Google don't show himself in a good light like he thinks they do. There are multiple, multi-billion dollar products that Google made where they had to trick and lie to him to get them released. And he still tells those stories as if he was right to try to kill those products. He's an executive and has no real expertise or insight into LLMs or AI.
Quite recently? It ended in 2021, again, before ChatGPT and this latest boom. I doubt anyone today would hear “AI leaders” and think about Eric Schmidt, no disrespect to the man intended.
Its divided because its the first time the previously more class unaware techbros have been critically challenged by the consequences of their actions - oh shit we might lose our jobs.
10 years ago "Disrupting X" was seen as a good thing. Now its come for them its a different story.
I suspect there is a lot of selection bias going on as well.
Forums like this, reddit, X, readers of news sites etc tend to be filled with people that don’t have much going on in their lives, have a lot of free time to comment, are less likely to exploit the benefits of AI, and more likely to have simpler skills sets that are replaceable with AI.
Talking to people in real world, I would say the overwhelming majority are excited by AI and interesting in using it more rather than less.
Did You build it? Or did you manage the build of it?
Could you have done it without AI? If not, you didn't do it.
A drill is just a tool. You can screw a screw without one. AI is just a tool, you can do things without it, too.
But AI applied in a manner you could not otherwise complete on your own is not a tool. It's a slave. None of the ideas or creations presented in that instance are your own. You just cheated someone out of a paycheck they may have otherwise earned.
Your comment is a perfect example of the low-quality reflexivity negativity AI I am talking about. Yes, of course I built it! Why do I have to defend myself? What does it even mean that I "cheated someone out of a paycheck" -- it's my own hobby project!
Yep. It has a lot to do with which comment threads you click on. I often read one and think "wow, I can't believe the people here are so negative" and then on another on the same front page at the same time and think "wow, I can't believe the hype here". It's just different people participating on different articles.
It’s not even a dichotomy, A vs B, especially when you consider “AI” is incredibly poorly defined. There are many new technologies available, and I have nuanced opinions about all of them.
I’m happy that my friend who works in plastics manufacturing can move his monstrosity of an Excel spreadsheet to something more predictable and maintainable. I’m deeply annoyed by my coworker who’s trying to put a chatbot in our UI.
The true state of things is that the anti-AI folks are FAR more vocal about their opposition, meanwhile, the people who like AI are busy being productive and accomplishing a truly staggering amount of work.
The 84% stack overflow "currently use AI" number from a _year_ ago almost certainly still holds true today. Just look at the absurdly long and very incomplete list of "tainted by AI" projects that the list-making activists are maintaining over on Codeberg. Software is not "divided", it is simply being occupied by angry protesters.
Hacker news skews significantly older and whiter, and the blogs and such that circulate come primarily from the "established" English-speaking old-guard "white people" software days. Opposition to AI is highly concentrated among the white, first world, left-wing, established engineers.
This group punches far their weight in terms of the volume of their activism compared to the actual percentages of humans on earth.
That's all it is. Anti-AI hatred is just a noisy echo-chamber of those who are privileged enough to not need to modernize their skills.
I'd push back a bit on the assumptions here, partly because (as I just spent a rabbit hole's worth of time describing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800), such perceptions are strongly conditioned by one's pre-existing feelings, but more because (to my view at least) HN obviously is divided on AI. That is, HN gets plenty of comments criticizing AI for various reasons, and plenty of comments expressing positive views too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 has almost 1000 comments now, and by far most are positive.
You make a good point about the asymmetry in content: the negative ones are mostly just critical, and often denunciatory, while the positive ones are less likely to be generic, and more likely to be about specific work people are doing. That's not a new dynamic, though, and long pre-dates what today is called AI.
Thanks for pointing it out. I guess HN is at worst ( or best ) 70% Anti AI. I personally put it roughly 50/50. There are plenty of post and comments suggest how AI is good for something and but also pointing out its flaws, rather than simply just Anti AI.
I can tell what HN is Anti though, in 80/ 90%+ if not higher. Ads, Oracle, Facebook, MPEG Codec, MySQL,
Well, it looks this post has already been flagged down onto page 7.
And IIRC, the same thing happened to the "oh shit" moment thread you linked to. Did the mods have to intervene to get it back on the front page?
HN might not be anti-AI, but I feel like the way flags are weighted by the ranking allows some users that are extremely anti-AI to create the impression that it is.
I think society is divided on AI because we've let the billionaire tech bro class rawdog power resources and AI deployments and I welcome the pushback on those 2 axes. The water nonsense OTOH saps my will to live.
But also, the algorithms push enragement equals engagement and that favors pushing content to the product (us) that enrages the product to drive up their engagement numbers so they click on more ads.
Meanwhile, the medical applications of AI alone are astounding. But that doesn't get people mad so it doesn't get promoted as near as much as the latest clueless word salad from a rich dude. Election season is going be to very interesting this year IMO.
The power and water requirements of AI DCs narrative is entirely nonsense. It doesn't hold up to even a cursory analysis on the back of an envelope.
And medical advances of AI are from other ML algorithms, not LLMs. They use similar technology and can run in the same DCs, but they aren't the same and people don't really have the same opinions on them both.
When people complain about"AI" they almost always mean general purpose LLMs and media generators. Nobody is complaining about OCR, MNIST trials, or machine translation.
Not in my experience. The rabbit hole is 9/11 truther deep here. And anything that isn't a mindset about either letting the billionaires billionaire the crap out of us or the American Butlerian Jihad gets shot down by both sides.
What's my position? GenAI will be subsumed into media toolchains. And reasoning is clearly no longer a hallmark of sentience or consciousness. That's going to take some time to sink in. Token costs are only going to drop further from here: https://www.navyaai.com/reports/ai-cost-report-token-prices-.... And there's opportunity to build businesses to bring down the rest of the costs in the article I cited.
Also, I'm with Martina Scorsese and Dua Lipa on GenAI. And having worked in and around Hollywood in the past, it blows my mind that such a corrupt oligarchy would be considered worth protection. Above the lines thrive while below the lines would be borderline homeless without the guilds. And the ones outside the guilds are.
Finally, build datacenters in the Dakotas, the Texas panhandle, and any other place far away from people where power can be generated onsite by whatever means suit the location best that's not coal.
Also, "AI good" and "AI bad" are very silly camps to describe a topic.
You might have seen some comments by me receiving votes lately that some might classify as anti-AI. I'm not for banning it, I use it at work and at home, I learn about it.
Here a few positions I hold, for example:
- There is a fundamental deviation between what we should be seeing if we were surrounded by 100x enabled engineers and reality. We're not seeing previously untackable, complete open source projects pop up everywhere like someone coding an open-source, iphone-compatible OS in a year, or companies providing 10x more. Just POCs and small apps. LLMs have been around enough that this is pointing towards inflated claims of success, even if they are actually useful, which I'm not denying.
- LLMs provide users with a strong psychological reward (making mental workload disappear). They do so only sometimes, in a chance-based outcome. Anyone with a passing interest in psychology should realize how similar that is to the mechanics of gambling, and thus how risky it is that a user misjudges when it is reasonable to use them. Mind that I'm not saying that the tool isn't worth it, just pointing at a source of major deviation between perceived and actual outcomes that few people consider.
- There are a lot of signals that humans rely on that are broken by LLMs. "Well formatted text -> text written with careful consideration" no longer works. "Large document -> significant effort" does not hold. "Good grammar -> educated speaker" is broken as well. "decent code practices -> the PR is safeish to approve" no longer true. Some of these barriers being broken can be enablers for people, but on the whole this is going to disrupt society in fundamental and unpredictable ways.
- I think the industry is drawing unreasonable and dangerous conclusions from the advent of AI. As some commenters pointed out, if code generation is now cheap we should be seeing engineers freed to deal with non coding tasks like automated QA, user research, architecture or design, and being more able to handle bug resolution for example. We are instead seeing a push for _creating code faster_, and proposing ignoring tasks like review and quality control in pursue of speed, which is fundamentally inconsistent with speed being less of a problem. To use a flawed analogy, if your car is now 10x as fast you should be putting way more attention to how you steer, rather than asking everyone to go pedal to the metal.
- LLMs products have the potential to be extremely user hostile if enshittified. We could have probabilistic insertion of promoted material. We could have subtle political steering of people. We could have a model's performance reduced without much SLA recourse. We are not tackling those issues before they appear when it is obvious that they will appeare, and society will pay the price.
If you read with attention you'll see that no point of mine is arguing against AI usage. I don't want to bury my head in the sand and pretend LLM's don't exist or are useless. I don't want to ban them. I'm just not willing to fully allign with marketing speech and turn my brain off.
Yes, the binary comments are more predictable and therefore less interesting. Mixey ones, like what you've posted here, are much better. (That probably applies to any divisive topic, of course.)
Your comment reminds me of another important variable: time. We're still at the beginning of figuring out what these tools even are, let alone how best to use them.
Some of it is TESCREAL ideology. Tech circles have been inundated with quasi-religious belief surrounding AI for most of the 21st century, which then biases tech enthusiasts towards extremist positions on LLMs.
Saying that society is divided on AI therefore HN, being society, should also be divided is an absurd take.
I expect the people in here to be domain experts, understand simple concepts like closed loop water cooling, deterministic vs non-deterministic systems, maybe some basic concept of how a GPU and vector math works and most notably the exponential pace that it’s becoming both more capable and more efficient.
Unfortunately, like OP that’s not the case and it’s the same talking points I could read in my local paper. Then everyone’s talking points change in unison like they are waiting on the latest instructions from headquarters.
You are getting negative feedback, maybe because of tone; but I am up-voting for the message which is in line with HN guidelines and expectations:
1. Comments should be thoughtful even if not coming from a place of expertise
2. Better comments have something useful to share behind the passion
3. "Me too" comments are usually not as interesting to read and rarely add to the discussion
I have personally been both praised and attacked for making detailed, reasoned comments. It's more about the mood and attitude of the reader(s) that determines which way it goes.
AI is a complicated issue because it is creating change very quickly--as many predicted it would 20-30 years ago--and that change is still accelerating.
In your words, the change is exponential--and this may indeed be demonstrated by the performance data over the past several years. It's hard to contemplate or predict when that change will plateau, but we definitely aren't there yet.
The ultimate impact on the world society is likely to be profound. Whether you like it or hate it, it is happening. Those who lose a job to AI may find that their mother is saved by a medicine or doctor aided by AI. It's complicated.
Perhaps there are ways to legislate compromises into its use or expansion in some parts of the world--but it is likely a technology that has at least as much positive potential for humanity as it does negative--so legislation is going to have to address the good and the bad and no country is an island unto itself.
I find that the more you know about a subject the worst impression you will have of AI. What it knows is kinda shallow and basic, and if you have a more difficult question the answers are confidently random.
That's something we've probably all noticed - Gell-Mann amnesia à la LLM.
But the opposite is also true: shallow basic knowledge about almost anything, instantly available in a form that directly applies to one's problem, is an incredible resource. Not only can you get pretty far on that alone, it also gets you moving in a way that inertia would otherwise have prevented. That's my experience at least.
Except on one side, it's apparently perfectly acceptable for folks to fulminate, make llm generation accusations, and brigade with minimal to no moderation attempts.
I'd need to see links to specific examples to say anything concrete, but from long experience I can say two general things with high confidence...
Edit: scratch that - I was going to link you to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018271 but it turns out you were the user I was replying to there! I don't suppose repeating it would help.
Because I enjoy writing code. I enjoy being paid for writing code. And I don't enjoy writing prompts for AI.
Code is not just a means to an end. Code is a means to my happiness. Users might not care, but I do care. I love good code. I feel great when I can write good code.
I won't say that I don't care about users. I do. But I care about me, first and foremost. And AI threatens to remove my lifestyle and workstyle. That's why I'm bullish against it. And at the same time I use it, because I feel forced to use it. This is rat race.
At the same time I can say that I don't care about delivering product 10x faster. Actually I'd prefer to deliver product 0.1x faster.
Yes, I understand that contradicts to the business side of view. Well, I don't care. I'm not getting paid percentage of product sales. I'm getting paid flat salary and I care about keeping it and live good life in the process.
I'm being completely honest about it. Maybe it'll help someone to understand that point of view.
Thanks for the honesty. I think this is a very useful point of view precisely because it is explicit about being based on personal motivations, and that is completely fair.
That said, as a minor wording point, I'm not sure "I'm bullish against it" is the right framing here. "Bullish" usually implies a positive expectation based on some thesis or evidence. In this case, something like "I'm resistant to it" seems more accurate.
I agree this is a change that affects every software engineer's lifestyle and workstyle. But I think it is important to separate personal motivations from critical, objective analysis when discussing new technologies (e.g. whether for or against AI) so the discussion remains valuable instead of becoming emotionally polarized.
I am sympathetic to this point of view. But also: I love reading books. But I'm aware that nobody will pay me to read books.
In much the same way, like you, I love writing code. And there was a time when "writing code" was a close enough approximation to what people wanted to pay me for that I could get paid for doing this thing that I love.
Unfortunately, this is no longer true. This thing that I love is now no longer the thing that people pay me for. It never really was. People paid me for solving problems using software. It's just that the thing I liked to do, the act of writing code, was the only way to accomplish that.
But now it just isn't. Now I can create useful software more quickly and better without actually writing much code. And that does suck, I do experience it as a loss. But I also experience it as a great opportunity.
The very premise of your question is very questionable.
> Over the past six months, there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
At the same time, there hasn't been a single day without several AI hype posts. The notion that HN has turned into an outlet for anti-AI sentiments does not match my experience at all. In fact, many users are already tired of the constant influx of vibe coded "Show HN" posts, AI model discussions and prompting recipes.
Also, AI is not only about the ability to generate lots of code very quickly. The potential (and actual) negative effects in certain fields and in society as a whole are very real and it's reasonable that people want to discuss them.
I call these AI tools "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet". They belong to american companies which can cut off your access if american government doesn't like your country's government. They fed from the free internet that many of us grew up in, store it in humans unreadable form and sell you access to it. If some day claude starts to spit out compiled binaries instead of code nobody will notice, and we'll essentially get proprietary cloud-hosted compiler that most in the world depends on to build software. With built-in telemetry and backdoors and clause in license that allow full overtake of your business if provider wants it ofc. It's a great shift from the internet we all know and love towards the new subscription-based access to world's propriatary knowledge base. It's a perfect "mind control" tool as well - you don't need USAID, "free media" and stuff like that in other countries when all people there including politicians ask chatgpt everything from meaning of life to recipies of pancakes. Once you see these political and philosophical dimensions it's hard to unsee how claudecode running on my PC won't turn into a weapon some day. But in blissful ignorance it's fun to use, and companies love it for the promise of replacing people. Amen
The argument that LLMs are "feeding me back free and open internet" seems to skip the most useful aspect of the tool.
I could never, as an individual read, let alone synthesize and make decisions with, the amount of information on the internet. The LLM takes that free and open information and feeds me back novel information based on that free information. It gives me ideas, opinions, and hard data based on that information.
It's the most powerful information synthesizing tool in existence. I don't find the argument that "it's built on free information and sold to you" fair or plausible at all.
It's like saying you're free to make your own bottled water. Technically true, but in reality not.
You forgot the push forward towards more destruction of the planet we depend on to live, and the centralization of wealth in addition to the one of power.
To OP's point, I am curious why a tech forward crowd would consider AI-training/inference anywhere close to a significant contributor of greenhouse gasses? Datacenters are like a tiny blip on emissions plots [1]
I think AI is a convenient foil to get people whipped up and out to vote, but I know HN is not the forum for that. The technical data clearly says that closed-loop water coolers don't use that much water and energy use is a function of a counties energy infrastructure choices not the existence of demand.
But instead we're going straight to destruction of planet as the exact verbiage, which seems way out of whack.
But we have figured out how to create electricity without destroying the planet. It's true that we need to actually do that, and that we are to a large degree not doing so at the moment. But that's a problem we already needed to solve. It does make it more important to solve that problem, but it also improves the incentives to solving it (electricity is more valuable now).
Reduce will never happen unless population falls. Not in a big way.
It should be: reuse, recycle, renewable. First try to reuse and make things more reusable. Then try to recycle. Last, substitute renewable for non renewable sources for things like energy.
A late 2024 international report https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from... predicts that by 2035, datacenter electricity usage will increase from 2024's 1.5% to 2-4.4% of global usage. Currently about 1/3 of datacenter electricity usage is for AI (0.5% of that 1.5%), though that will presumably increase.
You think we’ve built that many data centers next to coal fired power plants that the emissions have gotten anywhere close to the emissions of all the iron smelters and the billions of people that commute in gas cars?
We could triple the data centers since 2023 and run them all on coal or natural gas and then maybe they’d even show up as a significant slice on these pie charts.
Our bubbles have blinded us to the scale of the real problem.
I'm curious what part of the charts would data centers fall under?
I'm assuming it would be under the Energy emissions category, but I didn't find anything particular around data centers or "technology" or "internet" or something like that.
Would it fall under "Electricity and heat"? Or just general "Buildings"? or "Commercial buildings"? Or am I way off base?
Yea, it would fall under Commercial Buildings, which is a cut of a cut of a cut under Energy use. Less than a quarter of all building energy use, residential building use being much larger (probably just due to absolute numbers).
Creating and updating those local models on a regular basis still requires the massive datacenters, doesn't it? You're assuming that those local models will continue to be provided for free or a reasonable price instead of eventually being monetized.
I'd say the "threat" of local models and user independence is currently (successfully) being fought by cutting off the supply and development of general computing devices and hardware.
The mentioned big few are buying up everything regardless of need and making hardware unaffordable and unavailable for normal people (or smaller businesses). And some of the few manufacturers are already being convinced to stop developing/producing consumer hardware altogether.
And whats left might be taken care of via the rise of attestation. Just start framing local, unapproved models as "security risks" at some point.
Forcing people to go through you by buying up the market supply of a commodity at 10x the production cost is a strategy that will inevitably collapse. More DRAM will get made if prices hold.
Only accessible via proprietary ISPs that require a subscription, actively monitor and censor (pirate sites). And managed by ICANN which is based in America (and though nonprofit, certainly influenced by money and government).
Meanwhile, local models package a large part of the past internet, can be stored in your computer and accessed by the most ignorant (but literate) laymen.
ICANN is incredibly corrupt now. They make money selling gTLDs which all have to play by American rules. Having American rules on .org .com etc is an acceptable accident of history - having them on every generic word outside of .us is not.
Open weight models remove most of the issues you list and require relatively affordable hardware like a MBP with 128gb of ram or even less.
Deepseek v4 flash is by any means comparable to SOTA from 6 months ago. It's more than good enough for AI-assisted coding and there are no reasons to believe that one year from now or so, they won't be even better and faster.
open weight models are released by the same companies who's revenue would be threatened by open weights - they won't continue to undercut themselves by releases free models once that happens.
Respectfully, this looks like coping with the fact that a fundamentally new technology is discovered but people can’t cope with the immensity of it so they end up throwing in shallow and spread out criticisms spanning sovereignty, USA bad, replacing people bad etc.
It’s my personal opinion and it looks extremely incurious analysis of what’s going on. Even if a person doesn’t like AI, I would expect a curious person to have more deep opinions. “Non deterministic database” clearly tells me this.
There’s not a single coherent critique but just throwing some polemic to see what sticks.
"Respectfully, <insert highly patronizing, incurious, belittling take about everyone who disagrees with me, which is completely divorced from any of the actual argumentation on the anti-AI side>"
Pure tech dimensions of AI are out of scope. The internet is full of tech critiques and praises, what's the point of yet another opinion on it. Can't open linkedin without seeing only AI-generated posts about AI replacing people next to AI dumb. But the political dimension seems completly abscent from the public discussion
the grandparent commentor described potential future paths of unfettered ai usage. it's not clear why arises the expectation that a discussion of future possibilities must adhere to a contemporary argumentative format (mainly because concrete evidence of future events does not exist). it's your right to interpret this discussion as 'USA bad', personally I think it's very likely that the USA will continue to exercise power until it cannot. do you have any arguments that support ai being unleashed en masse? at the moment it seems to me that students are mentally atrophying as a result of outsourcing thinking to robots, therefore from my perspective it's crystal clear that the current path of 'let it rip' is suboptimal
The USA is terrifying from a non-US perspective now, and it's never been great. We're furious at the states and sick of being dependent on its enshittified technology.
Anti-AI sentiment absolutely and correctly has a "USA bad" steak.
The internet is for everyone. I am proud for us for building something so awesome that we get to train an entire replica of human reasoning on top of it. It's sad that most of the "new" internet will be made by these machines, but that's cool nonetheless.
Yes it's billion dollar companies building it, but every technical revolution needs large funding before it becomes accessible. Even the internet itself was way too expensive back in the days. Now we access it from fridges and toasters. Electric cars had to start as luxury purchase, so did phones or even CD players.
Now that we know what quantization is most optimal so that we built optimized accelerstors, how to architecture/harness LLMs for our purpose, now we can start to reclaim it.
Especially now when LLM APIs are starting to get expensive.
Being honest about the limitations of AI is not being anti-AI. What a strange opinion.
To address your claim, that shipping speed is more important than code quality, that could be true so long as the code is correct. The problem is that AI can do a prototype reasonably well, but still starts falling down when the system becomes complex enough. When that happens, code quality absolutely matters as a human will need to go through it.
Perhaps in the future AI will have fewer limitations, but today, if you are building a product you want to have a long lifespan, code quality still matters, and so you need to use AI appropriately. The code quality debate isn't even unique to AI, people have debated this for decades with regard to human coders and how value senior vs junior developers are.
I actually hold both extremes inside of me simultaneously. The speed at which you can ship when you have a strong vision of the end product and the architecture is extraordinary (the part of me that loves AI-assistance).
The journey itself, at least for me, has been absolutely grueling though; I'd say ~30% of the time it's just straight up soul-sucking. Some of that could be because of my own incessant need for discipline and clean code. I don't know how people let agents run wild in hours-long workflows, I can't even get Opus to stop running my test suite repeatedly to look for failures even though cargo test fails fast (the model already knows this), CLAUDE.md has the exact steps and commands for running the test suite, every invoked skill explains the same, and the hook rejects repeated attempts with the same explanation. It STILL, 90% of the time, uses whatever command it wants, bypasses the hook's cooldown to try a different grep because its own invented command didn't return any failures, and if it doesn't bypass the command it tries to wait it out so it can try again. Such a simple thing that it can't get right no matter what I've tried.
Anyways.. Love the leverage, hate fighting with the model on the way from A to B. Everything it does should be challenged.
People that "hate" AI are either expecting it to do too much and are disappointed or aren't watching it closely enough and have to suffer through refactors after they thought they'd been making progress. People that are only over the moon may be working in less complex systems and haven't felt the pain of all the failure modes yet, or just aren't yet aware of the bugs hiding in what AI produced.
Anyone who has built something significantly complex enough probably shares the same love/hate relationship.
Same boat, although the soul sucking, I find, comes from the fact that AI can iterate on ideas so much faster than I could even begin to pull out a pen and paper that I find myself in an existential crisis when I use it too often.
What is the point of my work, especially when I must ship for a paycheck, if I offload all my thinking and understanding to a machine. I can certainly dig deep and understand all the code the AI wrote, but when you didn’t create it, it feels so much less fulfilling. How does one find fulfillment in the AI engineering age? Isn’t solving problems and coming up with novel solutions part of why most of us got into it in the first place? When you strip that away, what is left? It’s code casino - I pull the lever, it spits out something that either feels like a dopamine hit (it works), or it spits out garbage and I prompt and pull the lever again hoping to strike the jackpot.
I find the most insufferable engineers those who use AI and think they are geniuses because they have access to this tool. Or say “AI told me …” They mistake the tools output for their own creative output or ingenuity.
IMO we have been conditioned to believe that everything is "all or nothing" which is a mistake. AI-assistance provides undeniable leverage IF, and only if, you know what you want. I think the market, in general, is still finding where things level out here. The problem, which I have been guilty of myself at times, is offloading key decisions. Humans absolutely have to retain those. AI can be used to present options, but the accountability always rests with the human (at least for now).
The code casino is real and I don't have an answer to it, only share the sentiment. It is frustrating and exhausting to go through those boom/bust cycles.
The workflow that works for me is: I do the thinking, the writing, then let the AI review it. I am still doing all of the creative work and thinking. The AI keeps me honest and its code reviews are very helpful. The loop becomes competitive and makes me pay more attention to detail; I try to nail things on the first attempt. This gives me a sense of accomplishment and improvement.
Whether this workflow has its days counted, I don't know. But I also don't care. If/when software development as we know it truly stops being a thing, then I'll sadly just have to move on and work in another field. I am not doing vibe coding or programming in natural language. Fuck that.
But I have also noticed that, as much as the AI can process things faster than I can (I also use it to help me navigate the existing code base, and that is also very helpful), it cannot answer the question of whether we should do something, or whether X is more desirable than Y, etc. Maybe for some people, thinking about those things and letting the AI do the rest is enough. For me, personally, I like to navigate all levels of the development.
"AI told me" -- yes, absolutely insufferable dudes. I just don't even bother stating a reply.
In the end it's an emotional response. I am "anti-AI" because it has caused a net negative experience for me, so I feel bad towards it. Confirmation bias makes it easier for me up-vote or voice concerns for "anti-AI" posts and stay silent for "pro-AI" posts.
When I first started working with claude at work, I had a mixed bag of emotions. On one hand, it was awesome, surreal experience that lets me go 10x overnight. Then the negative experiences started hitting me.
My team who has fully embraced AI now generate slop. They're 2-5x more "productive" and churn out code for me to "review". I point out things that don't make any sense, and their AI agent enthusiastically agrees with me, "You're right to push back, great suggestion! You're right that this didn't make any sense". I feel dismissed and it has contributed to my dissatisfaction at work significantly.
A lot of my work is seeping through the AI slob because I can't get away from it. AI PR descriptions like a novel and it's so _verbose_. It's tiring. It allows juniors who are being so extra with the new tool and give bad ideas with bad implementation. Shooting that down nicely doesn't work and because other people in the team who have embraced AI accepts it.
I enjoyed writing code and reading code. I used to take pride in writing a clean, maintainable code and writing a good documentation. AI has made bad developers think they're right, and very confident. It's tiring to talk to. So I don't like AI, because that's the source of all this frustration.
Yes, I am definitely more productive with AI. But the net result for me is decidedly negative.
I'm being completely honest about it. Hopefully this helps someone understand why some engineers dislike AI.
> Over the past six months, there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
because it's true
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.
How can you guarantee that it works though? You can verify, but it would be at the same speed as before the AI, or even slower.
> By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
By then you have a blackbox of a codebase which is unmaintainable, or in a worst case scenario you end up losing your data or get hacked or both.
What this looks like it practice: enterprise SaaS vendor introduces bug, I report the bug, get a canned AI response because literally nobody cares, and it never gets fixed. The product continues to deteriorate.
I mean, it's just as true that most teams “write bad code,” “introduce bugs,” “create technical debt,” or something along those lines. There is this amazing thing that happens where when we talk about AI code, it's always compared against some idealized infinitely capable professional following every best practice, purposefully and carefully crafting every line.
Which is fantasy. Most of you are creating absolute slop. That's just truth. Clutch your pearls and say it ain't true, but there's this weird reality that when people inherit other people's code, it's declared 100% slop, almost all of the time. It's the reason we are constantly tossing projects in the bin and starting anew.
AI is absolutely imperfect, just like teams of human developers.
>By then you have a blackbox of a codebase which is unmaintainable
Have you ever used Claude Code to work on a project? In what reality is the code unmaintainable? How is it a "blackbox"? Are you getting it to write LLVM IR or something?
In my experience, and with careful guidance and oversight, it makes spectacularly maintainable code. Better code than any human developer I have ever worked with. It helps to occasionally do cycles of refactoring as you've built out the foundation and the core becomes more evident and clear.
>or in a worst case scenario you end up losing your data or get hacked or both
This one is amazing. The industry is awash with garbage, insecure, exploited code. We were making that garbage code by the data centre full long before LLMs joined the scene.
that's just objectively not true. code is not just the thing that "builds" the final program, it's also the blueprint of that program.
it's both the most detailed _description_ of what the program does and also the instructions on how to build that program. and it's deterministic, which means that the same compiler will *always* generate the same program based on that code (search for bootstrapping, and you'll understand better why that is). you can think that a very detailed prompt is like a "code" in the sense that you'll always be able to build the same thing, but that's simply not the case because LLMs are not deterministic.
the other thing I like to comment is that you mention _"product"_ a few times, but you never mentioned a _"program"_, which is what it becomes after it's built (or executed, for that matter). I think those are in different levels of abstractions. if you're looking for a way to come up with a product faster than your competitors, good for you. code is waaaay more than that.
- One crowd is using to research algorithms, libraries, write boilerplate code, write test harnesses, introspect and integrate with APIs, do hands-off refactoring, and automating what would otherwise be boring tasks. They still think about architecture, best practices, understanding things in detail and the general shape of the solution is in their hands.
- Another crowd is curating prompts, setting up autonomous agents, creating tooling and guardrails around it, anything else but getting actually involved in how the sausage is made. They are working on meta tasks around the problem, in the hope the solution will write itself.
These two crowds are currently living in very different worlds, and getting very different results. We'll see what survives soon.
Are we including just technical people in these crowds?
Because there's a third crowd: everyone else/the general public that are standing up vibe coded websites and don't give a hoot how things work in the background or know as long as money is coming in. There are people that are using AI and thinking less and less causing their brains over the long term to become more inelastic.
We're in for a very, very painful future that will have mixed results. On one hand, you can boostrap things a lot quicker with less mental effort and it helps get up to speed without having to know some complex things (e.g. deep knowledge in coding). This can help us innovate on basic things faster, probably.
On the other ... people aren't going to learn. If something breaks in that state where they don't know how something works, what, we're just going to ask another AI to fix it? I don't know how I feel or think about that. On a long enough timeline, there are people that won't know how any of this was designed in the first place.
That's the world we actually live in. And that's what will survive despite crowd 1 and 2 that you mentioned above.
You probably saw this, but future readers won't: just last week, anyone could steal any Instagram account by telling the AI support chatbox they'd lost access to their email address.
I’m working with an ideas guy, no skills and no capital but for the first time can deliver code
He wants my tech expertise, his code is spaghetti, he is making all the mistakes, he is experiencing AI psychosis, his AI makes md files warning him that its all going to burn him which he forwards to me lackadaisically without reading
But can he sale? Yes
Its tempting for me to proselytize that he isnt using feature branches or project tickets or even deploying with committed code
But I bite my tongue and tell him to focus on the MVP since he wants to prompt Claude Code for 48 hour sessions without there being any indication of how other devs could contribute
Because he has clients that wants what he described, and because he has no capital I get a huge cut of that
I’m fine with that, I’ll clean up the project very quickly
It could be okay if it wasn't for the fact that they have a high esteem of themselves and don't learn shit.
The first POC they vibecoded and managed to sell was a pile of trash that we couldn't realistically deploy as it.
So we spent two weeks to make it something decent enough to have the minimum confidence of the thing being reliable and safe enough to reach staging.
Two weeks during they told us daily how we were slowing everything down.
After that we spent an hour explaining them how making something works on their computer, without tests, without thinking about edge cases... was not the same thing as deploying it and releasing it to actual users.
We agreed on, next time, asking us for an estimate on how much it would take to move the POC to something that could be released, before signing on any engagement with a customer.
Well, last week they came with a new deal they just signed on a completely new POC. Customer was expecting it for yesterday.
To make it work, we have to setup a VPN between our infra and customer infra.
Their internal process make it impossible to have this under a month.
Now, my guy and the customer, are mad at me because I can't deliver.
And the first POC? Customer wants new features. My guy don't want to deal with it because it's not their job.
For good reasons, they don't have access to our infra.
I wasn't involved, but I heard last year they tried to vibedeploy, provisioning an AWS account in their own name with their own credit card.
I let you imagine what happened and why they haven't retried this since.
I know LLMs are getting the majority of the attention of late, but there are others of us training and using AI to…
…reads MRIs and video to detect cancer
…analyze genomics for early target discovery
…assisting surgeons
…folding proteins
And the list goes on in other fields as well. Just hoping the recent AI counterculture doesn’t stigmatize other uses of AI.
Am I a fan of Claude code? Not particularly, but I have used it on occasion. And I’ll never understand someone using an LLM to write anything (especially a comment on a site like HN) intended for consumption by other people. Not because I think it’s subpar, but because the point - IMO - is to make human connections, learn, teach, and debate. That’s hard (impossible?) to do if you’re just typing a 30 second prompt and then copy/pasting the output.
This problem only exists because of the marketing move to call anything even slightly ML related "AI".
I see it as a double edged sword. People that want the category of AI to succeed can claim a victory when someone uses it to approximate protien folding and invent new drugs. But that also means the entire field is constantly being dragged down by low quality vibe coded sites, slop videos on social media, whatever horrific thing Grok is doing this week, etc.
>This problem only exists because of the marketing move to call anything even slightly ML related "AI".
We need to remember what "Artificial Intelligence" actually means. It refers to the field of research starting in the 1950's developing algorithms related to combinatorial search, planning, and reasoning. Machine Learning isn't AI in the sci-fi movie sense, but it's among the topics you'll find in a textbook like Russell and Norvig.
A problem like protein folding isn't tangentially related to AI, it's at the heart of the kinds of problems the field has been trying to tackle for decades. Yet when there are legitimate breakthroughs, people deride it as "not real AI."
For me personally I am vaguely indifferent to programmers using LLMs to make more shitty code. My worry is the second and third order effects
For work currently, as an SRE, I'm being asked to maintain and look after slop as if its properly built and instrumented. Our platform has clear rules and conventions, and AI isn't following those.
For the wider world, I fucking hate that image/video generation is evaporating what is "real". For memes sure its great, but for bad actors it gives a brilliant way to say "its AI wasn't me" and then the debate moves away from "did person do bad thing" to "is it wrong to say that things are AI?"
I also worry about the debasement of value of human work. Looking at history, say of the weavers, it didn't work out to well for them when the powered loom came along.
This is the opposite of a loom. With a loom you can very easily see that what it makes is exactly like cloth made by hand, except it's more uniform and faster. There also wasn't this weird drive to drive out the heretics so the AI messiah may dwell among us, this desire to put all eggs in one basket, instead of welcoming competition and a control group.
I would suggest that you are looking at the product, not the effect on the workers.
The powered loom produced more uniform, much cheaper fabric. It wasn't colourful or particularly flamboyant. It took a lot more work to get patterns (its where punch card come from)
But thats not the point. Powered looms meant that cottage industry that employed people close to sources of production (ie cotton/calico in india and wool in england) were thrown out on their arses. The majority lived on rented land/housing. Couldn't pay the rent and were kicked out into the loving arms of the poor laws. Lots of people had to re-train, the rest went begging. Combine that with agricultural reform, meant that Lots of people moved into slums in the towns, where they worked much longer, unsafer hours.
> I also worry about the debasement of value of human work. Looking at history, say of the weavers, it didn't work out to well for them when the powered loom came along.
They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option. And the world is better with the power loom. It's scary but we still have to embrace that eventually pretty much all valuable labour will be automated, and by then our society and economy needs to have been restructured for supporting humans providing 0 economic value.
> They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option.
Yes, but then whole swathes of the English countryside (and then the Indian countryside) was plunged into destitution for generations and it took rebellions, massacres and revolutions to get something like comfortable living.
Yeah there was no system in place then to ensure those who were left without means to survive would be able to survive. Shouldn't be the case with the knowledge of that history and all this time we have to actually change things. We quite literally know that it's a matter of only a few years now before the vast amount of knowledge work (at least) is fully automated away; governments should be making changes to make the economic transition more smooth. It'd be highly irresponsible to not do so, and I dread that most will be irresponsible.
>It'd be highly irresponsible to not do so, and I dread that most will be irresponsible.
This is why I can't stand people who talk about embracing AI. You suggest that society needs to adjust to AI, but then turn around and admit you doubt it'll happen.
>They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option.
Who is they? The majority of British textile workers experienced destitute conditions following industrialization.
That's one of my two gripes with AI:
1) It's posed to take over knowledge work, and yet our societies have no safety nets for the millions of knowledge workers.
2) It promotes superficial understanding. It sounds so convincing and compresses complex topics into a few messages, leaving users thinking they know more than they actually do.
A lot of people doing the latter camp are people with the knowledge of the former camp, and who are sufficiently happy with the speed and guard rails to no longer worry about "molding the solution in their hands"
I'm not speaking from personal experience, this is what friends are doing at their startups
But I am not surprised at all, because the building blocks of major applications are all out there as boilerplate code - heck half the time AWS has the example you need for you, assuming you know what you want to stitch together and why
If you know the major AWS tool chains and how and why to use them and how to design a product in microservices, then theoretically Claude has no idea what the whole shebang is up to but happily writes all the parts
For me it is hard to invest too much time into being in first crowd.
This space is moving too fast for me and I have current job to do that is paying my bills.
I can invest time to watch/follow people from the first crowd.
But no one is going to give you a medal and it is not a „better crowd”.
I might need to pay for this expertise some day, but I guess it will be OpenAI or Anthropic that takes my money just like so far all the advances were introduced to frontier models or their own tooling.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster.
Show the receipts. Where are the mobile apps, the photoshop replacements, the video and audio editors, the games and game engines that took a decade to make in the past that have shipped since Claude code came along?
> By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
Again where are the receipts?
My experience with coding agents is that they’re perfectly good at generating a v0.1 that just about passes the sniff test. It does the first 90%, but the second 90% always takes longer than the first 90%. That second 90% is what coding agents are terriblle at, and are what make actually good products.
Being 10x (or whatever multiplier) faster at programming doesn't mean you're going to be 10x faster in designing a product or any other aspect that goes into making a good product.
Even if you hired an actual programmer, it'd take a massive amount of time to build a Photoshop clone.
Of course, at the end Photoshop is lines of code and it could be output as is, end to end. One problem is that users aren't generally giving very precise design documents which would narrow the way to interpret them into code in precisely one way. Or that a design document at any level of precision, other than code, couldn't be interpreted in multiple ways when it comes to a specific implementation.
LLMs also take a relatively long time to output acceptable code, often taking tens of minutes before giving you a small diff. The larger the codebase, the longer it usually takes to start producing code, even over an hour.
> Of course, at the end Photoshop is lines of code and it could be output as is, end to end
And yet it’s not.
> LLMs also take a relatively long time to output acceptable code, often taking tens of minutes before giving you a small diff. The larger the codebase, the longer it usually takes to start producing code, even over an hour.
The problem is that they don’t generate acceptable code, they generate code that needs to be edited to be acceptable. That has always been the slow part of engineering. Waiting an hour for a bugfix even if it cost $75 in tokens would be cheaper than hiring an engineer but only if it worked. And it’s a bit like hiring a snake oil salesman - it passes the sniff test but it’s only when you’re drowning in the fact that your ai now takes 4 hours to fix the same bugs, and it introduces new bugs _and_ you don’t have anyone who can reduce that complexity that you see the reality. For a lot of us, that is immediately clear from first glance at the output of Claude and codex and the likes.
That was my point as well. That it hasn't been output, even though it could be done by a talented solo developer given enough time, and that current LLMs definitely aren't able to do so.
> The problem is that they don’t generate acceptable code, they generate code that needs to be edited to be acceptable.
You've never had an LLM output a one line bugfix that is correct to the point where you don't have to edit it?
To make things more concrete, here's an example from the creator of Redis on how he utilizes LLMs in programming: https://antirez.com/news/164
> You've never had an LLM output a one line bugfix that is correct to the point where you don't have to edit it?
I have. I’ve also had IDEs and static analysers do the same thing. I can also take my car out of gear and have it roll down a hill but that doesn’t mean it can run without fuel. Only a sith deals in absolutes, and in the general cases LLMs don’t generate acceptable code.
Try it out, like seriously, learn to use it well. Spent a few weeks with it. You will not say these things if you were an experienced user of these tools. Saying their code is "unacceptable" is a skill issue. Describe what you consider "acceptable code" and watch it produce it in copious amounts. They don't have one mode, one setting, they can generate whatever the F you want in whatever style you deem "acceptable". You're completely in control.
That said, I watched many of my - generally pretty clever - colleagues struggle mightily with this. I can't put my finger on it yet. Regular "programming" - typing BS syntax one character at a time - always felt astronomically boring to me so I'm one of the guys happy with these tools. Not happy with how it will fuck up society though, but that's uh.. yeah.
Photoshop alternatives already exist and are cheap or free, like Affinity.
Why create a Final Cut Pro alternative when it’s so cheap from Apple?
Many existing apps can be mostly cloned by a small team over 6 months or a year, but the challenge is finding customers willing to switch. You still need to add something new and useful, then reach customers somehow.
If you are a graphic designer you are not going to make your own Photoshop. Even if you could ROI is not there.
Graphics designers of course are bad example because everyone will just generate images directly from LLMs.
But restaurant owner for example could build his own website with menu - heck even with just slapping html without LLM making a decent website was easy but these people didn’t have time for that.
I work in insurtech, wet dream of all big companies dealing with insurance was customer self service so they were building those interactive forms - but no customer wants to do the filling, they don’t care they don’t have time they are busy running their own business and they want to call or meet with someone who knows what needs to be filled in those forms. Chat with AI is not fixing that because business owner will have to spend his time answering all these questions that were in the form but only now it will be chatbot.
It's definitely not at the make me a photoshop stage but I don't think that angle explains adequately explains the tone of the anti-AI hn discussions taking place at all.
If it was just a toy with no shot at making something real people would go "oh cool have fun with that" and move on with their life. Instead we see pretty emotionally charged posts.
What stage is it at then? Because every new model is met with people saying they haven’t opened an editor in a year, or how they’re 10x more productive. But I’m not seeing 10x more tickets closed, 10x more bugs fixed, or 10x more feature designs that we can smash through. I see verbosity and noise when used by the people who were behind, and I see the same level of quality and excellence from people who use it like it’s another tool in their toolbelt
>I see the same level of quality and excellence from people who use it like it’s another tool in their toolbelt
It's certainly currently an edge if you know what to tell the mystery box of magic in precise terms.
I don't think this distinction is going to endure though - every level of "it can't do it" has fallen and generally faster & more decisively than predicted. We started with it printing hello world, to autocomplete where you still needed to be able to know what the line should do, to autocompleting functions, to writing entire units, to working out architecture tradeoffs, to doing research planning architecture execution and testing all autonomously. That trajectory plus people retreating to nebulous "I'm adding taste" tells me this is going to sail straight past "tool in toolbelt" territory at Mach 10.
Everyone has their own perspective but to me "show me the receipt" at a specific point in time is a completely wrong lens for a tech that shows clear signs of exponential improvement (i.e. https://metr.org/ ).
I’ll agree it’s an edge. But edges aren’t worth the GDP of a middle sized European country.
> every level of "it can't do it" has fallen and generally faster & more decisively than predicted
I disagree. The agent + harness model was a huge leap and really moved the bar. The tools became genuinely useful for coding very quickly.
> Everyone has their own perspective but to me "show me the receipt" at a specific point in time is a completely wrong lens for a tech that shows clear signs of exponential improvement
At some point, the exponential improvements have to show results or it’s just a Ponzi scheme.
I get that results in your mind is a vibecoded full feature photoshop as the goal post, which is fair enough. That's no less arbitrary than say me defining the goal post as can it make me a useful script & thus has already delivered results with receipts.
That's why I'm saying this whole look at one point in time logic isn't useful here. Depending on where you set the cutoff you get diametrically opposed answers.
>Ponzi scheme
The IPO & bubble financial shenanigans are only loosely linked to the technological advancement. Tech genie is out of the bottle, people are intrigued and people with ability to tinker on this are spread globally. Even if the entirety of western tech & financial sphere disappeared tomorrow tech progress here would wobble and slow not stop.
Even the one global nexus where progress could have been killed globally - Taiwan - is looking like it'll de-risk shortly between CXMT and SMIC's rapid progress.
In my mind the base case assumption here has to be that the trend (that has been remarkably consistent) continues until proven otherwise. Stack enough improvements on top of each other and instead of a useful script you shall have your photoshop. Maybe...
> I get that results in your mind is a vibecoded full feature photoshop as the goal post, which is fair enough. That's no less arbitrary than say me defining the goal post as can it make me a useful script & thus has already delivered results with receipts.
I think vibe coded photoshop is what’s being talked about from Anthropic, OpenAI as the end goal - Dario is on record saying that AI will replace engineers and Sam Altman has said “ we will never ever write code by hand again. It doesn't make any sense to do so”. The cursor founder has said that he ships 10x what his other engineers ship. I want to know where people _genuinely_ think the cutoff is, because there’s a lot of talk about where it’s not, and that’s gmoving the goalposts.
> The IPO & bubble financial shenanigans are only loosely linked to the technological advancement.
Except they’re not. Someone is paying for this compute power, and energy.
> In my mind the base case assumption here has to be that the trend (that has been remarkably consistent)
Making wild promises, and insane promises about capability and then doing the same thing 3 months later when a new model releases? Isn’t it convenient that both OpenAI and Anthropic have models that are “too powerful” to release. How responsible of them.
At the same time; Anthropic, OpenAI and Copilot have all changed to usage based to billing recently for enterprises as they’ve been been undercharging by 10/100/1000x in many cases. Enterprises are limiting costs (uber limiting spend to $1500/mo this week).
If these tools were really game changing and integer productivity multipliers why aren’t major engineering organisations spending all their hiring grown on these tools and getting ahead of their competitors? Because they’re “not quite ready” just like they weren’t 6 months ago, and they still won’t be in 6 months.
>I want to know where people _genuinely_ think the cutoff is
I don't think there is/should be one at all. If you and I stand in front of a crazy fast growing plant the question on how tall it'll be tomorrow is initially interesting, but a couple measurements in when it's clear the answer is exponentially the relevant question stops being how high is it now / will be tomorrow and more holly shit how long can this keep going & where does this go.
>Except they’re not. Someone is paying for this compute power, and energy.
Certainly, and the questionable subsidizations may disappear but the tech won't. If APIs disappear tomorrow I'll be looking into building a LLM rig. And researchers at unis will continue to do research to advance the tech. And chinese labs will continue. Pace may be somewhat limited but IPOs blowing up stop this tech train
>The cursor founder has said that he ships 10x
CEOs say all kinds of crazy shit. I don't think their promises and marketing is a good reference point for how a technology is actually developing
>usage based to billing
I don't think it's relevant at all for general purpose technologies like this. It'll land where market forces dictate. Maybe some people go bankrupt. Do you know what the billing model on the first electricity grids were? I don't. And I don't care. If it's useful the market will figure out the economics.
>why aren’t major engineering organisations spending all their hiring grown on these tools
They are spending big. Just because they're not committing 100% of their budget right now doesn't mean it hasn't yielded results. It's an evolving situation not a mature technology.
I can't speak for others, but my main emotional issue with it is how it has addled the minds of my employers. If they would judge on output and I couldn't keep up objectively, ok fine I'll use AI. But they judge on usage even if output is worse! Anyone would be upset if forced to abandon their skills and work in a different way that produces worse results and is less enjoyable. It's just stupid.
That’s because it’s really hard to evaluate results but usage is comparable across people. It’s the equivalent of counting lines of code submitted or jira tickets closed.
If people just wanted to make their own stuff and have fun, that's fine. Knock yourself out.
However, it's launched this enormous tidal wave of mediocrity that emboldens the dumbest people to do the dumbest shit and make it my problem. I just had to yell at one of the IT guys for trying to hook up our Duo to Claude, and I'm still mad about it lol.
> Show the receipts. Where are the mobile apps, the photoshop replacements, the video and audio editors, the games and game engines that took a decade to make in the past that have shipped since Claude code came along?
Same document, Figure 12 page 41 shows a significant spike in iOS apps but also the users per app is way down (which you should expect, given this makes it possible for low-user-count apps to be sensible business propositions).
How many people care to spend a year making a replacement for something that took a decade? Photoshop, despite the complaints about price and subscription model, just isn't expensive enough to justify one engineer-year to replace. Unreal and Unity are free for a lot of people using them, and likewise are not worth the cost of replacing for those who do end up paying (because the teams using them know how to use them and don't want to be retrained).
For this reason, you should be looking at things which would have taken a year of human time but now take a month, or faster, so less Photoshop 27.7 (today) and more back when it was still called ImagePro (1988).
For games, I've seen games like the following take a month or more to get good enough to be interesting, and yet the following took me two prompts, the second of which was the single word "continue" (and only needed that because this was on the free tier and I used too many tokens); I didn't bother to look at the code, I don't care about the code, making the app itself was as easy as simply finding an app like this on the Apple App Store even though such an app was in one of the top-10 lists: https://github.com/BenWheatley/Piano-Trainer
Is this game "as good as" the one on the App Store? Who cares. Any random person who wants their own app can now get their own custom version doing the specific things they care about, which doesn't need to simultaneously support all the use cases of all the other people who would buy the app on the App Store.
From what I read on Hacker News comments, the same is happening with video editing, where it's not "Make an iMovie clone" (why would you, iMovie is free), but rather every time you need one specific thing, you ask your LLM of choice for a solution, and it gives you a shell script which calls ffmpeg with the right arguments.
The more close you are to the fire the more you understand how dangerous it is.
HN always have had a sizable anti-tech crowd (I don't want to say luddite because it's borderline pejorative). If you see the technology from close and you understand the human impacts of it then there is a reason some would rather stay clear from it. I know some FAANG engineers who doesn’t allow their kids to have smartphones or use social media even though they are themselves working at those companies. Why do you think that is? And you don’t even have to be a FAANG employee to see the social and human impacts of modern technology. AI is the same, in fact not even the same because it’s even worse and it will be only worse.
> HN always have had a sizable anti-tech crowd (I don't want to say luddite because it's borderline pejorative).
It's frequently said that technology is ethically neutral, and whether it's used for good or bad ends depends on how it is applied.
What you call the anti-tech crowd is simply the crowd that takes their ethical responsibilities seriously.
There are other potential points of view that could be adopted instead of tech neutrality. Some tech could be seen as inherently good, in which case there very little concern about how much of it is used. Some tech could be seen as inherently bad, meaning it should be avoided at all costs.
Anyone being honest about AI can see that although it has some positive uses, the potential for misuse is enormous. Therefore, if you're going to use it at all, you should think carefully about how to apply it. To people that have fully bought into the hype this caution appears like negativity instead of rationality.
I have recently begun to call myself a "technorealist". Technorealism is an old movement that I've found my existing views have been aligned with for some time.
Technology is meant to serve man, and a solution that involves technology is not always the best one. We must consider the social and political aspects of technology, and discuss how it should best be applied before jumping headlong into using it.
Solutions should be made to be sustainable in the long term, even when technology fails.
We've seen many applications of AI lately that aren't particularly sustainable, in several aspects.
I'd imagine nearly all here are positive about technology itself, what they're against is: hype, 'progress' at all costs regardless of collateral damage, consolidation, anti-consumer practices - tech as wielded for power. If you pay attention long enough, it's hard not to become wary.
A Fox News Poll indicated that 80% of voters believe protecting the public's interests and enacting regulations should be prioritized over unchecked technological innovation.
> I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
You will need a lot more to make yourself my enemy, but this is the divisor between us... not that you like to use Claude and I don't.
I think it depends a lot on where your interest in (self) development lies.
My main motivator has always been to understand how things work, and myself being able to create as elegant solutions as my technical role models (in the range from colleagues and mentors to the elders of our field), hopefully even pushing it further. Having the LLM just create the product robs me of that, or at least of the most rewarding parts of that. And that's why I don't like to use it.
Different people are driven by different things, I don't think either trumps the other in the objective sense, we're just wired differently.
That's well said and where I ended up as well. This whole thing did reveal that a lot of people really never enjoyed programming at all and only saw it as some irritating necessity. I don't really like that crowds presumption that everyone else disliked it too.
For me working through the programming part is the understanding and solving. Programming languages are pretty beautiful and encourage different ways of thinking. Hopefully we can understand it and contribute.
> My main motivator has always been to understand how things work
Which things, specifically? I got started programming in order to control scientific instruments and analyze the data I collected. I care about the systems I'm studying. I don't really care much about the software I'm programming. As OP said it's a means to an end.
I think you're right that people on HN are generally more curious but it doesn't have to be curiosity about every single element of software. We don't write assembly code anymore either, half of software is about making software easier and faster to write.
Low level systems programming mostly. Embedded systems, *nix userland programs, API and library design, sometimes including writing assembly although in very small fractions.
I am with you. Over the last 40 years I've spent a great many hours enjoying the process of creating software. I did a PhD in mechanical engineering, but the ductility of programming won me over. I started following PG when I read his two Lisp books many years ago, and some of his examples (implement OOP in one chapter!) blew my mind. And they enabled my first company.
These days, however, my time is spent managing agents. I have lost the joy of craftsmanship. I don't spend my day in emacs anymore.
But I am learning to enjoy it. Maybe because I have always had a utilitarian streak, and I actually care for the ends, so husbanding incredibly efficient means is thrilling. I am actually having fun.
This is important to understand. I have been coding since I was 11 when I got my first C64, and it is a genuine passion for me, but I also love working with LLM tooling.
One of the biggest things for me is that after decades of sitting in front of a computer I have chronic back and wrist pain that makes it impossible to do the long deep focus sessions that were normal when I was younger. Using AI tooling to handle all of the procedural tasks (running tests, debugging, managing git, etc) dramatically reduces the physical strain of programming, and allows for a much healthier workflow, with regular short breaks.
• - Larger Context: I believe this is the biggest negativity driver. But it is sublimated in practical discussions.
Humans are not divine. Not ordained. Entities passing us in intelligence are a species-level threat.
This exceeds any normal range of pro's and con's. Acknowledging it directly derails any practical discussion, so it gets sublimated. But it indirectly colors many views.
• - Hype Trampoline: Lots of people get sick of hype, and have a Newtonian equal-but-opposite reaction to hype, and the inevitable unrealistic or over-optimistic claims.
• - Adaptation Style: Adapting new tech to ourselves, and adapting ourselves to new tech, are different things. In this case, the fast self-adapters are getting value sooner than the fast tech-adapters.
Never has this Rorschach test been so clear.
• - Negative Lens Effect: There are a large percentage of engineers who are contrarian or cynical all the time. These are smart people, but they tend to approach judging new things by processing limitations first.
To me it looks like kneejerk negativity and an obsession with dotted i's and crossed t's.
But I have noticed it does not slow them down from using the tech and getting good results. Just a foreign mode of processing to me.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster.
That's not true, or true only for you or very specific/narrow scenarios that are trained inside the neural net. You can't rule out that's true for everyone. I spent months trying to speed up a novel idea I have only to be frustrated and eventually start it all over via hand coding, and the journey was actually worth it because I learned a lot! And no I wasn't using the Agent in the wrong way
First of all, I expect to be a loser in the socioeconomical effect the AI brings. This isn't really about the technology itself but about the political systems we have now. From the pure job perspective, I will either lose my job, or will keep it but it will be increasingly more stressful and less interesting. There are literally zero benefits for me as a worker.
The only hope is that the economic effect will be so huge, the trickle-down crumbs will be enough to live a decent life, but that is unlikely to happen in my country.
But, even if I had generational wealth behind me to be able to leverage the AI to my advantage, I still see a lot of cons in the way cheap content generation worsens the world around me: facilitating fraud, political shilling, disrupting online conversations (now everyone just sends bot summaries to each other).
In a way, I feel a similar change that from the "pre-facebook" Internet to the "pre-chatgpt" Internet that happened in the early 10s.
You don't need "generational wealth" to leverage AI. If anything the opposite is true; AI empowers people with less to do more. Hiring humans is expensive, tokens are much cheaper.
Also, programmers will be least negatively affected by AI. Humans will need to be in the loop in the forseable future, and programmers are a good candidate for those kinds of positions.
But more generally, I'll never understand this attitude about jobs. As if your job is this thing that you own that someone might take away from you. To me, my job is is something useful that I do in exchange for money. If I cease to be useful then it's fine if I lose my job. I'll find somewhere else to work, somewhere I can be useful. It might be paid worse of lower status but, to me, being useful is the whole point.
I use AI tools daily and find them genuinely useful.
However I am increasingly annoyed at how everything has to be framed as a conversation about AI, how every tech-adjacent company has to brand itself as AI-first, and most of all, how overblown predictions are about an LLM being conscious, etc.
In short – it’s a useful technology reshaping tons of industries, but the hype is grating.
I have spent the last 3 months away from family, I caught up with my brother & his wife and they also got back from an interesting vacation recently. I tried to get information about their vacation but at best got 2 sentences that it was enjoyable. But they spent more than 24 hours(sleep over to see the nieces) ear bashing me about AI.
I truly don’t care that people find this stuff exciting, just leave me out of it and tell it’s AI content upfront and we’ll get along swimmingly.
This has been my issue this whole time. Why isn't it just framed as a useful software tool that helps you automate tasks and write code? Use cases beyond this have exceedingly high social cost and negative externalities, and it's arguable that besides highly specialized local models with very specific training data, AI is not reliable enough nor deterministic enough to truly "replace" humans in the vast majority of roles outside of tech.
Obviously the answer is $$$ and the fact that this admin's economic policy has further encouraged the market to go all-in on AI as it's the only thing that's trending in the black for the economy right now. I don't think you'll find many people on HN who won't readily admit that even if they're anti-AI, LLMs are genuinely amazing pieces of software that can be transformative and useful in many different environments, and it's mindblowing how they work. The issue comes from the very harmful way it's currently being commercialized and marketed.
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.
Software never worked even decently before AI let alone right now that we have AI. I'm a user too like many of us we see every day software built by people who don't care. AI is not a force multiplier if it can let you be lazy you'll be lazy, not being lazy requires a lot of discipline. IMO Agents requires a lot more discipline than hand coding, that's why I use them both, I let AI stress test my code and viceversa, rarely I let my code(usually an interface) let AI write better code, or I ask AI a lot questions about the codebase. That's totally different than some
narratives pushed by people you can find here or on X I believe the criticism comes from pushing back doomers and astroturfers. AI is good but not as good as they claim to be, to me very far away from what's claimed and you still need to care about software
I'm not particularly anti-AI. I have some concerns about the intellectual property aspects of it, but my opposition is really the (a) functionally illiterate MBAs who think (?) that AI is a thinking machine that will take them right to the C-suite by allowing layoffs of 90% of the workforce and (b) evangelists who believe they're entitled to do whatever they want with other people's information to make their machine god.
I think some folks believe that anything other than slavish adoration is “anti,” and some folks think that only vehement contempt is “anti.”
I think it’s great. I’ve been using it to significantly improve my development velocity and scope.
But it is far, far from perfect. I can’t even envision the disaster that would occur, if I just let it do its thing, unmoderated. It can very well be an AFU force multiplier.
It is likely to achieve a state that approaches “perfect,” eventually. There’s still a lot of elbow grease to be decanted, though.
A lot of people on HN are anti-overhyping, which comes across as being opposed to the thing being overhyped. It was similar when cryptocurrency overhyping was popular.
That's what I feel. Whenever I see someone writing something to the effect of “LLMs will replace X” (where X could be literally anything including software developers) I get an intense urge to write something against it. Not something nice, mind you.
I also find takes from the anti-LLM to be exceedingly dumb at times. Oh this text has this and that, it must have been written by LLM and thus is not worth even considering.
I'm personally amazed by what "A.I." is actually capable of, but I have a fairly solid understanding of what's going on "under the hood" of it, and therefore have somewhat realistic expectations of it. Then I see folks go overhyping it's capabilities because they've drunk themselves stupid on the lies they've been told about what it is and what it's capable of (and it's simply not capable of what the liars at the top of the A.I. corporations are telling everyone). Just try to temper their enthusiasm with a bit of reality and you're instantly "anti-AI" or "doomer" or some other just completely wrong characterization. At this point I'm convinced that for a lotta folks, A.I. is just another literal cult just like politics these days, or crypto-coins not that long ago... Drink that kool-aid, I guess... ~shrug~
I also don't think that many of the so-called "anti-AI" folks are so much against AI itself, as they're against the unethical ways that certain folks "at the top" are using it to do massive harm in an attempt to try to satisfy their bottomless greed and lust for power, and against the ways that some other folks are using it to basically escape the need to think at all, even when their job requires actual thinking.
Sounds like me. It's awesome. Only the sheer amount of very clear fraud and the way an entire way of people who, not too long ago, where barely functional, have jumped on the bandwagon (same as with crypto) just sours me on it.
That and Jenson screwing those of us who made him over the last decade.
It'll be better once the fraudsters are in jail and once we're able have boxes with ~1TB ram running off of our solar in the garage.
Well... It's got that potential, that's for sure. It could pretty easily be pushed straight past that line into "awesome" if not for those absolute clowns "at the top" holding it all back decades behind where it should be, all to play their little game of "He who dies with the most money wins" at the eventual expense of all life on Earth (at the rate they're going). It's just so sad the petty misuse and waste of resources the ultra-richest of the rich are choosing to be. Actively working against the betterment of themselves and the world around them, for the most insane reasons, when they could be using all this amazing tech to build a genuinely better world for themselves and everyone else.
Honestly, I look at where technology's gone since my early days (300baud acoustic phone modems, 64kilobytes of RAM, 1Mhz 8bit CPU days) being utterly fascinated by how actual science was so quickly catching up with science fiction (Star Trek being one of my bigger influences in that area of interest), and I see so many truly amazing things that we've invented / built along the way; if we were a more cooperative society instead of "Law of the Jungle" hostile greed-driven society, we'd already pretty much have that Star Trek reality today (minus the faster than light travel bit, as that's apparently "impossible" according to current theory and math AFAIK).
We've already got a bunch of Star Trek level tech, and we could have most of it I suspect. 3D printing? Not terribly far off from ST: TNG "replicators". LLMs? Not too far off from the Star Trek computer interface. Smart Phone? Pretty much a Star Trek PADD (tablet computer). Tricorder? Well... Smart Phones are gettin' pretty close. A few more fancy sensors would pretty much do it. Holodeck? Well, that one's a bit more tricky, but who knows where VR would be today in a society that wasn't totally 100% beholden to the cult of money?
Oh absolutely! This made me wonder and there was an exact post with similar title but instead of AI it said Crypto
Ask HN: Why is Hacker News so anti-crypto? : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302494 (Do note that the post is flagged and there might be some good moderation reasons for that)
This is the reason that most of us at HN might dislike overhype. I have seen a lot of these crypto users move from crypto hype to AI hype.
Every few years, people forget the last shiny thing and move to the next and think why is X crowd not invested in Y? They must be anti-Y!
The hype was totally justified for AI now that coding has been completely transformed for the most part.
Trying to “correct the hype” just looks like clowning in hindsight.
It’s like people in 1990s were trying to correct the internets hype: oh you know it won’t change anything and the tech bros want to create hype out of nothing!
So it’s not neutral to be anti hype for AI. It is just wrong.
Those of us who were actually there in the late '90s also remember the insane overhype, grifting, and fraud that led to the dotcom bubble and then the painful dotcom bust afterwards that took the entire industry years to recover from. That pattern is playing itself out again.
Those who analogize today's AI frenzy to the internet adoption frenzy of the '90s in a positive light abjectly fail to understand what an incredibly bad look that is.
HN is not anti-AI. HN reflects a reasonable ratio of pro-AI and anti-AI sentiments (sometimes held by the same person! because AI covers a lot of ground).
I have many diverse friend groups. And HN is lot lot more anti AI then even the worst of the non technical groups I am in. e.g. [1] is so detached from reality and got to front page for multiple days recently. Or [2].
I have never seen a positive story(I am not talking about things like current model, just how positive AI could be like the Sam Altman post) in front page for a long time. Feel free to disprove me.
I would also suggest that if you believe your two links are "detached from reality", you may be struggling with your own bias. They're both perfectly reasonable takes that you are totally reasonable to disagree with. Try to come down from that feeling and realize that disagreeing does not necessitate that the person you are disagreeing with is insane.
>AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
Which is undeniably true. I am not "anti-AI", in fact, it helps me immensely in my current job, but in my experience, using these tools still requires quite a lot of involvement. Otherwise, updating existing or adding new functionality becomes increasingly difficult as the system grows. The funniest thing is that when you start to lose touch with the internals of the system you are building, you cannot even give the AI proper context to pinpoint the problem or guide it to make specific changes, which results it a lot of wasted tokens, wrong assumptions and mountains of sloppy code.
Exactly this. I've been using a lot of AI, both at work and on personal projects. It's a great help, but it needs a tight leash.
I see arguments saying "what does it matter, since you're not going to be touching that code anyway?"
Well, what you said about not being able to give it context is one aspect. Another one is that what the LLM is writing is still software. The more brittle and complex that software gets, the harder it is for the LLM to maintain it, since you get either spaghetti code or a house of cards where you can't move one bit of the system without breaking stuff on unrelated parts of it.
Oh, but the LLM can fix it, as long as you have some formal verification of the functionality! Sure, but it compounds.
All of this is absolutely fine for some projects, but for most enterprise and commercial software you need more rigour or you'll see yourself with a long, expensive and risky migration in the near future.
Calling it AI is where the problem lies. An LLM is not AI. It is a next token prediction function. That is a very powerful function but just one function out of millions in the overall stack. As an engineer you still have to have the right framework to call that function with the right inputs at the right places and validate the results. But if you focus on the technical details and not the marketing hype you can get amazing results in the areas where it works.
Personally, I don't know a place more hyped up about AI than HN. It turned from my daily dose of tech excitement into a daily dose of tech anxiety.
As for your argument, there's no such thing as elegance. Code "elegance" is mainly maintainability (and, to a smaller degree, some other aspects like security, performance, etc.). The importance of maintainability greatly varies between projects, industries and individual subjective viewpoints, resulting in the diversity of attitudes to AI-assisted coding. That, of course, assumes that AI cannot match humans in maintainability. Which seems to be the case to me right now. But it also seems that the gap is closing, not as much through AI writing "better" code, but mainly through it being increasingly capable of maintaining "bad" code.
It’s a boosting strategy to go where people are mostly positive about AI and complain that they’re too negative. As in “guys, are you true believers or not?”
That said, I agree with dang’s read. This site is big enough that both camps are decently represented (expect “mine”, of course), but anyone sees only what they want to see. The boosters see only doomers, and viceversa.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Go develop a non trivial videogame, a performant compiler, an embedded code in a microcontroller that don't allocate and so on instead of developing a web app. Why?? Why in hell bloated code doesnt matter on the web? The state of web just sucks because of that
I've seen it before and over time it always plays out similarly.
- the cloud was invented and we were told CTOs would be able to just point and click and make infrastructure and apps! What did we actually get? Another layer of abstraction to debug through. Does it have is perks? Yes. Does it have it's own problems? Yes. Is it more expensive than setting up bare metal and having a solid team? Well that depends on what you're doing and the economics of it and the team.
- then document storages came along like and got wildly popular like mongo and people were calling it the end of SQL! And no more complexity or relational nonsense. Everything is JSON and life is great. What actually happened? These companies realized over time their data was getting trashed, adding things and fixing bugs became complex in pure docstore systems. So the initial v1 was easy and looked beautiful but only 4 years in you have a production db with orphan data that's twice as big as it should be. New features take forever to see a clear path in adding it to the model because it's no longer as intuitive to get performance for a feature.
Anyway. I see AI taking both of these roads at the same time. In 5 years I believe the code will be a giant pile of unfixable mess for most vibe coded things. I also don't see it getting rid of programmers but just adding another layer of abstraction to the mix that yes is helpful, but only if you already know what you're doing, much like what came of the clouds.
What's wrong with the cloud? I get the point about a hype cycle but those two examples don't seem even remotely in the same universe of similarity. SQL is still around, but the cloud won pretty comprehensively no? If you're starting something new, there's still a debate around what's the best database to use and stuff, but I'm struggling to imagine a content where the idea of managing your own hardware would even make sense as something to consider outside of the context of an existing large company with pre-existing on prem infra? And at least in the web world, 90+% of the time you are just going to go and click some buttons in vercel and posthog and whatever and that's your infra. The generic saas webapps that make up a huge chunk of the new projects that would be making architecture decisions where you might theoretically consider on prem are pretty well covered by the point and click abstractions - most of them probably wouldn't exist with the friction and overhead of having to actually manage bare metal
Like US politics now, AI talk is just a team sport where there's no room for nuance. If you want to talk about such things then you need to anticipate this and work around it from the jump, making clear the expectations about the scope of the discussion and ground somewhere concrete. For politics it's gotta be economics, data, specific policy. For AI, it's gotta be research, benchmarks, very specific workflows or use-cases.
Even establishing the scope of the discussion is tedious, and most people have no patience for that, so the practical choices are basically having a dumb rah-rah type of discussion, or none at all. I'm breaking my own best advice by even writing this down but the only answer is: Read More, Talk Less. If you're in school and talking with other students or if you're talking to colleagues with known background in the context of known practical problems they would like to solve.. it's different. But the forums? Read-only is not even effective as far as "checking in" on the "collective culture" in engineering to get an accurate picture. Actually engaging is even more effort for even less profit. I regret having opened the thread, so back to burying my head in more research and hands-on projects :)
Unsurprising, agents' solution to everything is writing more code. They'll happily reinvent the universe (a really crappy one).
Bug? More code. Unexpected behavior - read the docs? Couldn't find anything. Let's try another 1000 lines of workarounds. Still doesn't work? Write another 1000 lines to monkey-patch behavior. It sort of works now.
The actual solution is removing those 2000 lines and passing the correct argument on line 25 which is clearly documented. Most humans would never do that because we're too lazy but it's so easy to generate slop at an exponential rate and blow up the LOC metrics.
I think that in my career I have absolutely seen multiple times people making absolutely horrible architectural approaches where passing a parameter would suffice. Inventing and building basically whole universe instead of doing a bit of research.
With LLM coding I already have seen agent pointing out easier solutions because agent is not scared of or tired by reading existing code. Whereas most of developers want to write „their code” not read someone’s else’s code.
> but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
yes and an end has to be worth the means. people disagree about whether it is worth it. some people see a benefit using LLMs and agents to such a degree they're willing to look past the noise and water and air pollution produced by the unprecedented data center buildout that we've seen over the past few years, or the unprecedented increase in things like spam and deepfakes, or the way that it is decimating the job market + funnel, or the way that it reinforces existing antisocial incentives in society. some don't/aren't.
>> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
Really depends on what you are shipping, what your users expect and what your personal preference is. I do not want to go 10x on products that need high performance / high reliability, is deployed at large scale where its not easy to undo. But for other stuff, sure why not. The problem is everyone just puts everything in same basket. Either way, AI is useful but not to the same extent people claim it to be.
Well said. In creative spaces they talk about “Dirty” vs “Clean”. Dirty they say lets you move fast. Clean is slow.
Happen to be a startup that isn’t mission critical to someone’s health and well being? Great, now you can use AI and be as dirty as you would like.
Are you working with dangerous chemicals that are ingested by others, or systems that control hunks of metal flying through the sky with hundreds on board? Maybe we should stay clean in those environments until we make AI itself clean.
Because a lot of us are engineers. It's our mindset and our job to question hype and broad strokes and easy solutions, to go a few levels deeper and ask "okay but does it really work?". I don't think most people are anti AI more than they are anti any tool.
I think that anti-AI sentiment is caused by the business bunnies, over-selling what AI/LLMs can do. Mass retrenchments, re-hiring engineers again a year later to clean up the shit storm caused by over use of AI.
Put even simpler: We, engineers/tech people/tech heavy industries, we are the ones who's lives get the most disturbed, uprooted, messed up by the use of superlatives, the "promises" of AI.
Don't get me wrong, I use it all the time, got the AI psychosis myself, but it is still daft, thick as bricks. It is no replacement for a human.
Because for many people writing code is exactly their job, it isn't a means to an end.
It is like replacing people at the supermarket with self checkouts and expext they still feel fulfilled on their job, replenishing products from the warehouse.
Additionally only optimistics cannot see their job is in jeopardy.
If you deploy 10x faster, than me as business owner need less of you for the same amount of work.
No, the need for work doesn't grow exponentially every year, there is a physical limit to distribute among all people offering delivery capabilities.
Finally its environment impact destroys all the progress that was made in the last years, and brings computers prices back to the 1980's.
> If you deploy 10x faster, than me as business owner need less of you for the same amount of work
An important consideration here is that velocity is not zero sum. If you are delivering in weeks what used to take months you are creating an entirely new realm of what is possible to do with software within a corporation.
In the real world, I have never worked for a company that doesn't have a huge backlog (either tracked or in engineers heads) of work that would never be done because it wasn't economic under the old model. This tends to apply to the internal work of engineers (developer tooling, infrastructure, tech debt, etc) more than anything else. 10X faster doesn't necessarily mean shipping 10X product code. You can use that productivity boost to accelerate prototyping, ship betas faster, move the iteration loop faster, all while shipping higher quality code with less tech debt and having the time to continuously improve the engineering side of things that the business never sees.
If you fulfill your delivery contract in half the time, great for me, you now need track down another customer.
Or put in another way, an agency now only needs a third of previous team sizes to deliver the same amount of work.
The other two thirds might be lucky to have another project assigned, or get to seat on the bench, and depending on the world region (offshoring shops) get their salary halved, before being fired if seating too long on the bench.
But less people to build something means more companies will he able to build something, this math will be interesting in the future. Also there will be a exponentially more stuff to maintain.
No it doesn't, that is the MBA thought process of exponential curves of endless sales that always ends in layoffs when real world physics reality check kicks in.
The amount of customers willing to buy a specific product is limited.
At my workplace, we outsource a great deal. Of all the companies we outsource to, the employees of two are very upfront that they use LLM "assistance". Their output has been getting worse and worse since that started, about a year ago. Firmware produced with LLM assistance results in hardware that does not work reliably. Tools created or maintained with LLM-assistance do not function reliably. In short, LLM-created product doesn't work in my direct experience.
I think it's the subconscious telling the conscious parts of our brains what's coming. We're in the foothills now, and we're starting to feel the difference in how thin the air is. It's getting a bit colder and not as many trees grow here. Looking up, we see the snow capped summit of the mountain looming above us, and we know we can't survive up there.
Many users may not care which bridges they drive over, but I personally would like to avoid driving over the original Tacoma Narrows bridge[1] or any others of similarly flimsy engineering.
The engineers who hype AI the hardest are the mediocre ones. They lack the skills (or the motivation) to write quality code themselves, so they ask the LLMs to do it for them. Then they get to pretend they wrote it themselves, and a business idiot hands them a gold star.
I am not totally anti AI but I don’t use coding harnesses. I see my coworkers using coding harnesses decline in basic engineering mentalities, asking me questions easily answered with a modicum of research or thinking, but claude told them something so they ask me.
I don’t think these are bad guys or bad engineers, it’s concerning to me though. Engineers should be getting sharper in their analysis over time not weaker. When someone tells me they haven’t even looked at a few lines of code they submitted it’s shocking and a sign of sloppy thinking. It’s rude too because is expecting me to pick up their slack.
I’m sure the AI companies are in love with the idea that people are growing dependent on their product for things they could easily do themselves. That’s a great business.
> It’s rude too because is expecting me to pick up their slack.
I just had to deal with this, they never pushed back on my PR comments, just copy pasted everything I said back into Claude. Its just second hand vibe coding at that point, might as well fire the middle man…
My boss was fired yesterday, in part because every single document, email, meeting agenda, performance review, and PR he's written for a year has been pure AI slop.
His defense was always "everyone uses AI, including you" and I'm like yes i do use it for code but never communications, and my code is always 10x better than the untested slop I was constantly asked to review.
This is a guy with 30 years engineering experience, reduced to submitting untested and unreviewed slop code of a quality drastically worse than the least-experienced juniors in the company.
That phenomenon on a global scale is concerning to think about. That people are using these things outside of tech to get medical advice or as therapist replacements is even more concerning.
Interesting. What factors led your boss's boss to this decision? Does he not have AI psychosis? I thought the further up someone was in an organisation, the more AI they used.
LLMs as provided by Antrophic and OpenAI represents an enormous centralization of computing, and are black boxes that end-users are completely at the mercy of.
HN probably has as much as 5 million monthly users. This is not just a small group of insiders, but more of a broadly representative sample of startup and engineering people.
So there is a wide range of judgement, and more importantly, a diverse set of worldviews. These are beliefs that form the foundations of cognition and perception. In the general population there are a massive number of people who do not understand technology and/or do not really appreciate it at a deep level. This includes a significant percentage of startup and engineering people unfortunately.
Interesting, my impression is that HN crowd is aggressively pro-AI, and on a level that is simply bizarre. E.g. the 'spec driven agentic engineering' that seems to be all the rage right now is pretty much a return to the 1970's waterfall development model, just with faster implementers. But initial implementation speed wasn't the bottleneck then as it isn't now - maybe people are too young to notice that we're (more or less) just witnessing another rotation of the big wheel of reincarnation ;)
Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
This isn't really related to AI because it relates to manually coded things just as much, but on this point specifically this is only true for your very early I-gave-it-to-a-bunch-of-interested-people-to-try customers. It's much less true for your first paying customers, especially if the 'major issues' make their pain worse (e.g. data loss, time wasted, etc). You lose those ones for good, or until there's a critical mass of social proof to tell them the early problems are solved.
'I can dash out an early prototype with AI and then fix it later' is a dangerous mindset. If you're working in a small market with a limited number of customers you might piss off enough people that you won't be able to recover. There still has to be some level of quality. But it is a balance.
The post asks a question and then presents a strong opinion with the confidence of it being a fact. There is a pretence of curiosity veiling a complaint. I think it is this perceived lack of curiosity, casual exaggeration (“10X faster”) and implication of the “one true way” (“Let’s face it”) among AI supporters that grinds my gears at least.
It is more of a reaction to misrepresentation and falsehood, which AI and its rhetoric seems to have generated a lot of.
A lot of modern discourse makes sense when you realize that most people, when they express an opinion, are not making a claim about objective reality but rather using it as a badge of membership for their in-group. They see being "anti-X" as a proxy for identifying "good people" and being "pro-X" as a proxy for identifying "bad people," or vice versa.
The elegance of the code is not superfluous at all. It correlates with the developer's understanding of both the code and the domain.
Many kinds of software cannot be yeeted 10x faster with AI. Someone has to sit down and understand what the right thing to do is, first.
It also matters how many users you expect to be able to reach. If you're Facebook you can afford to use the first 10,000 users as unpaid QA. If you're an indie shop that's barely getting downloads you really want to make a positive impression on your initial users or you're toast anyway.
I’m more of an “AI centrist”, as I think the topic is extremely nuanced. As with most tech hype, there tends to be a black and white “AI good” or “AI bad”. I think reality is somewhere in the middle, personally.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
It’s takes like this that remove the nuance completely and ignore so many facets of the debate. That being said, let’s assume this is true because I think vibecoding a CRUD app does make this realistic on the face of it. When I say vibecoding I mean prompting and dropping, not reading the code.
You do your adversarial reviews with multiple agents, you have your UX agent look over it, your security agent etc. Under the hood there are architectural issues. The code is probably passable, but rough.
You release, customers start using it for their business that they depend on for income. Issues start cropping up, you burn more and more tokens to fix the issues as they come up. Expedience starts sacrificing quality even still, architecture (if there was any) starts being violated and it degrades more and more.
I consider myself a professional, I would never want to end up in a situation like this for mission crititcal products. So, what do I do? I read the output, I make sure I understand it. Why? I care about my customers and secondarily I’m the one with the pager when something breaks down.
Now, for some fun hobby project to track my hobby paints for Warhammer… who cares? I agree. I have used Claude for such projects and not really cared. But your statement does not
hold up in the enterprise world with mission critical software.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
This is reductive. You’re assuming people’s concern is “elegance”. It isn’t solely
elegance. It’s domain understanding. It’s quality over all. It’s being a professional.
Writing the code was never the slow down for large scale enterprise products.
There are medical devices and stuff that will always require slow deliberate testing and changing.
If you have an application that real people use in everyday work and depend on stuff not moving under their feet. Execution speed is not something you aim for because you have to adjust to speed of users adopting changes.
As a startup owner of course you can’t really care about those people using your software because you have to pivot as quickly as possible to an investment that pays the most and boring every day app is not going to be a unicorn.
There is another option at the end of the spectrum. You aim at posthuman world where humans are not required and your software doesn’t have to bother with earning money or users that are slow or have emotions.
I think it depends on which side of the regression-to-the-mean machine that you land on (above or below the mean) for any given skill that is being disrupted by AI. From above, AI is frustrating; from below, it's magical.
For most software engineers LLMs represent future financial uncertainty, pushing them into a tailspin. For a substantial subgroup the challenge runs deeper IMO. They are experiencing an identity crisis, as a central component of their self-concept is being violently stripped away on top of the financial uncertainty.
I think it also has to do with the experience after using AI for a while.
I have decided to leave what has been my workplace for over 15 years - mainly to do other types of work. Why? I stopped thinking in my current job as a system architect and dev. AI output is better or on par with my thinking, and I lost all feeling of achievement in my daily work.
I still want to use my brain, so I will find a job where I can continue to do that.
this is already a thread that is superlong so I think this will get buried, there's the common camps of people but I'd like to explain why from my perspective too; because I don't often see people reflecting my concerns as openly.
Every single technological improvement that has helped "developers" in the last 16 years has been worse for users (with very few exceptions).
I tried constantly to reconcile this fact, but I find it hard because I don't "speak" finance, I don't "speak" PM, and I don't "speak" sales. I speak: goals, outcomes and product.
My industry niche has been reliability, and I've all but seen my role be eliminated because nobody wants to pay for things to work properly, they don't want to pay for the friction of someone slowing the gears of business in order to actually satisfy requirements: unless they're forced to.
Every abstraction on top of an inefficient system: that speeds up development, but slows down (or makes the runtime expensive) has a direct or indirect impact on users respectively.
If you build your programs using electron, they're laggy unless you're on a <3y mid-level machine or greater they use copious amount of memory and they don't even integrate with accessibility toolchains of the system itself.
Heavy web-frameworks exhaust compute so completely that we have to run complex orchestration systems and deployment schemes to operate them now, what was once considered slow because it was interpreted is now many orders of magnitude slower anyway due to those orchestration overheads. We run containers, on VMs, inside of dedicated sandboxes, on generic CPUs with low single-core clock speeds, on expensive vendors..
An issue that compounds.
.. to save developer time from writing something more efficient, or in running closed loop systems.
You can, as a developer: enjoy these times. But make no mistake, they want to minimise the amount of time you spend making things because they want to employ less of you.
AI is just another step in this direction. LLMs generate passable code, it's not good, I will definitely have to go in and clean it up when it inevitably fails. You will generate your first $10M with a good idea, but then you'll hit a scaling issue and I will have to come in and add to my grey hairs: and you will resent me the entire time I am helping you.
AI will make worse things more ubiquitous. Eventually the public won't even want to use technology, because we made it so fucking awful.
I'm not sure what the question is in your comment but this sentence is the only one that has a question mark:
>> I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
The answer is that, yes, most people do understand that. Some people like writing code regardless of whether they realise the extent to which that code is useful to others or not. Some people write code just as a means to an end and couldn't are less how that code is produced. There is, from what I've seen, a general expectation that the people who care about code are better at writing it but my experience is also that they just aren't. Some people who are "passionate about prorgramming" are horrible coders, some who are lukewarm or don't care at all are great coders.
I honestly don't know how AI comes into all that. HN is certainly not anti-AI. Just the other day a post made the first page with a title like "HN front page without the AI" but I can't find it now. There's as much AI stories submitted as anyting you could consider anti-AI.
The other day, I had a similar thought about the relative importance of code.
I'm working on a game, and I've been fussing over the code quality. And yeah, having code that isn't awful is important for various reasons. But with a game, it got me thinking, the code is literally the only part of the game the player doesn't experience.
The time I'm spending on the code, I could be spending on the art, the game design, the music, the story...
But my natural tendency is to hyper-focus on the only part of the game nobody will ever see. I thought that was interesting.
(That being said the codebase is ass and I do need to clean it up!)
My point of view is that code is the experience. Dealing with the constraints of code is one of the ways game design evolves as one iterates over what could be cool and filter for what is possible.
The code working is everything the player experiences. They don't experience consistent indentation or comment block style, but they experience what it does.
HN crowd is quite pro-AI. Many reddit forums like r/programming have simply banned AI topics.
"Content about AI and LLMs are considered off-topic with the sole exclusion of deeply technical content about implementation."
Frankly, your opinion on HN being "anti-AI" is eye-rolling - it means you are living in a pro-AI bubble and have never seen anti-AI. There are many on HN who will defend AI to the death.
The only places I've seen profoundly pro-AI bias are places full of programmers specialized in fields where they have to have extensive domain knowledge outside of what the coding part does.
Typically there's a lot of acknowledgement that problems are coming rapidly, if only in the form of amateurs flooding the domain, but there's also an assumption that their domain knowledge is going to matter, in terms of staying viable in the market. This is far from a safe assumption.
Even if you assume you are ONLY needing to sell products or services to humans, also assuming that humans will continue to thrive and spend money, you're assuming people will be able to identify superior products you assume you can produce and market, and that they won't be misled by false advertising, at scale, generated by other AI to optimize its effectiveness.
If you instead assume the domain experts are going to need to sell to AIs (either as owners of wealth and power, or as the agents of the humans we're assuming will still thrive and spend money) you're making a hell of a big assumption that the agents will be trustworthy market participants with perfect information able to evaluate stuff in the best traditions of market capitalism. Humans don't manage that, even when they're a lot smarter. If this assumption fails, all the money goes to whatever exploits the AI agents most effectively, also at scale. At that stage there is no use being a domain expert in anything but hacking people's AI agents to trick or puppet the agents to do your bidding. Anything else is wasted effort.
Sometimes I also see pushback along the lines of programmers criticizing the quality of the AI coding itself. This is gonna be domain-dependent and it's fair to counter it through developing less fragile languages, but we don't know that'll work as an answer. There's a lot of handwaving.
I'm pretty sure people's experience of AI, as a rule, is the bad, damaging forms, where it's burning stupid amounts of energy to make everything worse while openly promising to take away everyone's ability to work and replacing it with the need to pay the AI owners a sort of extra tax just to be able to exist and think. The HN crowd is WILDLY pro-AI compared to the general population.
It's not going to look any better in future for the general population. What I've described leads to 'AI' increasingly producing shockingly bad outcomes for people in general, through simple market dynamics. It's going to be way more profitable to produce the bad outcomes.
You live in a bubble. HN absolutely is profoundly pro-AI. All the most celebrated thought leaders here do nothing but post pelican AI bench marks and wax poetically about building a Matryoshka brain around humanity.
People have reasonable concerns about the ethical, political, economic dimensions before we even get to the technical capabilities.
Even within the narrower question of the technical utility, I think there are a lot of factors which differentiate people's different experiences which are largely unacknowledged and lead to people talking past each other and failing to understand how others have such different experiences and opinions.
The sentiment that "users only care if it works" for example implies that all considerations beyond "does the feature work today" are developers self serving their aesthetics, but overlooks many other concerns which _do_ impact users at a later point.
I use AI for small, stand-alone utilities, with limited risk/impact. These are things I make for only myself to use.
For anything something else will use, this is a real problem you can’t simply wave away.
> AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt”
Bad code is hard to maintain, for the AI as well. While all code eventually becomes technical debt, the throw-away nature of AI code, and the sheer volume it creates, tends to turn it to technical debt more quickly. If code is “cheap”/“easy”, and the AI is bad at maintenance, why not do a full re-write for every update?
Bugs are bad for users and harder to find when you don’t have a deep understanding of the code. Logic bugs are the worst of these, because the AI and linter won’t necessarily find them. Some logic bugs can cause a lot of real world issues before they are reported and found. If doing a full re-write for updates, because the AI doesn’t care, each run is an opportunity for new bugs to get injected into the code.
If I’m expected to understand and answer for the code when there are issues, I need to be able to read and understand it, not just deploy quickly.
This does not really match my observations. While it does feel to me the sentiment is shifting towards a more negative one, overall HN feels reasonably balanced between those that are pro-AI and those anti-AI (with the middle ground somewhat absent).
Unlike what many other comments here seem to suggest, HN seems much more pro-AI than what I see in real life amongst developers - at least where I live.
And I do think many users would care more than we might think, but unlike art etc. it is often more difficult to tell.
I think it's very useful but the hype promises so much more than it delivers. And a lot of the proponents are all in on the hype it gets annoying.
I use claude to write a design, review the design, turn that into an implementation plan, spend 2-3 turns reviewing that, but still when that is turned into code it misses things or creates helpers that's not actually used or... It creates massive files and unless I explicitly tell it to it never refactors them. It often just silences errors and warnings instead of actually fixing the problem.
It saves a lot of time, and I'm building things I couldn't have on my own. But it makes a lot of mistakes, it's far far from one shots which the hype keep going on and on about. It's tricky to put firm limits on what it does. A lot of the mistakes I catch because I've spent 15 years without an agent and sometimes it's just "hm, this smells weird" and I begin digging. I worry about the next generation.
For me the mental framing of "It's all hallucinations, some of those hallucinations are useful" is helpful to keep frustration in check as I ask it to review the same implementation plan for the 4th time and it turns up different issues because the input was slightly different, or review the output code and see allow(dead_code) despite my claude.md forbidding it.
This is very much my experience and process as well. Lately I've found 4.7/4.8 telling me not to fix problems lol: "outside the scope of this PR," "not caused by your changes," "safe to ignore" etc. Robot, I decide what to fix, when, and how!
It hates following project conventions, loves mocking so much out of tests that it fails to test anything at all, and yeah constantly leaving dead code around.
And yet it's still very useful. It's just nowhere close to as good as it's hyped, and yet there are professional developers who are using it as though it is.
Yea, and a related annoying thing that started in 4.7. It often stops halfway "Do you want to continue?".
Then I want to shout at it "Is the work done? No it isn't so yes of course continue, are you stupid?", but then I remember it's basically a big matrix and for the 58th time type up "Yes, ultrathink and continue"
A junior developer would learn, claude doesn't. I've tried adding this to CLAUDE.md but it doesn't help.
I am against it simply because it corrupts reason.
Humans are trained for easy wins, not thinking about long term consequences and assuming risks will not play out. It's the lethal trifecta of emboldening our worst characteristics.
Not only that the majority of problems that we have with software engineering are self-inflicted and everyone has forgotten that they don't have to be. All this does is allow us to operate the pile of shit we built over the last 25 years with somewhat less efficiency than we did 25 years ago.
The customer does indeed care that the product works. But the engineers should care what they build and with what. And they don't any more. The status quo is using a statistical model to assemble a pile of trash.
Go back 30 years and I single-handedly built a full custom ERP system for a company in 3 months without an LLM in sight, with no internet connection and thus without pulling a single dependency off the internet.
Add the me-too culture over the top "we have to have an AI proposition" and it's a gold rush but the gold is muck.
Lying to customers is shitty behavior. They'll ask.
Do you feel this way about apps that gather information about you? "It says it has no tracking cookies.." Or apps that sell your email address? What if I claimed my product was vegetarian?
Like, wtf kind of attitude is "just lie about it".
We _know_ LLMs can't be _that_ good as they are promoted.
I've spent the last 6 months creating a production grade app from scratch with Claude where I wrote no single line of code. I've reviewed code and it was looking good, almost completely following my templates, workflows, skills.
Now I've started to make minor manual updates and I'm horrified. Claude has no idea why there were those templates and instructions in place. It followed them blindly without grasping their spirit. The end result is like a very junior dev copy-pasting answers from Stack Overflow into the codebase. No consistency, chaotic application of different conventions, duplicated code, ghost code (does nothing), and perhaps more as I'm digging in.
The pros: The code works, all tests pass (43% code / 57% tests, 1:1.3 ratio), the UI looks good with visible glitches
The cons: I'll have to rewrite most of the code on the long run, make it fit, easy to maintain.
The verdict: I wouldn't started this project alone. Claude get me through to v0.1.0 / MVP where I've focused solely on the product: technologies, architecture, functionality, and usability. Now it's easier to refactor all for v0.2.0 manually without Claude.
So this might be our gut feeling: we know it's something good, but not as good as the stakeholders might promote. We know it helps in some ways but it's a nightmare in other ways.
We are not anti-AI but rather pragmatic: Not that AI enthusiasts we are expected to be.
> No consistency, chaotic application of different conventions, duplicated code, ghost code (does nothing), and perhaps more as I'm digging in.
I didn’t understand this part. You said you reviewed the code and it was looking good, so how did the cruft creep in?
Were you reviewing every diff, or taking an occasional sample?
AI has done widely-accepted-as-bad things (e.g. spamming social media, datacenter physical consequences) and seems to have done less widely-accepted-as-good things (code improvement, but many people aren’t convinced. Is software today better than 1-2 years ago? I can’t find clear examples.)
Good or bad, I believe the genie is out of the bottle, and we should do the best we can using and mitigating AI. But I don’t blame or disagree with anyone who’s critical.
I tend to agree with your overall point, but I think you reveal far more about yourself than you accurately reflect anything about HN. Just read back what you wrote:
> AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues
You want to ship major bugs to your users, let them find them, report them and fix them afterwards. You passively assume this is a good way to build software without even really questioning it.
Aside from some people just not liking this in principle, there are a lot of contexts where bugs cause actual harm and cost actual money. In some cases, "people dying" and "go to jail for it" type harm.
If everyone does it and the majority of users are captured in ways that they wont or cant seek out alternatives then shipping bugs to users, letting them find amd report them and then fixing them is business-optimal.
It would potentially be more business-optimal to ship fewer bugs if everyone else is shipping more bugs. Your development cycle would be costlier, but users would prefer to buy your products over others.
Saying "code is just a means to an end" is like saying a Car is just a Vehicle to get from A to B. Which is true to a certain amount of people, but certainly not to people who need a special car like a truck and certainly not to the people who build cars. Developers are car builders.
> there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
Confirmation bias. There has been pro-AI post every single day too but because you already decided that HN is anti-AI you didn't notice that.
I have loved using AI technology for 45 years (symbolic AI, old fashioned NNs, … to the present). I am also skeptical about the apparently desperation-driven ‘bet the farm’ approach we are taking here in the USA.
Are you really surprised people feel this way? People have pigeonholed themselves into this field and now they find themselves horseshoe makers in this new age. It is scary and concerning. People do have legitimate fear. The whole pitch with AI isn't really that it empowers you to make some CRUD app easily. It is that eventually, sometime very soon, people will wise up to the fact that prompting is not a six figure job. It can be done by desperate low skilled people halfway across the world. Eventually those people will also hit the block.
I think people who aren't scared right now aren't really considering the larger implications of what is actually being pitched. The fact that the AI evangelicals don't realize that they too have no moat is going to be so ironic if only it wasn't so sad what is actually happening.
I mean, we are devaluing humanity. That is what these tools are promising really. It isn't just software. It is art. It is sales. It is poetry. It is C suite. It is filmaking. It is surgery. Every job there is, is at risk. Maybe not tomorrow, but on the horizon. The remaining jobs on earth will become the next target to automate and remove humans out of existence. An ever larger target until there are no targets left but AI controlled companies infighting among eachother for the energy coming from the sun and the nutrients in the 6 inches of topsoil.
Earth will be for the birds and the machines by the end of the century I'm guessing. Keeping us alive will be seen as a liability and a great risk to power structures. If we are allowed to live, and that is a huge if, we will probably devolve back into the hunter gatherer stage, fearful of the machine gods and their robot soldiers and temples of data and compute.
I can only speak for myself. I mostly write C# and the code they generate isn’t of my liking. Too many var statements, async everywhere even for the most trivial things, and then a lot of times when I ask something difficult they fail spectacularly. I asked Claude the other day to propose an algorithm for Named Entity Recognition for brand names and all it did was to build a heuristics based on the type of business entities. And then in order to do that it went and created four classes. They overcomplicate things all the time for no apparent reason.
I built an Asterisk dialplan using Gemini a few months ago and it has so many hacks and quirks in it that I don’t dare touch it. I just leave it there hopping that it will keep working. I excluded Asterisk from future OS updates to avoid something fucking up that travesty of a dialplan.
Couple of weeks ago I wanted to explore an enhanced version of a PPMI algorithm that tries to flatten rare pairs. I went back and forth with all three major LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) and they couldn’t agree on anything. They kept changing each other’s algorithms all the time. The “reasoning” part seems laughable, it’s just a probabilistic infinite loop.
And that’s just for the programming part. Whenever I’ve asked them about SEO their answers are highly inaccurate. All in all I just don’t fucking trust anything they say.
Many reasons. Each person is an individual and you will learn most by seeking to engage with all the individual stories to empathise and understand. Ultimately it’s a very human thing to care, this is a big change and everyone deals with change differently. It’s a great start to see you caring and wanting to know more.
Is it? As mentioned by another comment, it's probably more divided than 'anti-AI'.
Also, 'Over the past six months, there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI ...' probably means the opposite is simply not news worthy anymore - no one wants to read another article that says AI could write fairly reasonable code.
Because it's the crowd that sees reality of the results, not just the marketing.
You can ship a 1.0 10x faster and leave bug hunting to your users and tank your reputation before you have one or you could do like what we've been doing for 30 years and ship quality. There was no problem to fix there that AI fixed.
It feels like the "Hype Wave" is going through oscillations before it damps down.
You know, it starts with hype about this new thing that is, perhaps, smarter than humans—or at least may soon be. And then the backlash comes and AI's reputation follows in descension.
And from such backlash and hate, some people start to say, "Hey, it's not so bad. It works for me." And maybe AI's reputation begins to swings toward the positive…
I suppose this is to be expected and perhaps ultimately healthy. I know for myself the swings in attitudes regarding AI have caused me to give pause and consider both sides with more regard than I might have. It has blunted some of my criticism and praise, sharpened others.
1. Many criticisms of AI’s usefulness focus on the present/past. They may well be right about the current state, but the trajectory things are improving at (unless we’ve hit a brick wall) means they’ll probably be wrong in a few years.
2. Some of the most vocal anti AI statements I’ve heard have come from people the most impacted by its disruption. Does the concept it cheapens your prior work, or perhaps threatens to replace you, not lead to a huge amount of bias?
Like any technology, AI has good and bad aspects. There should be criticisms of it, we need those. But focusing on where it’s headed, and being aware of bias, is going to produce the most important discussions.
My honest take? Hackers and builders value not just the result but also the journey. There is a feeling that AI is a cheat code to get to the result without having gone through the journey. I am fully on that side, and like everyone I’m using AI because I can’t afford not to, and because it’s also admittedly, fun and addictive and even within it, you can build skill
(no pun intended) and for now at least, talented people with good taste and problem solving skills seem to manage to just use AI as a multiplier.
But because AI made everyone have perfect English, and above average design skills, everything that 4 years ago would be considered elegant, well written, well working anything, now looks like yet another low effort AI slop.
People appreciate not just the result but also the effort.
Also the entire AI will replace you marketing bait from all BigAI CEOs is tiring. And the entire you have to adopt AI to survive is nauseating. It takes mostly pure will to become an expert in AI, just prompt what’s the latest FOMO skills repo and you also can be an AI influencer.
If you think HN crowd is Anti AI, try to talk to a random person on the street. HN crowd is generally more measured on the topic. Current AI is not the perfect solution, and comes with many many soci economic problems and general HN statement reflects that alongside the mindblowing strides made
The root cause if of course AI's role in loss of power on compensation (coding as a skill is no longer as valuable), and loss of power in labor vs capital.
It's hard to face this, specially for the one oasis in the job market that pays well.
We shall see. My area of coding for a living is SO specialized and SO far from 'skill at literal coding' that I'm making that bet, because I don't stand to benefit from anything else: if I go for AI it will directly relegate me to sheer vibe-coding as the AI will immediately go for abstractions that are more sophisticated 'code' than I know. It'll do them wrong but I won't know the difference and won't be able to criticize them.
That's so worthless and doomed to failure that there's no point attempting it, so I do the coding my own primitive way and focus on the specialty I do.
I can tell you the risk: any sufficiently motivated AI can go after my userbase by simply lying and claiming it's doing my thing better than I am. There'll be people who can't tell the difference, so if the AI is able to leverage more marketing and resources it may well succeed.
Only defense I have is to continue to do what I do, like some artisanal box-maker able to survive because they're doing exquisite work making something you can get a cardboard version of at Home Depot for a buck seventy-eight. Then when I die, there is ONLY cardboard, assuming there aren't people learning to make artisanal boxes.
I think some of it is just needing to be a counter balance to the unending hype train from the AI companies that have an existential need for AI to be the next big thing. That and seeing these amazing demos and press releases, then trying it out yourself and finding that it's not nearly as capable as advertised and many of those demos are bullshit.
Even the "programmers are now obsolete" predictions have really not panned out as more people discover that while AI is an absolute boss at solving college homework level problems, it entire falls apart completely or requires a ton of babysitting to work on problems larger than homework exercises.
It's certainly useful at times, but you always have to keep problems about homework sized and generally focused on a single thing that has been done many times before or you'll have a bad time.
Good uses of AI: Asking it to implement a GStream Webp to backing store module in a GTK project.
Bad use of AI: Asking it to implement a libnftables interface for adding and removing firewall rules. The AIs completely hallucinate the entire API and output useless garbage. Plus the API is high level so even when you try to input it into the context the AI engine gets very lost. You can fight with trying to get it to understand, but in the end it's faster to just write the code yourself.
I think it's because too many people have released tools that's clearly not ready for production because they don't know what to actually check. So it's now just easier to pattern match away any good tools that might surface.
I work with junior ops "engineers". Even though some of them won't admit it, they want to do everything with AI, and they do not care much about testing. Even their peer review is done by AI, you can tell by the way the comments are written. They want to deploy stateful clusters, manage VM lifecycles, and even deploy our own Kube cluster, probably entirely vibe coded.
One of them tried to use tabs in yaml instead of spaces, didn't know what a virtualenv was, and didn't know why Kube jobs asked for xp in writing operators ; yet he is pushing multi-files features in less than a day that are meant to manage our backups, and is pushing for managing our own kube clusters in front of management (which finds that it is a lovely idea). At this point I am not sure what to do but it won't end very well I feel.
This is not a question of ideology or personal beliefs. It’s just a matter of fact that AI systems, especially LLMs, are not capable of producing reliable results.
This is a fundamental issue and for many uses we still need the old school way of computing that produces reliable results. It doesn’t happen accidentally, you know, a lot of resources went into this. AI just isn’t there yet and probably won’t be there anytime soon, no matter how much compute we throw at it.
I'm not an ML expert, but regarding code _quality_ I see no progress at all in the last couple of years. LLMs still write code by using probabilistic calculations vs. applying rigorous thinking and logic.
This is only good while no one has to look under the hood. When trying to understand and fix code written by LLMs you'll realize what a mess they produce. It's a codebase without any systematic thinking inside. Everything is ad-hoc, wired together to pass the tests, and to conform to some templates. No deliberate practice, no intelligence at all in the code.
This can't be a long term strategy for an entire industry.
We're going to need some mid-level representation of what software is trying to do. Formal specs? UML? Semi-formal specs in natural language? Design rules?
People hate updating such representations, but AIs don't have that problem.
That is the status quo now. If LLMs get better and better, managers will simply direct them, well, directly. That's what the parent comment means by the machine learning to do your job. It completely, not mostly, replaces you.
I have some doubt here, because I do know that managers of at least some seniority have the political antennae to be wary of taking responsibility for something they don’t understand blowing up in their face. If they use LLMs directly, then the number of production outages will increase with the use of these powertools in unskilled inexperienced hands. The causes will probably just tilt towards design mistakes and unforeseen exceptions rather than coding language defects. I can see them wanting to keep some techies around simply to have someone to blame. You don’t get far up the ladder without learning how to cover your ass.
I don't think they'll let the chain of managers above you handle the llm directly. That is just too much risk of incompetence. Instead, there will be micro teams (1 dev, 1 sre, 1 product owner) that are meta manageed by a LLM. And their llm reports directly to a higher up's llm. And software will diversify to prevent all these supply chain attacks we've seen lately.
Managers can barely direct me without shitting their pants. What saves them most of the time is my ability to say "No". Until LLMs can do that, which seems quite hard to do so far, good luck replacing me.
To all the managers reading this and thinking "phew. so long suckers!", I'd be willing do what you do for 50% of the pay. Surely it is _I_ that will be irreplaceable!
It’s just a big forum so it has lots of people. Personally, I block most reflexively anti-AI people because they’re boringly repetitive. But this has always been the case. Over a decade ago, my friend made a user script to block Snowden news[0].
There are just some topics that a lot of people like to act as radio repeaters on. I just block everyone who seems repetitive to me or who talks in a boring way. In the old world you’d go to a forum and you’d find that many of the threads are occupied by abrasive old timers of one or other type who have driven away all the people who’ve written the information on the forum. This is the standard thing that happens over time. Those for whom the group is the thing prioritize spending their time expressing group membership over being useful to the group.
As forums grow bigger, they attract these participants and then these guys drive out the rest. But you don’t really have to give in to the whole thing. I just remove them and their threads from my comment feed. It’s a pretty good experience.
Other groups that I find undesirable are those with whom I cannot relate. Programmers in crappy companies spend a lot of time talking about how they’re defending their work from useless managers who take credit for everything and so on and so forth. Or they might invent psychoanalysis to express why bosses want people in office rather than remote. There’s just not very much to learn from this kind of person. It’s just a generalized complaint machine which, unlike on sites which have topic-forums like Reddit, leak into general space here.
But you can clean up your own feed. And it’ll get better. It actually doesn’t take very many.
AFAICT hacker news is only slightly less positive on AI than the average tech industry gathering, which is still like two standard deviations more positive than any average gathering of random people in a city. I think the culture of silicon valley reads anything less than gushing hype as negativity right now, which is a weirdly polarized place to be, but the discourse around this technology is bizarre in general, being an absolute gamechanger that nonetheless still somehow feels quite oversold by its most ardent boosters, who are themselves a minority, but one with rather disproportionate voice and reach
It's in the name "Hacker News". Hackers are people who enjoy doing the programming themselves, because they get satisfaction from it. Often they program in their spare time, and sometimes what they develop has little to no practical value, and is done as a learning exercise. Using AI would defeat the purpose for them. If they're forced to use AI in their job, it decreases their job satisfaction.
There are others who just want a problem solved, and it doesn't matter to them how the program which solves it gets written, as long as the program (appears to) work and it's done as quickly as possible, so they outsource the development to AI. That is not hacking.
If I was an end user of a working product (AI or not), I wouldn't care.
At work generating and fixing loads of slop is less rewarding work than doing old coding, troubleshooting, article writing, whatever. The internet is full of fake blogs full of fake information. Youtube is full of fake videos and people reading LLM scripts. It feels impossible to share or appreciate small projects because it's so much harder to tell if any effort or thought went into something at all now. My parents can't tell what's real on social media. I'm less sure in my career path because I might spend my time learning skills that become useless in 5 years. I have conversations on the internet or Jira where people respond with LLM output (half the time saying "Claude says..." half the time not.) Kids are cheating their way through school. I'm probably getting dumber by using it.
There's plenty of reasons to be "anti-AI". It's not just a tool that's making programming more convenient.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Having seen bad (human) code behind award winning products, and good (human) code take so long the investors get cold feet, yes.
Some people claim (or seem) to know which corners can be safely cut. But what I've seen suggests those who cut corners got lucky, rather than using skill to know what could be safely ignored.
The other side of this is that I have come to view things like "Clean Code", "SOLID", "VIPER", and use of mocking in unit tests, the same way as self-help books: survivorship bias.
GenAI in code is likely to give us enough feedback fast enough that we can turn the survivorship bias of SWEng self-help guides into actual science; but unless progress stops suddenly (could happen any time if investments stop), humans coders aren't likely to be the beneficiaries of this research.
I "hate" AI[0] because I believe that elegant code is a different bulding material to ugly code. Ugly code is harder to change. At some point, it becomes impossible to change.
I notice that a lot of people say they'll be able to write 2.0 faster than I can write 1.0. This means that their 1.0 must have been so bad that they had to rewrite it. Why, then, would their 2.0 be any better? Because they got some feedback? At some point, your users are just going to leave for a competitor.
[0] Meaning I use it, think it's neat, and will continue to use it, but would prefer to use it a lot less than my boss wants
> I believe that elegant code is a different bulding material to ugly code. Ugly code is harder to change. At some point, it becomes impossible to change.
I believe the same thing and it’s also the main reason I hate AI code.
AI tends to not have much regard to “architecture” or even really considering how code should be organized. Need a function to read a base64 string into a private key? “fn base64_to_key” right there next to the code that needs it. Need to take that key and encrypt a blob? “fn encrypt_blob” right next to it. No thought about maybe pushing that code to a crypto module, or representing the invariants as types, or even just putting the functions where they might logically belong, just spews them out everywhere.
But, I have a problem trying to prove why this is an actual problem in the end product. You can say “it’s harder to refactor later” but the LLM is already pretty good at just changing bulk amounts of code to behave differently. In fact, having utility functions “nearby” the code that needs it might be better for its own context management. Most of the reason humans prefer the “single responsibility principle” and “modular design” are to make the code easier for us to change and reason about, but an LLM with a finite context window may actually do better with code that doesn’t match this premise.
I find myself reviewing code that others on my team generated with an LLM, and I tend to focus on these sorts of architectural “problems” the most because it’s the biggest gap between the way I program and what the LLM executes. But sometimes I worry that I’m fighting a losing battle, and that the focus on good architecture isn’t as important as I think it is. Or at least, I’m having trouble proving that it actually matters tangibly. Will it result in an unmaintainable mess? Maybe. It’s not guaranteed that LLM’s have the same limitations we do when it comes to maintaining code.
I actually felt the opposite. HN is full of AI crowd.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
This precisely why I still have mixed reaction towards AI, even AI can produce functional code but might be filled with foot guns. I personally don't use AI (the full automated ones, e.g., Claude code, Codex, Cursor) but also I don't complain about people using AI.
This also reminds me of Jonathan Blow's Software is in Decline[1] talk. Even when the humans coded everything, we gave up on quality a long ago for speed. So people complaining about low quality AI code is ignored.
Simply put software engineering is not as rigorous as other engineering and most of the time when software ultimately fail there isn't major consequences.
People definitely have preferences of tools. For your construction analogy, I'm anti hammer. I prefer screws in almost every instance where a nail could be used, and hammers aren't the right tool for screws. Hammers suck.
Back to AI, it's a tool, and you can definitely be for or against it. Someone against AI might prefer other tools, like a canvas, camera, word doc, or visual studio (depending on the application they could be using the AI tool for)
You can be pro- or anti- nail gun. I'd expect carpenters are pro-nail-gun when working professionally, but good ones avoid nail guns in at least some of their own projects, so they can stay in touch with the underlying physics.
I think the technology is fantastic but the current trend of larger and larger proprietary models will bring a concentration of power/money like never seen before.
It's like we are 19th century farmers and suddenly there are the latest John Deere equipment available for huge amounts of money raising yields 100x. Most of us can't afford the equipment and will be pushed out.
And look who Anthropic is partnering with: the absolute worst of Wall St. like Apollo.
Because we include people who dislike the hype machine and the initial "it's alive" push triggered a reaction, coupled with a different reaction to what we might call legitimate fears of dis-intermediation: much code is derived from prior code and so LLM are a good fit for reducing the need for coders in some contexts.
I think few of us are blind to how good some systems now are, but we're concerned by reports of worrying trends like swamping free software with machine derived CVE and a decline in critical thinking, not to say outright exam cheating.
I am guarded on today's LLM after much unit testings myself.
For as long as LLM use the probabilistic predictive next-token for an algorithm, there shall be glaring errors when encountering a complex-logic (or even compound-logic).
In short, use AND, OR, NOR, XOR sparingly when doing AI prompt. Elevate your err-dar when doing so.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Yeah, when your code runs on more than one machine, more than once. Then it's worth it to spend some time to make it actually good. RAM usage also matters.
I have similar thoughts a lot. Actually, bugs and technical debt existed even when humans wrote the code. However, while low‑level layer coders might oppose AI interfering with their 'artwork,' someone like me, who mainly assembles libraries like Lego bricks on top of frameworks, would probably find LLMs useful.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
This works better in greenfield deployments than in existing ones. We all know AI "hallucinates". This is reasonably easy to work around on new code where you can take any number of paths to get the right answer.
In existing deployments, being flat-out wrong has a greater cost. I've worked with AI in a ton of examples (working in existing codebases, troubleshooting system problems, etc) where it simply wasted my time, and it would have been better to solve the problem myself.
When I first started working with LLMs in 2019 AI was in no was synonymous with LLMs. I personally realized pretty quickly that they’d eventually be able to write software that compiles. Not necessarily good software, but software that passes a minimum threshold.
Then again there were all sorts of hallucination-adjacent issues which are still present but rarer as models get bigger. Wondering about the consequences for software engineering as an industry was a little bit of an “overpopulation on Mars” problem since GPT2 could barely string a paragraph together.
Another factor is the industry’s continued insistence on evaluating the ability to write software using leetcode. Well, Claude is probably the best leetcoder in the world now, but since our industry never figured out better evaluation criteria for candidates of course we are backed into a corner.
I don’t know why people have to pick one side or the other. AI speeds up development at the cost of oversight. Whether this tradeoff makes sense depends on the real world consequences of getting it wrong and the quality of the foregone oversight, which is very much case by case
There is a large contingent, both on Hacker News and off, that believes AI not only doesn't speed up development but it doesn't work and everyone talking about it either a booster or undergoing psychosis.
It's an absolutist disagreement without any common ground.
Different people have different opinions (including opinions in favor of AI, and opinions in between, and more nuanced opinions).
I have several objections as well, including the Dijkstra objection (i.e. it is not as precise as using a computer code), as well as concerns about the commercial intentions (and terms of use and other related issues) of whatever companies makes them, and wastes of power and other things like that. There is also expectation of use even if it does not help, and that what I have seen often does not help and is better to do by yourself, or to use different software rather than LLM/generative-AI software. (Many people have different objections, although in some cases I do not consider them significantly important.)
I suppose you end up hating it either way, if you're a better developer than it you don't like it because it sucks, and if it's a better developer than you then you just feel obsolete
HN has been very pro-AI over the last several years. It's only swung back slightly the other way recently. I suspect this is due to tensions in the gulf causing some institutions to reallocate their investments, which results in reduced bot activity.
It's the opposite. There's documented evidence of China recently funding anti-AI bots in the west in an attempt to weaken the US's AI lead, I imagine that such bots also inhabit HN.
There is a huge difference that is missing in this question.
Anti-AI does not mean anti-AI-coding-agents. It's the new vibe-mindset being created by vibe coders/vibe thinkers (AI companies are also promoting this), which is that I can make my ideas from scratch on my own and then blame AI for the mess created by the maker.
As a software engineer, I cared about architecture, code and technical responsibilities/duties. To achieve maximum and optimal results I'll take assistance from anything — AI, non-AI and whatnot — to speed up the process either 10x or 100x.
Suppose one proved that a sizable mass of people don't care whether they eat dog food.
There are people who won't feed them dog food even so.
There are people who will see ways to extract more profits.
> just a means to an end?
Indeed.
Which means?
Which end?
There are as many unthinking raving fans as there are unthinking raging haters. The reality is that the decision-making power-wielding bunch will make dumb, uncaring, probably some form of "evil", people-harming decisions via AI. Because that is what they do. Almost invariably, until forced to do something else.
So, again, which means? Which end?
This weird "my perspective is universal" thing is among the worst features of humanity in general.
You can infer a developer's position on AI with 100% accuracy if you ask them a related question about the customer and how much overtime they'd be willing to pull to meet a deadline for one of their internal projects. It's the same question, just worded a lot differently.
The general form is probably something like "are you willing to sublimate your ego in order to care for the parties who ultimately justify your compensation/career?"
The current AI tech (LLM and other Gen image stuff) is impressive as heck, but it has flawed origins (facebook torrenting the books, everyone scraping the web and anything they can without attribution) and downright evil boosters advocating for the elimination of humans livelihood (they are talking to CEO). The “hyperscalers” moving fast and breaking things (their local environment mostly) don’t help.
I use AI daily. But not with agents. Those feel like cars before there were safety measures, like seatbelts. I'm no anti AI. I'm just waiting for the seatbelts.
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand
That's true, but they care deeply about the consequences of that:
> about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
So whomever your strawman is, they got a point.
Note that I'm "anti-ai", I use it a fair bit and even received the trendy email asking me to watch out how much I spend in it cause it's expensive. I'm also not delusioned into believing the "it's 10x faster" and "code doesn't matter anymore" marketing. If the thing fails it's my name on the git blame and my number they call at night so I'll review that code thank you very much.
I feel like past the wow effect it's pretty easy to see the seams and the limits, even on "frontier" (god do I hate that term) models, and nothing replaces human skill for now if you're working on something with any significance.
Dang sums it all, I dont perceive hn as being pro or against AI, it's a mix, but if you're polarized, whatever "side you're on" you'll feel the other side is over represented.
> Dang sums it all, I dont perceive hn as being pro or against AI, it's a mix, but if you're polarized, whatever "side you're on" you'll feel the other side is over represented.
It doesn’t feel that way to me. I remember reading the recent thread about Bun being rewritten in Rust with LLMs. Definitely not a 50/50 split of positive and negative comments. It was a pile-on.
I actually see surprisingly little "anti AI" in that thread at all, and mostly just concerns about merging 1,000,000 lines of code with minimal review, which i think is a reasonable thing to be concerned about even if you use LLMs yourself and aren't "anti AI"
The "it will get sentient next year and take over the world" bullshit?
These two things are simply unrelated, and my experience with coding assistants (that I do use daily, because they are useful) says whatever OpenAI and Anthropic say in their marketing is 95% lies and hyperbole.
Any technology that is marketed as a religion will get the same reaction from me.
I am anti-gun despite guns being extremely effective at propelling metal at high velocity. I am not anti high-velocity metal, nor do I believe guns should never be used under any circumstance.
It suggests to me that you don't see really any of the potential rewards for excellence. It's almost exactly the same thing as saying "there's nothing left to invent." I've watched software change the world SO. MANY. TIMES. during my short-so-far life that I must call such a proposition as the death of creativity bull fucking shit. Using AI makes you less likely to create any LASTING contribution to the world, even as it makes you look very busy.
If you want to be the best, you do the fucking work and learn from it. There Is. No. Other. Way. There never will be.
Given a large majority of the HN audience is likely directly employed by large orgs responsible for creating this garbage, it definitely doesn’t skew negative.
There is now more, and likely only an increasing amount, of AI content.
As someone interested in what other people, not machines, are doing - I don’t want to spend time reading superfluous prose/code that LLM’s generate.
I think it's a negative feedback loop: If you are convinced that AI is worthless you are not going to be willing to spend $100-$200 to try the best tools, and if you're not using the best tools or you have to work under severe token limitations you are going to have a bad experience which is going to further convince you that AI is worthless.
Take your pick: Anxiety over the possibility of redundancy and consequent financial precarity. Concern about our children's futures - their education and careers. Sorrow over the loss of the craft of software construction, with the potential for reduced autonomy and creativity. The atrophying of human cognition. Disgust at the excessive hype. Dismay at the environmental impact. Worries about the social and political impact, including further enabling authoritarians. Horror at the inevitable use of AI in warefare. Just plain exhaustion at the rate that the world is changing.
Like you, I'm a software engineer. 30+ years. I find the technology of AI genuinely facinating. I also enjoy making software.
> do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
This has been extensively discussed here and elsewhere. Its obviously a simplification, but some people prioritise the end-result: the product. Other people prioritise the practice of building the thing: the art/craft/engineering of coding and software construction. There seems to be a certain amount of mutual incomprehension between these two perspectives.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Ultimately, I think that financial pressures will mean that software inevitably becomes much less the product of a craft and much more an industrial mass-produced product, extruded by AI. So, if you're frustrated by current contrary attitudes on HN and elsewhere, then perhaps you just need to wait a few more years.
AI is not supposed to write excellent code, it is supposed to write the “most likely” code which equates to your average engineer. People who are below the curve are going to see a much higher benefit than people who are higher than the curve.
AI is no doubt powerful and i think that's reflected on HN. However, a lot of AI news these days is alloyed with hype and falsehood. Some amount of sceptical counter pressure is warranted.
The point is that bad code pretty directly leads to a product that doesn't work. It might work today (though... I wouldn't bet my life on it with how hit and miss LLM code is). But a year or two from now, with people just piling on more and more poorly written code, the system is going to suffer. It'll be slow, it'll be buggy, etc. Yeah, your users won't be able to say "aha, this is because they used AI!", but they will certainly notice the negative effects from you having done so.
Why do you assume the code will be bad in the first place?
Coding as someone without experience in coding? Most probably yes, but from someone with some kind of expertise who can act as a guardrail for bad code piling up? Probably not.
The AI spits out _some_ code => the developer needs to review & cleanup the mess, or accept that it worsen the system for the sake of delivering more rapidly.
That's the dynamic with AI and a lot of developers hate working like that, yet there is pressure to work this way.
I don't assume the code will be bad, I directly observe on a daily basis that it's bad. Since the widespread adoption of AI, all but the best developers I work with have been writing worse code with a higher number of more severe bugs.
Both of them can be true at the same time? Many people on HN are at the forefront of this technology, we're testing it in prod and telling each other what does or doesn't work. It's not anti-AI to use the AI and then document a failure.
We're still waiting for a model that can draw a pelican on a bike, you're not zero-shotting every problem with AI yet. If we want improvement, we gotta start by being honest.
AI is great for prototyping, but that is far different to AI in production-grade software, including with the hidden cost of maintenance. You have to know what you are doing.
Why even risk using AI directly in mission critical high risk software powering cars, planes and financial transactions or control systems with no human oversight?
If a disaster happened and an investigation was launched and the inquiry found that the software was "vibe coded" and no-one understood the code, would that look great towards the software vendor's reputation?
If your bar for good software is "released asap", more power to you. Fortunately though, that's not everyone's stance. Not everyone is aiming to shit out the next big crud app.
Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works. -> if the product does not work, you as a developer you need to fix it.
> AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
It is strange to me that your question is so narrowly scoped, as though code is the only current use of AI and as though bugs are the reason to be against it and not a clear existential crisis that the world has not demonstrated any capability to meet.
The end goal of AI, literally the goal, is to make it so that workers aren't needed anymore. Ignore for the moment that AI isn't good enough right now to have eliminated all the worker roles yet. That is still fundamentally its goal. You will tell the AI what you want, the AI will give you what you want, ..., profit. No nasty employees to deal with.
I would rejoice at this if I lived in a society that decided it would use the fruits of each new labor efficiency to provide for the populace instead of telling me that people who don't work should die in a gutter. But I do not live in such a society.
This site is the gathering place of the biggest AI zealots there are. If someone posted that they have stopped talking and started communicating with the world solely through a camera pointed at their face and having claude interpret their facial expression, I would not know if they were joking. That is the caliber of AI fandom here.
AI anecdotes posted here are also clearly exaggerated. When someone tells, it's a story of extraordinary feats, something truly spectacular. But then when someone shows, it's always some below mediocre slop. It looks like shit and the program does not work etc.
This is not a recent development either. Ever since chatgpt came out there have been people here posting that they use it for things it can't do.
And I'm not even of the opinion that LLMs are useless technology. They clearly are good for many things. Recent security vulnerability findings have been impressive for example. Automatic spam and astroturfing is an obvious use case. And it's actually easy to come up with potential use cases. This technology is not bitcoin.
I will meet your question with another: why is it so important to you that LLM-driven coding succeed?
You made some good points about users only caring that something works. Perhaps folks who are reluctant to hand everything over to some of the worst people running companies since the Internet has started have reasons for thinking that mass LLM codegen adoption might lead to bad outcomes for users.
Look, if modern LLMs mean I never have to find the lowest performing junior on my team to perform manual data entry because our clients think sending a bunch of PowerPoint decks counts as "giving us their data", that's great. But I've seen the code the latest tools produce. If you're happy shipping code with the LLM imjust straight up doing a SQL injection vuln... IDK, I don't know how to bridge that gap.
I have never seen so many people respond to criticism of a technology as if it were an attack on their own identities as much as I've seen with LLMs. And I used to work in the VR industry.
The only product of AI is labor displacement and, by extension, wage suppression (as the duties of the displaced become free labor from those who remain and those who remain aren't asking for raises).
So ahy are so many on HN anti-AI? Because automation has finally come for them. Now it's personal. While it wasn't personal, you could pretend that people who had their livelihood taken away was a result of personal moral failure. You would see that 10 or 20 years ago when people would quite callously say "you should've done computer science" and that was that.
There are a lot of reasons to hate AI, not least of which is the externalities. It's essentially profiting off intellectual property as well as user-generated content for no compensation. Software people can actually identify with that in a way they just didn't when it was music, art or literature.
The data centers themselves nobody wants. They get massive tax and electricity breaks. Everyone pays for the upgrades and gets to live with the water pollution ,noise and higher utility bills. And because the data center is powering labor displacement, unlike, say, an auto plant, it produces negative jobs.
This all comes at a time when society is at the breaking point. Unaffordability is a massive problem (only getting worse) while we rapidly approaching minting our first trillionaire. Wealth inequality is reaching levels that historically have resulted in violent revolution.
AI in particular and automation in general could be a good thing for society. In another version of society it would allow people overall to work less and more menial jobs could be automated away. We don't live in that society. We live in the society that will make 99% of people poor so a handful of people can have $500 billion instead of $400 billion. All while the world seems to be getting ever more violent and cruel and major issues like climate change are going to start biting real hard.
And I think there is a debate about llm biases [1].
And the obvious question of who owns and controls llm/ai technology. The wealth of humanity should be invested in humans and not a handful of llm’s and corporations who “own” them [2].
I think these are examples of thoughts which run through people’s mind——biases—-which direct replies even if they’re not directly expressed.
I suspect because most people that participate on HN have something to do with writing or shipping software. Most discussions around AI feel like children pretending to be adults in the room, except everyone else still just sees children pretending to be something they are not.
That isn’t new and it certainly isn’t limited to AI. For example, it’s come up in the past many times when people pretend to write JavaScript but can’t or when people believe they can replace JavaScript with WASM and yet can’t. What is new that Autism (absentee introspection) or Dunning-Kruger feel of it is both wider and deeper. It’s the feeling of someone professing their expertise without ever actually producing anything before.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster.
I just don't understand what you mean by "let's face it". I repeatedly face it at my job, all our code has been AI assisted since March, and not once have I observed such a 10x speedup. The only 10x examples I've seen in the wild have been on tasks like cross-language code rewrites that completely fail your "code is just a means to an end" criterion.
Your post is talking about only the code itself, the quality, the speed. Other people are already debating you on that, but I suggest that you also look into what's surrounding AI that's making people very averse to it.
Many see AI as the biggest representative of the world and the internet getting worse. It accelerates the decline that was already there, and when people see their favorite websites become littered with garbage, themselves not being able to find a job or the supposedly enlightened tech elite becoming 10x more insane than they already were, the obvious thing to look to is AI. And what about all the companies that are trying to hop onto the hype bandwagon and are enforcing AI usage or laying off half their staff and demanding that the remaining half 'just use AI' to work twice as hard? Also not very good for the image.
The kind of people who only care about code quality and ignore the above issues, in my experience, are people with no horse in the job market race. Old people, rich people, non-techy people who don't have to do this for a living. They're having the time of their lives churning our small personal projects and not caring about anything else. Everyone else is suffering too much from the other causes to take them seriously.
I feel like the negativity is mainly due to lack of understanding on how LLMs work under the hood. The more you learn about it, the more you realize that it’s just a glorified autocomplete machine and the reason why it looks so capable is the engineering behind prompt and harness.
Unless there is another breakthrough in model training, I don’t see AI taking over anytime soon. However I do agree that’s it has become another tool, the engineers can use to increase their productivity which is a positive thing
It is a next token prediction function and it is important to understand the technology accurately based on what it actually is.
What is unique about a next token prediction function though is that every computer program is just a string of instructions. At the theoretical limit a next token prediction function can generate the entire instruction stream (boot loader, OS, application) so a next token prediction function can theoretically generate any computer program, which means that it is a universal predictor for anything that a computer can simulate. Still not AGI/ASI in the woo-woo non-technical interpretations of those terms, but incredibly powerful.
What you’re saying is correct if the model is trained with all the knowledge humanity had, has and ever produce. But at the moment the next token prediction is quite limited to the training data.
Things could change if the model supports re-inforced leaning. That way the LLM would change the weights in real time based on a feedback loop, but again that could vastly improve the quality of the token prediction or completely degrade it as well
The distinction I would make here is that computer code is logical transformations on arbitrary data, not the actual data itself. An LLM can learn the entire space of logical transformation patterns from existing code, and can hallucinate new logical transformations, using a computer as a validator for the logic, so an LLM can create new logic as well as repeat existing patterns, and that logic can be applied to novel input data that the LLM has never seen before.
That’s not how LLMs work at the moment as far as I understand. LLM would not hallucinate any new logical transformation, rather just predict a transformation from its training data.
I understand that there can be many different combinations for all the logical transformations in the training data. But still the number of combinations are finite and I would assume that large number of those combinations would not result in any meaningful outcome.
Best outcome is that it just predicts a new pattern we haven’t discovered (LLM randomly connected the correct dots) one example is protein folding.
> the engineers can use to increase their productivity which is a positive thing
This might be the underlying hidden psychology: being more productive and efficient isn't benefitting the working class. It won't make them more money or make them work less hours, it just means overall more work for equal or less pay or less jobs for programmers outright. It doesn't make things cheaper or better, it just translates into more profit to the owning class. Of course nobody can articulate their anxiety's like that in a hyper capitalist society, but that might be the real reason underneath anti ai sentiment.
That’s not true. If you look at the history of humanity, every invention (internet, automobiles, telephones, vaccines, etc) has increased the productivity of human race and in-return increased the quality of life and lifted millions of people out of abject poverty. Productivity increased through AI is basically the same. Over the time it would elevate the living standards of millions of people.
As for making more money as a software engineer, it’s individual responsibility. You need to change your mindset of being just an employee and think as an entrepreneur. AI has made is so easy to build an MVP in record time and try things out. If you want to make money a nine to five job is not what you should be focusing on.
This is the underlying split on HN. The temporarily embarrassed millionaires, the prophets of capitalism, hyper individualist "entrepreneurs" vs. people who are disillusioned from real world experiences over decades that stripped away all the LinkedIn lunatic fringe of "change your mindset of being just an employee and think as an entrepreneur".
First is the corporate push for AI. We are constantly getting told to "use AI for X" and not "explore if it makes sense to use AI for X". It's pretty obvious that quality doesn't matter, only cutting staff costs does, and I dread to think how software and service will look in 5 years.
The second part is how people use it to do their work without shame. You can't get a bug report without someone saying "here's what Claude thinks". Great, is it right? I can ask Claude myself, at least verify. Outage reports will be summarised and pushed by AI without anyone verifying. I have to argue with a bot to get my PRs through, and nobody reads anything anymore.
It's not that AI can't be useful it's that it seems like nobody cares how good the quality is, only that it does the work.
The genuine answer is that many people who hold a lot of power over me (the executive suite of my industry) intend to do me harm with it (put me out of a job).
Years ago Hacker News became deeply resistant of and resentful toward new technology, not coincidentally around the same time that it became more Reddit-like (consensus-brained, left-leaning politically, defensive, sclerotic). It's all part of the same phenomenon.
There's a lot of people talking about the technical aspects of AI, but I think the (for a lack of a better term) marketing of AI is just as important. Insisting that anyone who is anti-AI is on the wrong side of history does not tend to make people who leaned in that direction reconsider their opinions, it tends to make them think that pro-AI people are arrogant and thus push them even further towards being anti-AI.
This is even bigger with AI because of a couple of other recent trends that have been marketed the exact same way and have failed to live up to the hype: cryptocurrencies ("have fun being poor"), NFTs, the metaverse, etc. None of these have turned out to be the absolute use-this-or-you'll-be-unable-to-participate-in-society level changes that their proponents have claimed. Now AI proponents are making the same claims, but people have seen that the last few times this has been claimed (often by the same people) and therefore don't believe the new claims.
What surprises me most is some of the virulent reactions that code generation appears to elicit, sometimes citing reasons such as craft, artistry, and originality. As if the entire disciplines of computer science and systems engineering never depended on assemblers, code generation, compilers, JIT. Or really, just writing bytes that can represent machine code, P-code, or bytecode.
A reaction that doesn't appear to make the very direct connection with the systems of exploitation, but chooses to target the tools, or the users of tools is difficult to justify as extremely sophisticated.
But you can, in principle, understand a compiler. Also they're made by the same people who use them. Did blacksmiths get mad when they invented the first anvils?
While optimization may be done in unpredictable ways, it does not (by definition) change the effective behavior of the program. If you write a program to calculate prime numbers, it will always calculate prime numbers, no matter how the compiler optimizes it. If you tell an LLM to write code to calculate prime numbers, you are at the mercy of chance. (Maybe not for such a simple program, where the solution is directly in the training data, but you get the idea.)
Just like with politics, you see large numbers of people dividing up into two different camps. Pretty soon every statement that raises a legitimate concern about AI will be seen as 'hating AI' and every observation about how AI helped in a particular situation will be seen as coming from an 'AI fanboy'.
Exactly. Which is the reason why code that increases maintenance friction and costs, or decreases the product's operability or fitness for purpose, does not properly serve the end of advancing the business. Not in competitive industries anyway.
There's this whole manufactured narrative going on geared toward reframing the quality of code design and structure as an aesthetics problem. If you think code design and structure is an aesthetics problem, you will not understand the pushback.
A much more interesting question, I think, is why bad AI code is perceived as a worse problem than bad human code.
My observation is that bad human code ultimately slows down its own maintenance: the speed at which the human can add bad code decreases as the human adds more bad code. So it's a self-limiting problem. Whereas AI will quickly and efficiently add extra layers of bad code to work around the issues introduced by its own earlier bad code. If you let that go on, you can end up in runaway complexity scenarios where only AI can maintain the code at all, until even it can't. There have been a lot of arguments on HN that such scenarios are not a problem because AI will keep getting better, but to me this amounts to a Ponzi scheme for tech debt, which I find undesirable.
And that's not to even mention the externalities.
So, basically, depending on whether you care about all of the above, or not, the machine that supercharges your LoC-per-day metric will be seen as a good thing or a bad thing, and it's not a divide that can be reconciled because it boils down to what individuals care about. We can all agree about the end of writing code, but that doesn't mean you can't be wrong about the ways to get to that end, I guess.
Generally I've seen no signs that HN is anti-AI. I haven't ran the statistics, but there is as much excitement around AI especially when new opensource models release as there's cautionary tales around it. Even being pro-AI I have to admit that I scream at the black box and throw slurs at it quite often because it's genuinely a fustrating tool to use when it does not understand basic instructions, but also makes you understand that this is not magic.
However, people do need to make peace that AI as a tool is the future of programming at bare minimum and especially at coorperations as it becomes part of performance reviews and you have to compete with AI assited collegues. As I've said before at least for me AI replaced the boring part of writing code, but reignited the joy of designing systems and problem solving.
Generally speaking the local crowd is anti-hype, and so it's easy to get the manifestation of that conflated with with what you're describing.
(I fit your literal description, but primarily from a nomenclature perspective - I'll call them generative models and LLMs - and I appreciate this puts me in the minority. BUT I do believe part of the hype feedback loop was the intentional mislabelling of these technologies from the outset. AND I understand why the marketers did that.)
I suspect the older crowd has lived through the hype playbook enough to recognise it early, and that the pattern this time around is becoming a bit a bit more obvious now, so I expect increasing levelling out of expectations & understanding.
We're talking about vocal minorities expressing their arguments for and against AI. And some people here are just very vocal and dominant. Passive aggressive/obnoxious even. But that doesn't mean they represent the dominant opinion. If you've had the pleasure of attending a lot of meetings with developers, many of them barely open their mouths and some of them can't shut up. You find a lot of those types on HN. And looking in the mirror, that's me.
Most people that come here are hackers. Many of those probably use paid subscriptions for agentic coding tools at this point. At least, I don't know many professional developers that don't. But I know plenty that grumble a lot about AI and how they are still relevant and not that easily replaced by a tool. This stuff is a bit threatening to many people and it's triggering anxiety, uncertainty, anger, etc. And a lot of that leaks through in the discussions here.
And there's an uncomfortable reality that HN has been around for a while and the demographics are maybe a bit skewed towards people in their forties and fifties. People that are a bit set in their ways and maybe a bit conservative and change resistant. I'm in my fifties myself and I have to actively fight that tendency in myself.
I don't think it is a large number of people creating this perception, I think it is more their depth of feeling about the issue.
I am often struck by the similarity with bigotry about migrants, where they are portrayed as unreliable and undtustworthy entities that are threatening jobs. Simultaneously arguing their inability and ability are problematic.
You have a second vein of behaviour that object on more religious grounds. There are people that believe that any real understanding of models would deny biblical truth, much like evolution, it is a spurious claim, but at the same time the Discovery Institute is putting money into AI disinformation.
I am unsure how much the Future of Life Institute has influenced thinking, they reputedly have a war chest of half a billion. I have certainly seen videos on YouTube that have been sponsored by them.
There are concerns that are not in this area, regarding privacy, access, fiduciary duty, and the right to contest automated decisions. These are all things that people want to address with regulation. People make the problem that they have clear and propose a remedy, then seek consensus on that issue.
But when the message coming from people is "We don't want that kind around here" then it falls much closer to the mark.
Sadly this isn't even the only comment equating LLM skepticism to racism, even more sadly I'm not even remotely surprised that there's HN commenters that think this way
Actually hand weaving produced better quality products than mechanical looms for the first several decades of their existence. It was just much more expensive.
because anti-ai crowd is loud and stupid. They don't know how to use ai tools and keep complaining ai does a bad job when prompted "build me a Twitter clone".
What bothers me most on link aggregation sites - where (in theory i suppose) humans are involved in submitting and upvoting - so much of comment threads "yuk it's AI slop" like it can't me judge and discussed based on the actual ideas. What bothers more is when this shows up in non-/new posts because the implication is that whoever upvoted the post just has bad judgements on what could be seen as worth sharing. To me this is no different than brigading and cancelation
Bad submissions have always existed, if you don't like it, move on, don't engage.
There is a real divergence of experiences. That is one factor. There are people who are domain experts in some narrow complex domain who do such complex work that LLMs are still not there. I see some of that in my work place with large complex, domain specific languages, etc.
This is also challenging people's view of themselves as craftsman and the "crafting" of software. Something like carpenters who disavow power tools.
There is the worry about slop which is also real. I.e. that AI can and does generate garbage that ends up making things worse.
Worries about job security, the future of the industry, people's economic future and place in a new world where parts of their job get automated away.
I agree with you. Users don't care how the code is generated. This is purely economics there is no big market for "craft code" (like craft beer). There is only market for working software. And yes, LLMs are non-deterministic token generators, but so are humans, and LLMs are mind blowing. We live in the future. They don't replace software engineers quite yet- they are power tools.
Are they? Seems plenty of AI pilled to me. What they don't care for are the bs narratives and can see through the CEO excuses for axing jobs because of it.
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.
Users hate when a bunch of unrelated things break for no reason, and then get fed a pile of slop for months about why the thing that is clearly broken isn't actually broken.
I know two well-know games going through this cycle; one of them had a community manager accidentally leak their usage in the changelogs due to a slug left in a link, the other's owning company has been on the hn frontpage for their mandated llm usage.
The way I see it, there are three possible outcomes:
1. AI works worse than expected.
Our economies are depending on this not to be the case, so it triggers the Greater Depression. Widespread poverty and misery ensue.
2. AI works as exactly as expected.
This means whoever controls it gains enormous power over everybody else. There's no possibility of resistance: the Second Amendment doesn't matter when your oppressor has fully automated murder drone factories. We enter a dystopia beyond anything Orwell imagined. Note that this is an arms race, which means there's no limit to resources it can consume. Billionaires are fighting over who gets to be king of the world and they don't care how much you're paying for RAM.
3. AI works better than expected.
This means the "recursive self improvement" plans succeeds, and the "intelligence explosion" scenario happens. This, with probability very close to one, results in the sudden extinction of all life. Human values are a highly complex result of our shared evolutionary history. Something that did not share any part of that history will have profoundly alien values, e.g. "minimize training loss". If it's vastly more intelligent than us, it will be able to fulfill those alien values which extreme efficacy. There are very few goals of the "make number go up" kind that don't result in everybody dead when taken to the logical conclusion.
But our oppressors do have automated murder drone factories and have for years. AI doesn't need to work for billionaires to keep building their dystopia.
I don't spend much time on HN but from a glance it seems more middleground (reddit f.ex is extremely anti-ai). I think what you see generally just comes down to human nature. This new technology comes out which is going to change a lot and introduce much turbulence and uncertainty. Some people are happy to put in the work of learning these tools and are confident in their ability to land on their feet. If thats you this is an incredibly exciting time. Without a question a single individual has never had as much leverage as they have right now. And at least currently software engineering skills is a force multiplier in what you are able to accomplish.
But then you have a second group of people who don't have the time or inclination to learn a new way of working, or are worried they won't be able to keep up. If thats you this is a very scary time because the value of your current skills and position in life is decreasing day by day. Some peoples approach to this problem is to just stick their head in a sand with the subconcious belief that if they can convince themselves and enough people that this is not happening, it's not going to happen and their position in life will be safe.
A very common blindspot people have to rationalize this position is focusing on unskilled use of the current models (and often not even using the current best models). Then use that to make judgements about why AI won't be able to do something even in the future. The models are obviously going to keep getting better and I think even the best users are still just scratching the surface of how we can get the most out of the current models.
I mean others are saying its divided and that's true.
I guess the other side of your argument is... Is it better though? One could easily argue much of software development is promising projects strangled by their own technical debt and short sighted designs. It still has yet to be seen if AI can make well architected systems unsupervised. And this really was one of the few places where technical people shared their labors of love and appreciated the technical skills of a community.
Also, all the externalities whether that be environmental, social, or even technical and hn is really bad at actually talking about these things directly so we have to couch it all as the tool being bad. That's the part you're missing for many its more like its not good enough to justify the costs
There's a reason why this tech is called disruptive.
The same phenomenon can be observed on Reddit. You'll see a lot of knee-jerk reactions to anything that looks AI, as in 'Thanks ChatGPT' or 'AI slop' top comment, and at the same time you'll see entire subs raving about any new AI advance, or massive upvotes for somebody's vibe-coded project - because it's just... good.
Like others have said, we're becoming more polarized, partly because of the nature of social media (anybody can share anything, anybody can comment), and partly because of the effects of said media on the human brain. It'll only get worse/more amplified as we go forward.
I'm not against the usage of AI as a first principle, but there are a lot of problems with it currently that make me against its use.
The losing jobs problem. The controlled by a few big companies problem. The sycophancy problem. The devaluation of human purpose in our culture problem. The loss of human communication problem. Writing code a bit faster is not worth all these problems.
Separate from that, I also don't think it's good enough. By the time you stand up all the processes and guardrails that make it viable, and account for the lessened understanding slowing velocity in the long term, I don't think it really speeds things up. Obviously it speeds up small things that you don't need to understand much, but that's not what I typically work on.
you might be drinking some of that AI koolaid, conflating our suddenly hypertrophied abilities to produce code regardless of our familiarity with the syntax or the APIs with ability to produce and deliver good quality products, but this delusion is getting reality check as we speak.
a realization is propagating through the industry that being able to produce more code than you're able to review, comprehend and internalize is actually not a great thing.
HN has disparate groups, and the truth is that biased groups, even small groups, can push things that support their bias to the top of HN with ease. So the shakes-fist-at-clouds group might be small, but if something negative about AI is submitted it will always make the front page. During WWDC in a couple of days you'll see similar "DAE hate all the dumb Apple posts?" on the front page, like clockwork, despite it being a tiny percentage of the userbase voting it up.
Like yesterday there was an "HN sans AI" submission where the linked site didn't even work (maybe they should have consulted AI in their design?) and the submission kept racking up the upvotes, despite the irony that it was a submission arguably about AI.
Everyone is just working AI into their workflow that best that is possible. Others choose to tilt at windmills. Eh.
They called it AI instead of calling it neural networks and therefore provoked unrealistic expectations for this technology. Criticism will never end because of the fraudulent naming of this technology.
The field has been named "Artificial Intelligence" since the 1950s, It has nothing to do with neural nets per se. It just is about systems that do what was previously thought to be only something people could do. Traditionally the big names in the field like Minsky actually despised neural nets -- Minsky even wrote a book called Perceptrons (1969) which trashed the early version of neural nets and discouraged most research on them for a couple of decades.
What field? They brought back up that old sci-fi term AI specifically for neural networks to create a false impression among people that this is a technology that can "think."
It's not SF. Again, artificial intelligence has been a recognized branch of computer science since the 1950s, with journals, conferences, and applications.
Why are you so pro AI? I find HN well balanced on the topic. LLMs are consistently referred to in proto-mind or cognitive frames. This is whats truly eye rolling. Push back should be a given. We are not even accurately describing them as semiotic infrastructure yet. We’re just getting started. Expect haters.
people have already become accustomed to low quality software, luckily just in time for ai llms to finally start generating somewhat usable code (in small context) for h1b prompt pilots. silicon valley rejoicing
>I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
>Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.
I will tell 8 year old me that his interest in coding was simply a misguided abstraction towards providing customers with business value.
Certainly these AI agents will get the time machines ready for that any minute, or, well, any major software/app/website breakthrough that has happened every 2-5 years. They work 10x as fast, so it should be easy, right? It's not like everything's been bottlenecked by product and engineering is the slow burn skill that PUT FOOD ON OUR TABLES this whole time... right?
The following does not answer your question. I am me; I'm not "the HN crowd", if there is even one. And if there is such a crowd I wouldn't be the one knowing what it thinks.
The following is only a perspective on the argument of "the product works" and what "code elegance" means. I don't really care much about LLMs but the following is not necessarily tied to them.
Also, I'm retired from professional programming so feel free to ignore all of it as antiquated and irrelevant.
---
Code is not really "a means to an end". Code is better described as a liability.
People you write code may have different perspectives on code but those with more experience generally end up with this idea engrained in their minds. Code is a cost.
Thus, you'd want to have less of it, and you'd want to have code which:
- you at least have some grade of confidence that you can understand as deeply as possible, because that means you can maintain it better and more efficiently. It means that you can, when if fails, quickly/easily find where it failed, sometimes even why it did.
- you can manage in its entirety, which becomes exponentially more difficult when there's more of it and you didn't write it yourself. Not only that, it becomes more difficult to manage it when it has been incorporated in very large chunks that reach all over the codebase, and it becomes a lot more difficult when it lacks consistency, coherence and a certain uniform style.
What you call "the elegance of code" is not an aesthetical quality but a practical one. A developer obviously wants to have something that works, but that it does so well, reliably well. And they want code that is manageable enough that when shit happens -and it always does-, the fix will be hopefully easier and will hopefully make the resulting code more reliable, not less.
And, sure, in some circumstances development speed does matter. The problem is that the circumstances in which it does are frequently "unwanted" ones, usually external pressures, which we already disliked. Usually, you need to develop faster because someone else is pressuring you into putting that speed above reliability, not because it is intrinsically better to do it faster.
The one acknowledged situation in which development speed is tolerated above these other qualities is when doing a prototype. But then again, experienced developers know that prototypes can very easily turn into traps. When doing a prototype, quality is relegated because it is understood that this will not be the final product. It is understood that a prototype's code is disposable. But too often prototypes then become either the product directly or the basis for it. And again this happens because of external pressures. Most of the time because someone says "hey, it's working" without realising that it is barely so, that it's fragile, that it relies on constant tweaking and manual adjustment. But as it appears to be working, it gives the impression of being good enough to make financial sense to build on it.
And when you "ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace" what you're usually doing is shipping prototype 2.0, an unreliable system that requires more constant tweaking and manual adjustment. A system that entraps the developers into more maintenance on each iteration, when they'd want the opposite.
---
All in all, using LLMs to produce code may have its place. But if you focus on the idea of producing vast quantities of it faster, then that may not be the best use.
Because no one has shown profitability, only made claims that are unproven so far. This combined with being one of the largest investments of capital since the rail system, and being backed by known conmen like Musk, make a subset of the population(myself included) sceptical.
If you are blind to or don't care about those caveats then AI looks amazing because it can legitimately produce novel results. Its just that for the subset that I am part of, it looks like they are doing so by burning a dollar to make 50 cents in revenue and that is not sustainable.
You have no obligation to agree with them, but after all this time I don't know how someone on either side could be ignorant of what the other side's main arguments are.
> I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, but do people realize that code is just a means to an end
The means to an end I care about is that writing code was a means for me to make a living
People can pontificate all they want about how software engineering was never really about writing lines of code and at some abstract level they are correct
Your average software engineer still spends (spent?) a lot of their day writing code, it is the activity that delivered the actual value of our skills!
How do I deliver value to keep earning that paycheck now? It has been massively undercut away from me by AI systems. I do not see a good future for myself anymore
Am I not supposed to feel so negatively about it?
Edit:
Do you think the dinosaurs felt negatively about the meteor that wiped them out?
Do you think bombing victims think negatively about the planes dropping the bombs or the people flying them?
My question is this: Powerful people are trying to replace all valuable labor with AI. Why aren't you negative about it?
So here is the thing, this community by it's nature is mainly powered by people that actually understand what they are doing, enjoy actually using their brains to make things happen, and are likely filled with the ability to actually create real life changing technology.
AI cannot think, and just processes requests through input and generates output based from training data.
There is no passion, there is no human brain improvement or anything that we as a human race evolve from over time.
The best creations have been creations built by us and will continue to be that way.
Yes, we created AI, but what is next after AI, we still like to create things ourselves which is what fuels the creation of the next best thing.
People who pride themselves on using a prompt to get something output miss out on the intellectual stimulation and brain development that comes with doing the work yourself and collaborating with other humans to get the work done.
These build memories, group bonding, and other things that exist in the real world that will never happen if AI does all the work.
You will also notice those that offload everything to AI are horrible at thinking for themselves over time. It has to be a balance, AI has some great use cases, but should not be used for everything as that takes away the natural challenge we as humans need to have.
I have seen the devaluation of what should be done by seeing a coworker say we built this thing. When I say oh you and your girlfriend built it, amazing, then they say no me and AI did it.... I say so you mean you told it to build that thing. It give a very real false since of capability and accomplishment while not highlighting the hard fact that the prompter is not an engineer, architect, scientist and has not built any real technical skill and wastes away sending prompts to a machine while not actually growing their own capabilities.
Then said person gets frustrated because they are stuck in their job, tired due to vibe coding with no visible results on their investment of time except for loss of money they have spent on tokens. Tokens in little to no financial return is what the bulk of people are seeing because the bulk of us that spend money do not want to see the same vibe coding mess that has been spammed everywhere.
There is also the massive security issues that vibe coded apps have at scale which is very hard for a human to maintain, follow, and keep secure. As we don't know why x code is there and the logic of it being there would need to be reviewed by a human that is the only thing in the equation that can actually think.
So use it as a tool, but still continue to do the bulk of the work yourself so you continue to grow is the best route to success over a very long period of time.
I guess you can describe me as anti-AI. I use AI everyday to write code. I can’t deny that it makes me more efficient. And there’s pressure from the people that pay my bills to produce more and more with it. But I still hate it. I hate the code it writes. I hate what is turning my job into. I hate the main companies behind it. I hate all the resources being poured into it. I hate that most of the real profit and benefits from it will just go on to make more delusional tech billionaires the likes of Zuckerberg and Musk instead of actually being distributed somewhat fairly amongst all of us.
But yeah, I can vibe code the same crappy app as millions of other engineers in a weekend. And we will all pay Apple $99 a year to upload the same crappy app to the App Store hoping to catch some of that AI-wave money.
One problem is that people trust the bot. To give you an example. If you submit articles for scientific publication you will get reviews that are at least co-authored by the bot. People defer their own judgement to what the bot says.
I don’t think HN crowd is against AI, this crowd is just more pragmatic than others. They challenge things - in a constructive way most of the times - but this does not mean an anti movement.
I run an AI newsletter on top of HN, I have seen the sentiment from the grass level: I think there is an inflation of Show HN vibecoded products that annoy a lot of people here, but other than that, I think it just pragmatism what comes up.
HN is actually one of the more AI-positive sites around. Some people just generally hate or fear AI because it's called AI and that comes with 100 years of scifi fearmongering baggage and modern fashionable doomerism. A lot of people hate AI because it enables behavior that they don't like: spam, slop, and other low effort content that drains energy and attention but provides no value. Others dislike being pushed to introduce AI into their workflow and tokenmaxxing policies. A few fear job loss or may be unable to find employment in their desired field due to AI tools. I've personally never used AI at all (because it didnt interest me) but have been growing interested due to HN articles and comments extolling it's virtues.
classifying things into two camps here is kind of a mistake. it remains to be proven that AI represents some kind of real general intelligence with reasoning, and that you can give it high level goals and just have it manage your entire codebase. I personally have seen large balls of vibe code that crossed the line of just being huge and unmaintainable, even for the AI.
It's also clear that it's valuable enough at minimum around the edges in prototyping, testing and analysis that it's not going away.
So any reasonable person would understand the situation is still evolving and maybe push back on strong claims of software development being already completely obsolete. is that anti-AI?
edit: you know, I might just be old, and maybe about to be irrelevant. what I don't understand is why that seems to make people so angry. I'm sure the future will sort itself out.
People who are in tech have already started observing that newcomers' skills are diminishing dramatically, and the reliance on AI is getting worse. This naturally triggers graybeards.
Software Engineering was inherently romantic before AI.
People took time to understand the inner world of computers. Some people built brilliant solutions that represented the finest examples of human ingenuity. Knowledge was impressive. Side projects were impressive. The right engineer in the right place could make or break a business. Any industry that operates like this, where human skill and intelligence is valued and a key component of the process is beautiful.
With AI, all that has been snuffed out. No one gives a fuck. There is no skill required now. Talking about code with humans is pointless, talk to your AI. The meritocracy is over, this industry will soon be all about who you know, not what you know. Fuck your resume, your list of skills and experiences are quaint. You really think anyone gives a shit about languages you know or how many features and products you shipped? Anyone can do that shit with a few prompts of an LLM. So how else will you get a job? Know someone? Blow someone? Just hope you win the random selection?
A lot of people aren’t against the AI tech itself, they are against how it will change the tech culture. The old world is gone and the new one looks like it sucks, many people just don’t realize it yet, they are slow boiling frogs. They have not yet experienced being unemployed in the AI era.
There's a huge difference in outcomes depending on the skill of the operator. People who aren't good operators get poor results out of AI and so develop a negative opinion of it. Given operating AI well depends on having excellent written communication and specification skills, and engineers are notoriously reluctant to specify and communicate clearly, there's a significant number of engineers for whom AI produces much worse code than if they wrote it themselves.
Knowing how it works means knowing that it'll always hallucinate and will never be more than the sum of its parts.
That being said, there are positives. It does things today, albeit imperfectly; I use it like a supercharged search engine. It's reinvigorated the AI race and raised such vast quantities of capital that it's more likely new AI techniques will be discovered.
But yeah, the current iteration is just a statistical model that guesses things. With a bunch of tools and probably an expert system bolted on. Definitely not useless, but also underwhelming given the hype.
I find the way AI is pushed for extremely offputting. It is as if someone took thr worst tendencies of tech sociopaths and concentrated then in one place.
The condescention, the attempt to make everyone afraid of jobs, the vision of hellish dystopia that is somehow framed as thing to work toward, the lack of actually positive vision. This is the first programming tool that is forced and pushed as much and negatively.
And also, the forming monopoly, the token based payment that just screams for future frauds and abuse. The political connection, the companies taking advantage of all the work others did just so they can destroy those who created it.
Because, at least numerically, there are more people here who represent labor than capital. AI is a win for capital, loss for labor. That simple. This creates this surprising effect, approximately for the same reason more people support Palestine than Israel here, and Ukraine than Russia.
It's not actually, people outside tech are even more anti-AI than here. Tbh I think AI submissions at least get really hyped here by the system at least.
Outside the tech bubble people either don't care or already associate AI with increased prices.
The HN crowd isnt as much Anti AI that you imagine. I am unsure where you are from but I recommend looking at general public.
some part of that hate is getting mis-directed into datacenters and others, but most if not all people dislike AI.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
And so can your competitors if they wanted to make something that you make and why wouldn't the people themselves use AI to custom-tailor their own solutions Why pay a middleman like you?
Also because you are deploying things faster, you are also dropping them faster. For some people (& ideas) that is considered a plus but I find it grating or missing the point if I create software that I have not written and then leave it asap.
And this has also made a race to the bottom for the attention of people with 20x the products so you have to compete 20x more for eye-balls.
There are also aspects of job insecurity within the normal public regarding AI.
Prototyping as a use-case is something that I have recommended multiple times but with all of this in mind, I must say that the situation looks murky.
This is why we are anti-AI because imo AI as a tech isn't bad but the way society is handling it is really really bad.
A shoe brand adding AI into their company name shouldn't logically change anything but the market is so down bad that it increased its price 4 times iirc and oh btw the shoe brand had sold its brand and everything to someone else before hand so people just bought an empty thing!
We need better societal discourse on the norms of using AI, when to use AI and when not to use AI and to create a social structure to help people from completely and solely relying on such technology and forms of psychosis.
you know how in third grade you have these confusing feelings about a girl and it's upsetting and you pretend you hate her and tease her etc? people here are in love with AI, it's that simple. can't stop talking about it. go ahead and deny it, that will just convince us more.
I think it's because the extremes are simply not equivalent.
On one hand, you have smart people are doing cool and interesting things like dang referenced: breathing life into old projects and cleaning out old bugs in EOL hardware.
And then you have people who use it to do things like "chatGPT can this trailer pull this car?", "gosh, my electric bill is high I should use an LLM to figure this out" or "please write this email to my subordinates".
So yeah, it's cool that LLMs can work on software(. And now, the profession that intersects between highest earning potential and least amount of schooling is able to be done significantly faster, so wages will be diluted faster than the workers will ask for raises commensurate to their output).
But it's more obviously terrible because a large chunk of people are losing their critical and creative thinking abilities rapidly, obviously, and with seemingly no end in sight.
The overwhelming majority of people don't just dislike AI but are aggressively anti-clanker. Tech is a bubble of mass AI psychosis so you might miss this fact, but it very much is the exception not the norm.
For many if us, being anti-clanker in our day to day jobs has an actual negative impact on our careers and livelihoods so we need to shut up and hide the obvious reality anyone with more than 3 braincells can clearly grasp. HN is anonymous so you can see what people actually think instead of what they're forced to pretend they think at work in order to not be punished by our billionaire-owned companies.
We particularly hate the malinche retards like you lining up to glaze AI. Do you think it makes you special or something? That you'll be the ones to survive layoffs and be AI tech leads once the Epstein class pushing clankers cleans house?
> AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,”
Is bad because
> Users [...] care that the product works.
Is true.
If you want your project to work for more than a few weeks/months at a time, you need to put actual engineering effort into designing a product that works. "The AI can fix it when it inevitably breaks" doesn't change the fact that it broke, and now you have to pay for more tokens to fix it.
Well engineered software still breaks, obviously, but the class and severity of bugs is generally a whole hell of a lot less. When you have an engineer who understands the product, fixing problems is faster than naive "pls fix" prompts.
The fundamental misunderstanding is that "code" represents the entirety of a project. Your premise is that code is a means to an end, which isn't wrong, but your conclusion is "therefore code quality is irrelevant". These two ideas put together are extremely naive and outright incorrect.
In many ways, the code is the product. The functionality your users want is literally encoded in the program. It's true that the aesthetic qualities of the code are largely irrelevant to that goal, but the code needs to be correct. Otherwise the functionally is incorrect and your users are unhappy. Moreover, the product needs to stay working indefinitely under practically infinite use cases. The only way that happens is if you put actual engineering effort into designing a system that works and is correct. The way that happens is if you write good, correct, and readable code.
AI generated code is not a bad thing in and of itself.
The bad and objectively incorrect idea is that you don't need to put thought, consideration, or engineering into a project because you have an infinite code machine.
These two notions are not mutually exclusive. You can have hand written slop that blows up on launch. You can have well engineered and architected AI written code. The problem is when people think that code is all that matters and thought is no longer required because any problem can be fixed with more code.
This is something fundamental that comes up in literally every domain. If you want your solution to work for the next ten minutes, you can slap together anything that works. If you want your solution to last a generation, you have to engineer it to do so. Bridges, houses, sewer systems, cars, medicine, code, interpersonal relationships. To do a job well, you have to put effort in and you have to think critically.
The bulk of the "anti-AI" sentiment you're complaining about is not about AI. It is the objectively correct rejection of your attitude that infinite code can replace thought, design, and engineering. Code isn't the problem, it's that you're ignoring everything else that makes a project work. This is plain and simple reality. Having infinite nails does not mean you can build a three story apartment block. Having infinite rivets doesn't mean you can build the golden gate bridge.
There are more articles in the HN feed on AI than any other topic, by far.
A certain amount of the push back is just because of how much it displaces all other subjects.
Another amount is just trying to overcome explicit fan-boi-ism. A year and a half ago, I was a total skeptic. The tech has evolved considerably since then. Now I find it has very strong results in some applications. But there are still certain demographics who want to believe its great at everything, which is just not true.
1) I'm incredibly allergic to hype. To me, LLMs are very technologically impressive. I don't doubt that they're useful for many things – adversarial code review (including finding exploits), refactoring, search and math exploration are some shoo-ins in my view. However, these and other applications speak for themselves. They are impressive. They don't need people running around telling everyone how they should use more LLMs. How "the old ways" are obsolete, etc. Awesomeness does not need a fanclub.
2) Usefulness in some areas doesn't necessarily extrapolate as well as the fanclub seems to think.
3) The fanclub happens to be aligned with some pretty unsavory people, and some powers that have very little regard for our shared planet. This is, of course, not the fault of the fanclub, but many in the fanclub certainly could do a better job distancing themselves from certain people and acknowledging certain regulatory necessities.
4) I think this revolution has revealed a dichotomy in the set of people who enjoy programming: those for whom the end goal reigns supreme, and those for whom the journey is the point. You yourself seem to be in the former group. As a member of the latter, I have to say we feel a bit invisible. We're also often accused of wanting to halt progress so that we can keep doing what we want. I think that's an unfair characterization (I won't go into details of why here).
5) A lot of people in a geeky community like this are naturally skeptical of relying on things that we ourselves can't control. It's part of why the FOSS movement succeeded. This is all very much on a collision course with at least SOTA LLMs.
6) A lot of us do intellectual work. We therefore rely on a functioning system of intellectual property. It seems that a large fraction of the pro-AI crowd subscribe to the idea that passing IP through an LLM can strip it of its original ownership. For points 1-5, I believe we should have a nuanced discussion and try to understand each other. On point 6, though, I think these people have lost their minds. I completely fail to understand how they themselves don't think they'll soon encounter face-eating leopards if their worldview holds water. There seems to be very little acknowledgement of this, and it makes me angry.
> the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster.
Prove it.
> as someone who has spent more than 20 years honing their craft
Proving it should be exceptionally easy. So.. why haven't you done it? Why is it always prognostication about what AI "could" do and never what it "actually did for me?"
> but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
They do. They also might realize that your post is just a means to an end. Is it actually a genuine question or something else entirely?
> I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
Do you realize not everyone shares the values that caused you to say this?
It's way more than code. Sure AI can crank out code at prodigious rates. Gary Tan, Y Combinator's CEO says he ships 37,000 lines of AI code per day [0]
And so can I. (oops)
"In the Beginning" (I was there) people wrote accounting packages in BASIC. It worked, the language allowed rapid prototyping, and out the door quickly, but BASIC lent itself to spaghetti code, and for anything really serious, the programs were too lightweight, and were very difficult to document and maintain, so that bugs could be fixed and esoteric features added (for $$$) without the fix breaking something else. Every damn line of code had to be commented so that someone else could pick it up when you left and maintain and upgrade it.
So, AI's got a mind of its own, and from what I hear, every time you get a solution (code) it's different from the previous. At this point, no solid libraries, such as mathematicians, physicists, medical researchers and yes, rocket scientists can rely on as 100% solid and "bet your life on it"
In addition, the hype has extended AI into more general areas, including "bet your life on it" situations where people are using it for therapy, with fatal consequences at times [1] "Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. Adolescents and Young Adults Use AI Chatbots for Mental Health Advice" (RAND) and it's so flawed.
And also, it leads to cognitive surrender. [2] "AI and the Psychology of Cognitive Surrender" (Psychology Today)
Key points:
• AI subtly erodes our cognitive strength by making delegation seem like self-generated thought.
• After repeatedly turning to AI for answers, the first thing that erodes is tolerance for not knowing.
• True judgment is built by wrestling with uncertainty, not outsourcing discomfort to machines.
In a very brief thread about Siri becoming AltSiri [3] my comments regarding the wide use of a tool that is IMO overextended and using the general population as guinea pigs:
---
I view and use computers as tools. They (mostly) do what I command.
That's because I am by nature a problem solver, and so are others. In fact, if knowledge consists of understanding a particular domain, and wisdom consists of applying knowledge across different domains, creativity of a sort, one of them being that unknown called the future then "button pusher" answers kill my ability to deal with future situations which are not recorded in "The Book of Common Knowledge" (a SNL reference).
When "computers" wrestle control of the situation and solve everything, then, as someone said in the early 20th century "Everything that can be invented has already been invented" then there's now no need for computers at all, since "Every problem can be solved by a chatbot" and no need for creative (genius) things like the famous "Wordless Workshop" that ran in Popular Science and Family Handyman magazines.
Just answer machines. No need to learn anything, nor to create.
Creativity and genius move us forward. That's why we have Hacker News as opposed to those "answer forums"
---
And YES, code that you have to reverse engineer in order to maintain must be understandable and well-architected. If that's "Elegant" then So be it.
I rapidly prototyped in-house apps, quickly and well, and they had a limited life span.
But "enterprise" software isn't going away. And whom [4] do you call when some CTO calls you at 1 a.m. when their business takes a header? Claude?
I am not 100% opposed to AI and I spent multi hundreds of dollars across the major players right now, but I'll see what I can add.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
This sentiment has been with us for a long time, and AI has only made it worse. Many people have experienced the damaging effects that focusing on execution speed have had on our lives, and you would think if AI makes us 10x faster, we could spend half that time actually making programs more performant and secure. But all of the gains always funnel into speed, when we have the golden opportunity to make things better.
Then there are the players that make it. Casey Muratori recently did a video called "It just Happened" where Eric Schmidt gives a commencement speech and washes his hands of the negative things that have happened in it, even though his decisions at Google and the technology he helped create made a lot of that happen. A quote from Casey's Video
> This is a case where someone who had direct decision-making authority during the time period when the very worst most dystopian parts of the technology business model were developed, perfected and entrenched. And he is giving this commencement speech to a group of students who have known nothing but that their whole lives. They're not like me. They didn't know a time before all of this. They didn't experience technology in the 80s or something like this.
One of the most important things in that quote is that there are people who have known nothing but a predatory, privacy invasive technology world. When that is your baseline, new technology that could advance that at 10x speed does not feel great. And now it requires only a couple bad actors and a subscription to make that happen.
At work we are mandated to use AI. That feels bad for a lot of reasons. But one of the worse is having to review AI generated code. I have never liked reviewing other peoples PRs, and now with the speed AI code is created, I could spend the whole day just doing that. So now my job is worse because I have to do more of the part I like the least.
Next, I've been thinking a lot about "the human scale of things". To me that means slowing down, and not consuming things faster than my lizard brain can understand. While I might be able to go 10x faster, unless I'm doing something I've done a million times before, I will not be able to keep that much code in my head. So I quickly lose understandings of projects, and I have to fight hard to rebuild my knowledge.
Lastly, as someone who has "vibecoded" an app, It feels completely impersonal. Yea I had the idea, and yea I had to type the prompts, but producing a whole mountain of code over the course of weeks or months (I've done both) just leaves me feeling empty on the inside. There is still a selfish human component to the programming that I and I suspect others do, and AI takes away from that
I'm not sure what the solution is though. Do we say, if you don't want to take ownership over the bad things that happen then we will down play your part in the good? Do we try to set up organizations that persecute those accountable? Should Eric Schmidt be in jail? Should he be fined? Do we as developers try to use the tools "for good?" I don't know, and I'd love to know what other people have to say on this
Technology is not some pure thing detached from emotions, society, feelings, and consequences.
Code isn't just a means to an end for a lot of people.
More people are now realizing that society has no protections around losing your job - what little power they had is going to be stripped away. Or its going to be used to reduce their power - you know have to work more bc you can use ai to do it! Ive already seen this.
Sure ai in a vacuum is a really interesting thing, oh its cool it can produce code or whatever. The underlying issue however is capitalism.
I have realised that my own "anti-AI" position is little to do with AI itself, and a lot to do with the flatly appalling culture around it, and my reluctance is partly to do with what navigating it has meant for me and people I care about.
I am willing to accept that I must learn these tools, so I am learning the tools. (Essentially: open source, open weights, open culture: the true state of the art.)
Now that I am learning these tools at my own pace, I can evaluate them all as the future boring technology they will soon be.
It has helped me see what I am "anti-", with clarity:
- I am "anti-" the way that tech people have brazenly underestimated the complexity, values, culture, traditions, and principles of the creative industries they have gleefully and derisively fucked up (I have a foot in multiple camps here so I can see this easily)
— I am "anti-" the exhausting burden-shifting of it all. Everyone has new stuff to deal with; every creative community has to develop new rules to stop "fix my AI generated thing" crushes, PR slop, "I asked AI and it said..." spam etc.
- I am "anti-" the tethering of this technology to "e/acc", and the "in the near future we will destroy all your jobs, we're deadly serious about this, sorry, I guess you're fucked haha, maybe learn AI" mentality that it has been riddled with since the earliest point
- I am "anti-" the sort of new tech industry imperial default: hey you can just change your business so it is dependent on pouring money into one of two American cloud startups that have demonstrated little commitment to openness or behaving in a predictable manner, that have subsidised pricing that will one day blow up, and is like Uber did, YOLO-ripping through regulations, legal principles and foreign commercial cultures, and at the end of it will get the government to change the rules so it doesn't have to do anything little people have to do like make a profit, and will leave said litle people holding the bag while they yomp on towards the next thing to fuck up.
In short, I am "anti-" the brazen, entitled, trollish trend of devaluing all of human culture and denigrating anyone who is not in the tech industry as expendable, inferior, quaint, classist etc.; it is like what happens to any social group when the spoilt children of the local overgrown rich-kid come to dominate it.
The technology? A bit less world-shaking than people realise, but possibly worth it for code-generation.
(This is just what I think and I'm not going to argue with your dissent, not least because as a middle-aged British man I am always right)
It's not anti AI, as many other comments point out it's simply heterogeneous enough that it's mostly the "theme" of a discussion dictating which subgroup will be more vocal in a discussion.
In any case I think that some in the anti-AI crowd are simply very defensive.
They have staked all of their careers on the technical part and skills of writing code. Now that they see the average developer (which study indicates can barely write a fizz buzz) outputting software at a great velocity they have a mixture of disgust for the (alleged) low quality of the software and fear for their own careers.
I think the biggest factor is fear. When we first started discussing LLMs a few years ago, it was easy to be amused and reassured when looking closer at all the inaccuracies. The models have improved at an alarming rate. Some of us have spent decades automating the roles of others, and now it turns out our own medicine doesn’t taste very nice. The timing is also terrible because the rise of these tools is coinciding with a dramatic post-COVID tightening of the jobs market.
On the other hand, it’s frustrating to see the trend and tools go towards vibecoding and fully agentic development. Many of us have also been in the business of inheriting (and supporting) code, so it goes against the grain when non-developers produce something without even attempting to understand how it works. Because we’ve been there in the trenches trying to diagnose and debug a serious problem out of hours under pressure, and know how essential it is to have a decent mental model of how it is meant to operate.
As a personal anecdote, I was working in an area with someone business-focussed and not particularly technical. There was some functionality we had been discussing, and one day they wanted to discuss it on a call. They then went on to demo something that seemed to have a working implementation of all the features we had been discussing, and more. I was curious, so asked them to screen share the code… at which point they started to get a bit cagey. I managed to get them to show it to me, and it turned out they had vibed the whole system as a single massive React component. And had no clue how any of the code worked. I told them I couldn’t possibly integrate that massive ball of spaghetti, and we agreed to treat it as a throwaway demo prototype and develop any production system properly.
That sort of mess is inevitable when banging Accept All like the LLM is a casino slot machine.
So personally, I have spent the last few years trying to amplify my skills and experience with these tools rather than bury my head in the sand. Three decades as a freelance consultant developer (with several stack pivots) has taught me that new technology trends don’t simply vanish if they are providing at least some business value. Don’t wait for all this to go away, because that day will never come.
I also think this technology makes us all generalists, unless somebody’s specialist knowledge and skills are very deep and highly unusual. It won’t be so easy to be a backend-only guy who doesn’t touch frontend, when your project stakeholder thinks he could have a stab at it with his free Claude account.
On my journey with this tooling I’ve struggled to find the line between how much I write versus how much I generate, and tried to maintain the balance between velocity and quality. I gravitate towards a workflow of insisting that I understand and approve every diff, and use the knowledge ingested by the LLMs to keep learning, and try to be sensitive to when the convenience has become laziness and there’s a danger of de-skilling. I combine my experience and instincts with the new powertools and feel that we are greater than the sum of our parts. I just have to hope that when this all settles down a bit, there’s a solid market for that type of work rather than being replaced by non-technical vibecoders with only velocity to offer (back in the day we used to refer to them as cowboy coders, but same idea).
I just don't want to read about it. I came here to read about my craft. I want to hear about cool new database tools. Or someone's project that will inspire me to do something. I don't give a single shit about someone's opinion about AI or some crap someone made with it (I've made plenty of personal tools with it; I never posted them here because they weren't interesting, much like all of these Show HN!) It has raised the floor for engineering, nothing more.
Because unlike crypto and other tech fads, it’s hostile:
- job losses are immediately associated with AI in news
- privacy invasions, AI profiling, AI aggregators, etc.
- annoyance, AI chat bubble, AI useless tech support, AI interviews, etc.
- bandwagon “wrappers”, you know, wrap gpt api in saas and try to sell it in subscriptions, flooding show HN
- slops, slops everywhere. Codes, graphics, you name it.
And a lot more. AI to tech world is what smartphones did to internet, flooding non technical people into technical people’s space and basically ruining the fun part. Additionally, it didn’t bring any substantial breakthrough, in the past 3 years or so, did we have any breakthrough innovation in any sector as a result of AI? Barely, so you end up with a lot of noise flooding the internet, bots now are more than humans.
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.
That is one part of the problem. Too many people who are not 20 years seasoned senior developers shipping out products that are nothing more than letting Claude or whatever go rambling unsupervised. And frankly, when I see a project that has Claude in its contributors, I do not want to have to waste time to check if the person directing the AI actually has a clue what they are doing.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Dead internet theory. In the end everything will just be piles of hacked together slop that no human can even begin to grasp and bugfixes or feature requests will get exponentially more expensive and risky.
Firstly, your question is not genuine and it's clear by how you've constructed your post. There's no need to put on a facade of curiosity to make a statement. It would somehow be less antagonistic without the question and just the statement.
I feel you could be confusing negativity towards the application of AI with negativity towards the technology itself.
I use AI frequently and am neutral to positive regarding the technology. However, we have seen a rise in "I built a tool" submissions on here which advertise AI envisioned, AI named, AI marketed, AI designed and AI programmed projects. The submissions contain AI generated descriptions. The authors reply with AI generated responses. Often, other authors reply with AI generated comments.
I am entirely comfortable expressing negative sentiment towards the people promoting projects made using AI in the most lazy, passive fashion possible. It's not a moral stance, it's just a matter of quality control.
Further, CEO's and thought leaders with strong pro-AI stances have repeatedly expressed sociopathic or misanthropic views. Again, I'm comfortable holding negative sentiments towards them.
Lastly, your framing is entirely from the point of view of a product person who is desperate to ship something. This is not necessarily the priority of all people present on here. I'm very happy to express negative sentiment towards the SaaS bros who create little value for their users, the tools they use or the wide community in which they participate.
I think the technology is an amazing scientific breakthrough. I use it myself; it's an excellent tool for certain tasks, and getting better.
I also think that the social implications of the technology, as it is being developed, monetized and pushed by BigTech, are all very negative, and potentially disastrous. And that's even without getting into a host of other issues, like how BigTech stole everyone's data to create these models in the first place.
I'm not anti the technology, but I am anti the way we're going about developing it.
I'm especially irritated by the starry-eyed AI-bros who remind me of the crypto bros, who are either oblivious to the implications of AI as it is being rolled out, or just don't care (because it's shiny or whatever).
Does that make me "anti-AI"? If so, so be it.
It's not unlike how I think nuclear fission is an amazing scientific discovery as an energy source, but I'm also very concerned that we instead used it to create the capacity to destroy the entire planet, and not only that, but that the power to do resides with a few people who I believe are untrustworthy and dangerous. Considering that nuclear power is such a small fraction of global energy production today, can we say that nuclear fission was worth it? Maybe it's because I grew up in the 70s/80s where I experienced that feeling of that we very close to someone pressing that red button (and, in fact, we were). People today seem to have forgotten that, but the bombs and the red buttons have not gone away. And in fact, I would say that I trust Reagan and Brezhnev to make rational decisions more than I do Trump and Putin, so we might even be worse off now (not to mention the other countries who now have nukes).
I despise code written by VI! The only code anyone should ever run is code written with EMACS. With SPACES, not tabs. Because tabs take jobs from space bar pressers, and boil the oceans.
When did HN become Reddit ? This is a real demographic shift I am seeing after a long time hiatus. The people who hate AI are largely those that lean far left and see themselves as liberal progressive.
I also see that and I'd say around Covid / past-Covid. More people became terminally online in those 6-12 months, like another eternal September.
Funnily you will always see some people waving the HN guidelines [1] flag: nooooo, don’t compare this site to Reddit. Yet there is another „rule” in the guidelines about politics being off-topic… which is the biggest symptom of HN turning into Reddit: General, especially US domestic, politics became excessively acceptable to be posted here. That wasn’t the case 10 years ago or more. Of course if you point that out then the „everything is politics” crowd will show up and the „should we close our eyes and ears to all the tragedies happening in the world”. Rinse and repeat.
That’s the problem with ambigous rules and to some extent why I still prefer Reddit. If you don’t like it you make a new sub, find another one etc. At least the bias is clearly known
Reddit has a high rate of global bans btw, you can't just find another subreddit if any of the power mods disagrees with you because you are supercookie-shadowbanned then. You'll think you're not banned but nobody will see your posts.
I don't understand the question. Shouldn't you be afraid and disgusted?
Of course I don't like it. I should dislike it. Anyone saying "it's not that bad" is just describing the fact that it hasn't hit them yet.
You think you're sitting pretty and safe? That's the real fantasy. Not fantasizing about how powerful AI is — fantasizing that you're immune.
Fear and disgust aren't irrational here. They're the normal response to watching the skill you've built your livelihood on lose value. The question isn't why HN is anti-AI — the question is what the people who aren't afraid are using to keep themselves calm.
It's because this place is full of people that are the developer equivalent of someone that constantly tells everyone they drive a manual transmission vehicle and it makes them superior.
Is it really so bizarre that people might be against a technical revolution that threatens their livelihoods? "AI" even in its current regurgative state can do so much stuff that people are paid to do.
Or that we're all talking to an LLM when we think we're talking to other humans (eg in here).
Or that kids are demonstrably taking the easy way out instead of actually learning. Cheating isn't new, but the level of disengagement is biblically awesome. Between that and the stagnant junior jobs market, what hope do they have?
Honestly, what is there to celebrate? Toil is a necessary component of human satisfaction, and we're shifting everything we do to a LLM.
It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant.
You can see from this megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI:
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174.
Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to bring out one side or other.
As for why the community is divided, there's always a temptation to come up with HN-specific explanations, but society as a whole is divided about AI. Surely that is the only explanation one needs. As I've been saying for years, HN can't be immune from macro trends: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Thoughtful comment, and I'd like to add another angle: However meaningful it is to say the community is divided, I also think that individuals are "divided" on the question as well.
I can speak from myself as an example (although n=1): I am incredibly open to machine learning and the advances it brings. On the other hand I am extremely conscious of the fact that the current LLMs do often write bad code, which becomes especially obvious once projects go much beyond "private toy" size. For me personally the consequence is that I try to make my projects even more modular, and the modules even more clearly delineated. With proper guidance, current LLMs work mostly fine when working on isolated modules. That doesn't mean they don't sometimes fail even there, but they also on rare occasions come up with surprisingly clever solutions when you let them loose on a code base, as long as the problem you want them to fix is mostly isolated in a couple of modules.
So long story short, you can be all for LLMs and still be conscious of their shortcomings, and that just vibe coding applications you intend to let loose on unsuspecting customers is probably a bad idea, and possibly outright immoral. We have already seen more than enough examples of vibe coded applications dumping sensitive user data into the lap of anyone who is inclined to pick up a stick and prod them a little bit.
Yes, I’m in this camp. I’ve been pushing forward some personal projects lately using LLMs. At first, I was delighted at how productive I was, prompting. But over time a lot of cracks have started to show. Claude is good at programming “in the small”. It’s good at getting self contained, well scoped tasks done. But it’s bad at large scale system thinking. Over time, every project I’ve gotten Claude to write has become riddled with poor design choices layered on top of one another until even Claude struggles to make forward progress. And at that point, what do you do? You’ve gotta read all its code. Something I’ve learned I should just do from the start to save myself a lot of time later on.
It’s also strangely bad at correctness. You can ask it to write unit tests for a project. Unless you’re careful with your prompting, it will only write the unit tests that it knows will pass.
Generally, these models are amazing tools. But they cannot be trusted to make correct, maintainable software. At least not yet. Maybe in another year or two.
There’s also the uncomfortable reality that a lot of people spent a lot of time learning how to do things that anyone can prompt now…
We tend to ignore that reality but it hangs above all these discussions like a dirty cloud
That does not seem like it should be controversial. I have known for quite a long time that a motivated high school kid could learn to code well enough to be perfectly useful. Especially with popular languages like Python.
This is just an object lesson for everyone who thought all that software guys did was write code that there is just a little bit more to the job than that. Actual developers should already have known.
I'm a divided individual.
I've spent an obscene number of hours learning how to get reliably good quality code out of these things. I'm actually very happy with where the tech is right now and can't imagine ever going back to typing code by hand.
But I absolutely hate how companies and society at large are acting because of this stuff. It feels like all rationality has flown out the window. So I'm just staying in my sandbox with my little toys and hoping the mass psychosis blows over at some point.
As an aside, the variety of examples in that other thread is impressive. Here are some that I noticed:
Fixing my furnace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417845
New software for a retro keyboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418158
Customizing my camper van: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417379
Porting my astronomy app from an old Nokia phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419242
Fixing my kid’s science fair project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419364
Unborking the family printer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419480
Learning to draw anatomy (!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418716
Lowering my electrical bill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417949
Making classic guitar pedals programmable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418006
Avocado armchair guy victory lap: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417658 (<-- oops, wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418274)
Putting an overlay on enemies in a video game: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420635
It just goes on and on. I was a little nervous when I saw that post originally, but it's amazing what happens when a title is somehow just right.
Oh dang, we all know –based on observation of your throughput and availability– that you're AI, you just can't "be nervous".
Jokes aside, thanks for your selection. I had read some, but missed others until your comment.
If it matters, I think there's some people that hasn't decided yet what tribe (pro-AI/anti-AI) they belong to. There's probably dozens of us!
The argument is dialectical. In other words both sides are right.
There is a really important question that is been lost between the anti and pro AI camps which is really answering what AI is good at and what AI is bad at, and what is the root cause of the weaknesses. Is it intrinsic to the models that LLM's use, or the way thy have been trained. In this knowledge is where the gold mine is for the next start up.
For example AI is very good at answering well defined questions, but suffers from premature closure. It will not know if it has all the information to answer the question. So whilst AI will score better than a doctor or a lawyer on a domain question it will not necessarily gather all the evidence needed to answer the question properly. Knowing this whilst using a LLM is a super power.
There is also a large gap Usability issue in that often the LLM does not really know the humans context, in other words a context collapse. It does not know if you specilised in your domain or just asking for fun.
We should be exploring and debating these gaps.
> There is a really important question that is been lost between the anti and pro AI camps which is really answering what AI is good at and what AI is bad at, ...
I think some of this pro/anti AI discussion is really a proxy for something else though. There is another unstated, societal disagreement about personal responsibility and the behaviors of the AI tool users.
It isn't entirely new, as people have always been blaming abstractions which lack agency (society, bureaucracy, "the machine", "the process", "the game", etc.) to conduct themselves in an ethically or logically flawed manner and then shirk responsibility. But, I think it is accelerating dramatically with the way AI agent usage is being adopted. I don't see how this can possibly continue to be normalized without leading to a catastrophic outcome.
Right now, AI tool usage is being applied in ways that would have been considered misconduct, negligence, or fraud if the actors were doing the same thing via traditional outsourcing. People who have a contractual and ethical responsibility to apply analysis, judgement, and oversight are rapidly turning into dumb pipes who just relay content. They essentially phone it in, trying to take credit for apparently moving KPIs "up and to the right". They pretend to themselves and others that they are reviewers and still in control, but when things go wrong they expect forgiveness and for others to lean in and clean up their rapidly spreading mess.
In software circles, many of us are appalled by this slop that is poisoning the well for our existing organizations. It seems like a massive, toxic externality. To us, people aiming their AI agents into our existing collaborations are pretty much flipping a switch to "roll coal", or worse.
And this is why I'm glad we don't have full continuous learning AGI at this point. Humanity is not ready. We neither have the legal system nor the responsibility of handling something that would be capable of agency when turned on.
I don't know if that's specific to AI. It seems accountability levels are in hell right now. Consider anything the president has done and how that would have gone if any other president ever did it. Or anything AI companies do. Or anything Tesla does. Or X.
Don't bring politics into it. We can literally see the software being produced getting worse very quickly since the introduction of LLMs for coding. I expect a wave of data breaches to come soon when the hackers realize how many new holes have been created lately and adjust their tactics.
But it's not just software and it's not just LLMs. Everything was starting to turn to slop before LLMs hit the scene.
There are also madman who get tools and capabilities via AI sane society would never hand anyone. Thos is a liberation for the untamed fringe.
I haven't had the patience or mentality to really absorb "ok but how is this useful" until that thread and your highlighted references. Thank you for the curated highlights, however brief it may be, because it's very hard to find such diamonds without dedicating far too much time wading through the abstract gatekept comments on the topic, in most cases. Real world examples give me much hope!
Lemme give another. I was formerly quite anti-AI but bought a cheap Claude plan just to play around with it a bit. First thing I built with it was this - https://github.com/tylereaves/onscreen-piano, in about an hour and maybe 10 prompt cycles. It replaced, for my specific use case, the 10% of the functionality of an increasingly-unreliable commercial app. That's including building the website, setting up actions for mac and windows builds...
My next project was a 2d game with random terrain, physics, sound, music, multiple levels, a day/night cycle with transitions high score tracking... (not uploaded anywhere, but it works, and I refined it a good bit.). That was more like 8 hours and maybe a 100 prompts.
Here are a few screenshots:
https://imgur.com/a/vhUXBu3
One thing that I have found to make a pretty big difference is using both the latest models and higher thinking levels. Opus 4.8 with thinking on Extra or even Max is genuinely mind blowing. The thing I hadn't really appreciated, having a sort of naive impression formed mainly from using free early versions of stuff like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion was sort of that "Type a big ass prompt and it craps out a result" experience. But Claude is really great at refining from feedback, and it's way more flexible and responsive than I would have ever expected. I can do something like take a screenshot of a small portion of the running app or website or whatever and just say "This button needs to be bigger" or "make this red" or something like that, or even sometimes just "fix this", and Claude both correctly identifies what I'm talking about, and actually does the thing.
here I've found it really, incredibly game changing is my health. I have a pretty, to put it mildly, complex medical profile at this point. I haven't worked in over a year and pretty much every sign is pointing towards permanent disability at this point. Tons of symptoms, long med list, and I live in a smaller town with not great access to care. I'm also autistic and have not the greatest verbal communication, especially under stress or time pressure. I dumped all my info at it, in bits and bobs over several days (Side note... it's memory is pretty limited, but it will quite happily right out everything it knows from a session into a markdown file it can later re-read. I've found it very good for things like screening for drug interactions, or talking through and logging symptoms (and it can log those into human readable markdown files too). Biggest win (other than having unlimited time and interactions) is that it thinks across specilaties, versus the "real world" where the gastro only wants to deal with gastro stuff, neurology only wants to do neuro.
I certainly don't (and wouldn't) use it as a replacement for a doctor, but as an adjunct it's phenomenal. For instance, it flagged a possible drug interaction with a symptom I was having, and then offered to draft a portal message to my GP about it. I have poor executive function so lowering the friction from "type up a message and send it" to "copy and paste" is actually a pretty big deal. Turns something (I probably won't do) later into something I will do now.
It wouldn't surprise me if my very direct, literal, autistic communication style is particularly well suited to interacting with AI. I actually find talking to it rather refreshing as, while of course it's not perfect, it tends to actually respond to what I say rather than the all the assumed subtext NTs tend to expect/react to.
Your last paragraph hit home with me. I also find it refreshing to be clear and direct, have the intent be directly understood, and have a pleasant, good faith, high signal conversation as a result. I hardly ever experience that with humans (I recognize that that’s not ‘everyone else’s fault’ of course).
I am very optimistic about people using LLMs to explore their medical issues. Human bodies are complex and doctors are time- and intelligence- limited. An LLM can be a really useful partner.
Dear god no. ML is useful for medicine and has been for some time. LLMs in medicine are 100% malpractice and should be treated as such. LLMs << ML
On the medical pieces, a very nice agentic medical AI worth looking at is https://biomni.phylo.bio
I think the community is divided. But I think it’s less A/B and more a spectrum. There are plenty of more balanced comments rolling in from people who’ve been using it for a while and have experienced both the advantages and disadvantages.
E.g., agentic development is great for solo projects and prototyping, but can become overwhelming alarmingly quickly when you’ve got multiple devs involved, especially if they’re not all super-disciplined and consistent about how they use their agents. And we’re all learning how to deal with that.
Thanks for putting it this way. I have to admit I was really astonished by the question as I feel like HN is very much pro-AI at least in the sense that there is more AI promotion on HN than there is AI acceptance among people in the real world. It's been months if not years since most of the posts are about genAI, and in a largely favorable way. It's actually quite fascinating that for some people it feels like the opposite.
I hang around a few developer-centric communities, and my gut feeling is that HN is by far the most pro-AI. It's somewhat rare to find people all-in on "developers just got replaced by AI, pick a different career field guys" anywhere but here. Maybe there are just more developer-adjacent types on HN.
I do find it somewhat amusing to read the commentary here and ponder why some of these people are wildly enthusiastic about making software development a dead field but simultaneously don't think it's also going to put them out of work. Programmers may be a lucrative target, but LLMs are "good enough" at many other knowledge disciplines too.
I think generally, extremist views tend to echo further than nuanced ones. This goes for any major topic really: whether it's politics, religion, arts, etc.
The AI discussion on HN is exhilarated by the fact that it can have a tangible impact on people's lives on this forum. You add to this the possibility of a minority extracting an unfathomable amount of wealth from the hype train and we lose all hope for a moderate discussion.
My own views on this are rather boring. After having tried various models, I've reached the conclusion that it adds minor benefits to my workflows, but I don't have to lose sleep from Claude reaching singularity anytime soon..
I'm using Claude Code at this moment to do some work for me. It's doing a pretty great job, if I'm being honest. It's going faster than I would, overall, but it's not some kind of 10x magic. It does things faster and in some cases better on the first shot, but it misunderstands and needs guidance on plenty of things, tweaks, etc. Even if I don't necessarily tweak the actual code and just ask Claude to go clean up it's shit, that still takes time.
I think the folks who say 20-40% faster is typical are definitely in the right ballpark. And that's best case. There are plenty of times where my biggest blockers are not anything Claude will ever be able to fix.
Maybe the result of this whole experience will be grudging appreciation from management that software developers aren't just coders. Maybe. I'm an optimist, though. And my manager already knew that.
I find it somewhat encouraging to hear that the devoted AI shills have not managed to generate the artificial consensus / synthetic consent that they seem to have been intending to.
While I agree that it's "divided", I wouldn't say "simply". Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023. It is the only subject where, when I have shared that I built something with it, I have gotten derogatory comments claiming I am inexperienced, unintelligent, and that the thing I built (a hobby project) is unimpressive or embarrassing. This has never happened in the decade+ I have previously been on HN, happily sharing other things I built with other interesting technology -- and many of those things were much worse than what I built with AI!
I did see your thread earlier today and I admit was pleasantly surprised. Maybe HN is turning over a new leaf? I hope so. I honestly considered switching to X it was getting so bad :P
I would say that HN was at least as sharply negative during the cryptocurrency craze. I recall various submissions asking "Why is HN so anti-crypto?" as well.
The false equivalency in this explanation is off the scale.
It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift; it was that you didn't need to be an experienced developer to confirm that 99% of the "web 3.0" nonsense that what was being thrown around literally made no technical sense.
You might reject LLMs on principle, or find that they don't work for you. But I think we're well past any debate of whether they do anything at all, which is exactly where crypto was sitting at peak hype.
> It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift
Was it universally obvious? Hindaight is 20/20 There were many block-chain startups funded, and even FAANG got caught up in the hype. FWIW, I was a crypto sceptic, but I had many arguments with believers online and in my social circles. Side note: a crypto enthusiast colleague bought a house off their crypto gains, it may be a grift, but a small number of crypto-believwrs got really wealthy, and you're not going to convince them.
> Was it universally obvious?
Yes. Crypto was never productive.
But nice that your buddy financed a house with other people's dumb money.
Crypto is the best way to pay for illegal things online, which is a really big business.
In fact as the act of paying itself has become more restricted, it's often also a good way to make illegal payments for completely legal goods and services.
Crypto also obviously does something at all. If anyone was saying it didn't, they were just as delusional as people saying that AI does nothing at all.
Crypto has no technological merit compared to earlier solutions, except "permissonlessness", which enables the circumvention of rules and regulations (at huge expense). But, sure, enabling crime is "doing something".
It solves a CS problem called the Byzantine Generals problem. That problem was thought to have no solution before blockchains were created. The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.
Enabling crime is massive. You have to remember that "crime" includes things like "selling abortion pills", "selling LSD", "selling ivermectin" and of course "supporting Palestine Action"
I say "simply" because, as I mentioned, it's an invariant—possibly the most consistent phenomenon we've observed on HN [1]. I admit I didn't add anything to substantiate that! it would have been too much of a digression. (Not that that ever stopped me before...)
The interesting question is, if it's so consistent, how can it go unnoticed for so long (as you've reported) and/or get perceived as one-sided ("HN is so anti-A!") when in fact it is almost always two-sided ("HN users are divided on A")?
The answer is that what you notice depends on how you feel [2]. If you like A, or (more precisely) if you dislike anti-A, you are far more likely to notice anti-A posts. Not only that, but you will weight them more heavily, meaning they will make a stronger impression on you than the median post—even the median pro-A post.
These two variables, frequency and impact, combine to produce a strong picture of the site as anti-A—so strong that people often use universals like "always" and "never" when describing it. In reality, HN is a statistical cloud, but your pre-existing feelings determine which datapoints you happen to notice (i.e. frequency) and how strongly they affect you (i.e. impact). [3]
This is why people with opposing views feel the same about how biased HN is, but in opposite directions: A is certain that the site is anti-A, and B is equally certain that it's anti-B. It's simply (<-- that word again!) that their feelings cause them to notice different datapoints. Abstract out the directional bit (pro- or anti-A or B), and their perceptions become isomorphic.
Unfortunately for us, HN is more afflicted by this than other sites of comparable or larger size, because all the others organize the community into silos [4], meaning they're sharded by social group (e.g. Twitter's follow lists), or by content (e.g. Reddit's subreddits), and so on. HN is non-siloed, meaning everyone is in the same place: all the As, all the anti-As, all the Bs, all the anti-Bs - we're all roaming the same threads and bumping into each other. Where you are more likely to run into datapoints you find disagreeable, you are more likely to feel that the community is biased against your view, and - what's worse - more biased the more strongly you feel!
Once or twice a year, some reply I'm writing gets hijacked by my sadness about this and turns into a digressive lament. Why? because although I believe that in reality HN is somewhat (<-- not to exaggerate!) more thoughtful and tolerant than other communities of the same or greater size, the dynamic I've just described means it ends up being perceived as less so. [5]
I believe this is why one so often hears about how toxic, nasty, negative HN is—not that it isn't those things! but the relative level of them gets distorted. Humans simply can't take very much of what we dislike and disagree with before resorting to generalization and other internal barriers. This is essentially an immune response. It often takes only a handful of datapoints (3, or 2, or maybe even just 1) before the impression burns into the retina and becomes permanent [6].
This is most painful when the topic is close to one's heart—for example, when one's own work is being discussed. In cases like that, it doesn't take much before one feels wounded, and such impressions rarely go away.
In one case I saw, some people were agreeing about how terrible and mean Hacker News is, and to prove the point, one of them linked to a vile reply he had received. That reply, however, was from Twitter—not from HN at all! He hastened to add "HN is the same"—somewhat self-refutingly, since if it were true, an actual example would not have been hard to find. In reality, while such vile comments do show up on HN, the community quickly flags most of them, and moderators eventually flag most of the rest.
That is an example of the skew in perception I'm talking about, and even though I felt terrible about it, I don't mean to be critical, because I understand where it comes from. It comes from fundamentals [7]: specifically, how HN's design interacts with human hard-wiring. Because those are fundamentals, this is not going to change, nor can it be affected by argument.
Or rather, it could only change if we changed the foundation of HN's design—in this case, by sharding the site into silos—but (a) I'd be scared to tamper with DNA at that level, and (b) if the above is correct, then it's good for the world that this place exists. It just can't expect to be perceived as such [5]. Thus ends this season's lament.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] I don't mean "you" personally, of course—everyone does this. It's a double whammy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion, sometimes described in this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect.
[3] Lots of past explanation here if anyone wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[5] I wrote a thing about this a few years ago, if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
[6] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[7] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
IMO it's because AI outputs don't pass "is this corpses" test and trigger uncanny valley response. There's something in AI that instantly cause unsuspecting viewers to become alert and hostile.
At the same time, cut raw steaks don't alert people in the same way as corpses do, and that is a double standard, in a way, I guess.
It is just a few people. Any time people are unpleasant to others or post in an uninteresting way I add them to a personal list that filters out their comments. Rapidly the site becomes more usable. The negativity is from a few highly polarized individuals.
I know others also do this - though often they are kind enough to auto-fold.
> ... I add them to a personal list that filters out their comments.
I think this would be a very useful feature to add to HN itself. I nearly emailed dang a few weeks ago to suggest it myself rather than roll my own browser extension to do it, though maybe it's my own responsibility to roll my own software too.
The Gearspace forums (vBulletin based?) have an "Ignore User" feature that helps make that forum vastly more tolerable.
There's probably a lot to say about it's merits or problems, but given the demographics (or my perception of them) is largely "software people" can you really be that surprised or angry given that this could snuff out a _lot_ of people's livelihoods like nothing we've probably seen in our lifetimes?
At least in my case, I don't think that's where the anger is coming from.
If LLMs were truly able to replace me, I'd be disappointed, sure - I've spent 30 years developing mastery of a craft, it's sad to see it go. But I'd resign myself and move on.
But that's not what makes me mad.
I get angry because I simply don't believe it is true. I have a reasonable math and tech background to where I grok how this stuff works at a fundamental level, and I'm utterly unconvinced that it is performing any sort of reasoning.
Call it a stochastic parrot, a token extrusion machine, whatever, but these things are not thinking or reasoning.
That doesn't mean they aren't useful- they clearly are very useful for many tasks.
My anger comes from the global attempt to replace things that require human reasoning with LLMs.
There's this push to use this stuff way past the point of "helpful accelerator" to "why do we need programmers/doctors/lawyers/etc..."
I think it's incredibly dangerous.
So while the tool is useful, I don't think we've figured out how to use it appropriately. For all the short term appearance of productivity boost it provides (whether this is real in a total-cost sense is still an active question), I think the risks to skill development and quality outweigh those benefits in many cases, and are being overlooked.
I think there's definitely groups on both sides, and I feel like it's similar to cryptocurrency a few years back. There's people really into it, and in response there's people really against it. On a smaller scale, see for example rust. In contrast there isn't as much vitriol against, say, world hunger because there isn't people very obviously pro-that to push against.
Same experience. But that's simply because you think you're experienced but the OP knows that you're just deluding yourself. Just kidding.
More seriously, I think this is a true reflection of a cultural phenomena. All discussions have become more polarized. There is a more of a generational divide in perception and discussion. I would also say there is a loss of nuance.
To complicate this even further there is a real diversity of experiences depending on many factors.
I mean we had flame wars on USENET but somehow it feels to me that most discourse even on controversial topics was civil. When we had tabs vs. spaces flamewars (or whatever the fun topic of the day was) everyone knew they were in a flame war (and often acknowledged that). Or maybe I'm just being nostalgic/biased.
I see the anti-AI sentiments in my work place. I think people are genuinely worried/concerned and don't know how this is going to change our world or even where we are exactly. This is also spilling into adjacent areas where people have strong emotional responses to (the rich, the economy, job market, politics, environment etc.).
>I mean we had flame wars on USENET but somehow it feels to me that most discourse even on controversial topics was civil.
I think this is probably a combination of nostalgia and/or USENET prior to 1990 or so?
> There is a more of a generational divide in perception and discussion. I would also say there is a loss of nuance.
The youth are facing an enormous employment crisis. Many have found themselves completely unemployable through no fault of their own.
And then AI leaders go around to commencement speeches to rub it in.
There's no loss of nuance, the situation has just escalated a lot.
And then AI leaders go around to commencement speeches to rub it in.
This is a good example of anti-AI bias.
This didn’t happen. Out of thousands of commencement speeches across the country, a handful of speakers, none of whom are “AI leaders”, mentioned AI in passing and students booed.
So yeah, I’d say there’s a loss of nuance.
"This didn't happen, except for that few times where it did happen and massively blew up in the media"
That you fail to understand why those students took such great offense to what was said at those speeches doesn't make it "anti-AI bias".
Those students reacted like that, and I used it as an example, because it's very emblematic of how tech companies and leading figures act.
I'm specifically saying that AI leaders didn't go around making pro-AI commencement speeches. At all.
The absolute closest example is Schmidt, who was last CEO of Google more than a decade before ChatGPT launched, and is now CEO of an aerospace company. No other "AI leaders" gave commencement speeches where they were booed.
So you're blatantly lying and spreading misinformation to feed a negative narrative about the companies and executives in the AI space, then doubling down when called out. Reminds of Vance saying that he's willing to "create stories" in order to draw media attention to his cause-du-jour.
For the record, besides Schmidt being booed, there was Gloria Caulfield (property development), and Scott Borchetta (music production). Then Jeremy Scott (fashion) tore up his AI-written speech and got cheered for that, and Ronny Chieng (The Daily Show) got cheered for saying "fuck AI" several times.
Exactly.
Quite recently, he was the chair of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Commission_o...
Pretending he's some AI nobody is a bit goofy.
Pretending he has any real insight into AI is also a bit goofy. Listen to him speak. Even his own stories about his time at Google don't show himself in a good light like he thinks they do. There are multiple, multi-billion dollar products that Google made where they had to trick and lie to him to get them released. And he still tells those stories as if he was right to try to kill those products. He's an executive and has no real expertise or insight into LLMs or AI.
Quite recently? It ended in 2021, again, before ChatGPT and this latest boom. I doubt anyone today would hear “AI leaders” and think about Eric Schmidt, no disrespect to the man intended.
Its divided because its the first time the previously more class unaware techbros have been critically challenged by the consequences of their actions - oh shit we might lose our jobs.
10 years ago "Disrupting X" was seen as a good thing. Now its come for them its a different story.
100% this. Disrupting and killing the jobs of others is good. Now that we are killing our own jobs, disruption is not so good anymore.
I suspect there is a lot of selection bias going on as well.
Forums like this, reddit, X, readers of news sites etc tend to be filled with people that don’t have much going on in their lives, have a lot of free time to comment, are less likely to exploit the benefits of AI, and more likely to have simpler skills sets that are replaceable with AI.
Talking to people in real world, I would say the overwhelming majority are excited by AI and interesting in using it more rather than less.
Probably not the best way to reduce complicated feelings.
Do those people not deserve to be able to live and survive or are they all just replaceable?
Everyone's replaceable in capitalism
Did You build it? Or did you manage the build of it? Could you have done it without AI? If not, you didn't do it.
A drill is just a tool. You can screw a screw without one. AI is just a tool, you can do things without it, too.
But AI applied in a manner you could not otherwise complete on your own is not a tool. It's a slave. None of the ideas or creations presented in that instance are your own. You just cheated someone out of a paycheck they may have otherwise earned.
Your comment is a perfect example of the low-quality reflexivity negativity AI I am talking about. Yes, of course I built it! Why do I have to defend myself? What does it even mean that I "cheated someone out of a paycheck" -- it's my own hobby project!
Yep. It has a lot to do with which comment threads you click on. I often read one and think "wow, I can't believe the people here are so negative" and then on another on the same front page at the same time and think "wow, I can't believe the hype here". It's just different people participating on different articles.
It’s not even a dichotomy, A vs B, especially when you consider “AI” is incredibly poorly defined. There are many new technologies available, and I have nuanced opinions about all of them.
I’m happy that my friend who works in plastics manufacturing can move his monstrosity of an Excel spreadsheet to something more predictable and maintainable. I’m deeply annoyed by my coworker who’s trying to put a chatbot in our UI.
"Divided" is a bit of a strong word.
The true state of things is that the anti-AI folks are FAR more vocal about their opposition, meanwhile, the people who like AI are busy being productive and accomplishing a truly staggering amount of work.
The 84% stack overflow "currently use AI" number from a _year_ ago almost certainly still holds true today. Just look at the absurdly long and very incomplete list of "tainted by AI" projects that the list-making activists are maintaining over on Codeberg. Software is not "divided", it is simply being occupied by angry protesters.
Hacker news skews significantly older and whiter, and the blogs and such that circulate come primarily from the "established" English-speaking old-guard "white people" software days. Opposition to AI is highly concentrated among the white, first world, left-wing, established engineers.
This group punches far their weight in terms of the volume of their activism compared to the actual percentages of humans on earth.
That's all it is. Anti-AI hatred is just a noisy echo-chamber of those who are privileged enough to not need to modernize their skills.
I'd push back a bit on the assumptions here, partly because (as I just spent a rabbit hole's worth of time describing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800), such perceptions are strongly conditioned by one's pre-existing feelings, but more because (to my view at least) HN obviously is divided on AI. That is, HN gets plenty of comments criticizing AI for various reasons, and plenty of comments expressing positive views too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 has almost 1000 comments now, and by far most are positive.
You make a good point about the asymmetry in content: the negative ones are mostly just critical, and often denunciatory, while the positive ones are less likely to be generic, and more likely to be about specific work people are doing. That's not a new dynamic, though, and long pre-dates what today is called AI.
Thanks for pointing it out. I guess HN is at worst ( or best ) 70% Anti AI. I personally put it roughly 50/50. There are plenty of post and comments suggest how AI is good for something and but also pointing out its flaws, rather than simply just Anti AI.
I can tell what HN is Anti though, in 80/ 90%+ if not higher. Ads, Oracle, Facebook, MPEG Codec, MySQL,
Well, it looks this post has already been flagged down onto page 7.
And IIRC, the same thing happened to the "oh shit" moment thread you linked to. Did the mods have to intervene to get it back on the front page?
HN might not be anti-AI, but I feel like the way flags are weighted by the ranking allows some users that are extremely anti-AI to create the impression that it is.
EDIT: And now it's back.
Not flagged. It set off the flamewar detector. We monitor those and eventually reverse the false positives. Mostly.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Ah, thanks for the clarification. :)
I think society is divided on AI because we've let the billionaire tech bro class rawdog power resources and AI deployments and I welcome the pushback on those 2 axes. The water nonsense OTOH saps my will to live.
But also, the algorithms push enragement equals engagement and that favors pushing content to the product (us) that enrages the product to drive up their engagement numbers so they click on more ads.
Meanwhile, the medical applications of AI alone are astounding. But that doesn't get people mad so it doesn't get promoted as near as much as the latest clueless word salad from a rich dude. Election season is going be to very interesting this year IMO.
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-paradox-of-medical-ai-i...
The power and water requirements of AI DCs narrative is entirely nonsense. It doesn't hold up to even a cursory analysis on the back of an envelope.
And medical advances of AI are from other ML algorithms, not LLMs. They use similar technology and can run in the same DCs, but they aren't the same and people don't really have the same opinions on them both.
When people complain about"AI" they almost always mean general purpose LLMs and media generators. Nobody is complaining about OCR, MNIST trials, or machine translation.
Not in my experience. The rabbit hole is 9/11 truther deep here. And anything that isn't a mindset about either letting the billionaires billionaire the crap out of us or the American Butlerian Jihad gets shot down by both sides.
What's my position? GenAI will be subsumed into media toolchains. And reasoning is clearly no longer a hallmark of sentience or consciousness. That's going to take some time to sink in. Token costs are only going to drop further from here: https://www.navyaai.com/reports/ai-cost-report-token-prices-.... And there's opportunity to build businesses to bring down the rest of the costs in the article I cited.
Also, I'm with Martina Scorsese and Dua Lipa on GenAI. And having worked in and around Hollywood in the past, it blows my mind that such a corrupt oligarchy would be considered worth protection. Above the lines thrive while below the lines would be borderline homeless without the guilds. And the ones outside the guilds are.
Finally, build datacenters in the Dakotas, the Texas panhandle, and any other place far away from people where power can be generated onsite by whatever means suit the location best that's not coal.
Also, "AI good" and "AI bad" are very silly camps to describe a topic.
You might have seen some comments by me receiving votes lately that some might classify as anti-AI. I'm not for banning it, I use it at work and at home, I learn about it.
Here a few positions I hold, for example:
- There is a fundamental deviation between what we should be seeing if we were surrounded by 100x enabled engineers and reality. We're not seeing previously untackable, complete open source projects pop up everywhere like someone coding an open-source, iphone-compatible OS in a year, or companies providing 10x more. Just POCs and small apps. LLMs have been around enough that this is pointing towards inflated claims of success, even if they are actually useful, which I'm not denying.
- LLMs provide users with a strong psychological reward (making mental workload disappear). They do so only sometimes, in a chance-based outcome. Anyone with a passing interest in psychology should realize how similar that is to the mechanics of gambling, and thus how risky it is that a user misjudges when it is reasonable to use them. Mind that I'm not saying that the tool isn't worth it, just pointing at a source of major deviation between perceived and actual outcomes that few people consider.
- There are a lot of signals that humans rely on that are broken by LLMs. "Well formatted text -> text written with careful consideration" no longer works. "Large document -> significant effort" does not hold. "Good grammar -> educated speaker" is broken as well. "decent code practices -> the PR is safeish to approve" no longer true. Some of these barriers being broken can be enablers for people, but on the whole this is going to disrupt society in fundamental and unpredictable ways.
- I think the industry is drawing unreasonable and dangerous conclusions from the advent of AI. As some commenters pointed out, if code generation is now cheap we should be seeing engineers freed to deal with non coding tasks like automated QA, user research, architecture or design, and being more able to handle bug resolution for example. We are instead seeing a push for _creating code faster_, and proposing ignoring tasks like review and quality control in pursue of speed, which is fundamentally inconsistent with speed being less of a problem. To use a flawed analogy, if your car is now 10x as fast you should be putting way more attention to how you steer, rather than asking everyone to go pedal to the metal.
- LLMs products have the potential to be extremely user hostile if enshittified. We could have probabilistic insertion of promoted material. We could have subtle political steering of people. We could have a model's performance reduced without much SLA recourse. We are not tackling those issues before they appear when it is obvious that they will appeare, and society will pay the price.
If you read with attention you'll see that no point of mine is arguing against AI usage. I don't want to bury my head in the sand and pretend LLM's don't exist or are useless. I don't want to ban them. I'm just not willing to fully allign with marketing speech and turn my brain off.
Yes, the binary comments are more predictable and therefore less interesting. Mixey ones, like what you've posted here, are much better. (That probably applies to any divisive topic, of course.)
Your comment reminds me of another important variable: time. We're still at the beginning of figuring out what these tools even are, let alone how best to use them.
I echo almost all of your points daily and it’s incredibly refreshing to see a level-headed response like this.
Tbf I think this is probably the way most people see it at the moment from my discussions with others.
The static comes from people who have essentially staked their entire reputation on AI one way or another.
"The static comes from people who have essentially staked their entire reputation on AI one way or another."
I have a suspicion that online, those are mostly bots.
Some of it is TESCREAL ideology. Tech circles have been inundated with quasi-religious belief surrounding AI for most of the 21st century, which then biases tech enthusiasts towards extremist positions on LLMs.
Saying that society is divided on AI therefore HN, being society, should also be divided is an absurd take.
I expect the people in here to be domain experts, understand simple concepts like closed loop water cooling, deterministic vs non-deterministic systems, maybe some basic concept of how a GPU and vector math works and most notably the exponential pace that it’s becoming both more capable and more efficient.
Unfortunately, like OP that’s not the case and it’s the same talking points I could read in my local paper. Then everyone’s talking points change in unison like they are waiting on the latest instructions from headquarters.
You are getting negative feedback, maybe because of tone; but I am up-voting for the message which is in line with HN guidelines and expectations:
1. Comments should be thoughtful even if not coming from a place of expertise
2. Better comments have something useful to share behind the passion
3. "Me too" comments are usually not as interesting to read and rarely add to the discussion
I have personally been both praised and attacked for making detailed, reasoned comments. It's more about the mood and attitude of the reader(s) that determines which way it goes.
AI is a complicated issue because it is creating change very quickly--as many predicted it would 20-30 years ago--and that change is still accelerating.
In your words, the change is exponential--and this may indeed be demonstrated by the performance data over the past several years. It's hard to contemplate or predict when that change will plateau, but we definitely aren't there yet.
The ultimate impact on the world society is likely to be profound. Whether you like it or hate it, it is happening. Those who lose a job to AI may find that their mother is saved by a medicine or doctor aided by AI. It's complicated.
Perhaps there are ways to legislate compromises into its use or expansion in some parts of the world--but it is likely a technology that has at least as much positive potential for humanity as it does negative--so legislation is going to have to address the good and the bad and no country is an island unto itself.
Thanks for the opportunity to comment.
I find that the more you know about a subject the worst impression you will have of AI. What it knows is kinda shallow and basic, and if you have a more difficult question the answers are confidently random.
That's something we've probably all noticed - Gell-Mann amnesia à la LLM.
But the opposite is also true: shallow basic knowledge about almost anything, instantly available in a form that directly applies to one's problem, is an incredible resource. Not only can you get pretty far on that alone, it also gets you moving in a way that inertia would otherwise have prevented. That's my experience at least.
> the exponential pace that it’s becoming both more capable and more efficient
"Exponential" is very clearly not true.
Except on one side, it's apparently perfectly acceptable for folks to fulminate, make llm generation accusations, and brigade with minimal to no moderation attempts.
I'd need to see links to specific examples to say anything concrete, but from long experience I can say two general things with high confidence...
Edit: scratch that - I was going to link you to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018271 but it turns out you were the user I was replying to there! I don't suppose repeating it would help.
Because I enjoy writing code. I enjoy being paid for writing code. And I don't enjoy writing prompts for AI.
Code is not just a means to an end. Code is a means to my happiness. Users might not care, but I do care. I love good code. I feel great when I can write good code.
I won't say that I don't care about users. I do. But I care about me, first and foremost. And AI threatens to remove my lifestyle and workstyle. That's why I'm bullish against it. And at the same time I use it, because I feel forced to use it. This is rat race.
At the same time I can say that I don't care about delivering product 10x faster. Actually I'd prefer to deliver product 0.1x faster.
Yes, I understand that contradicts to the business side of view. Well, I don't care. I'm not getting paid percentage of product sales. I'm getting paid flat salary and I care about keeping it and live good life in the process.
I'm being completely honest about it. Maybe it'll help someone to understand that point of view.
Thanks for the honesty. I think this is a very useful point of view precisely because it is explicit about being based on personal motivations, and that is completely fair.
That said, as a minor wording point, I'm not sure "I'm bullish against it" is the right framing here. "Bullish" usually implies a positive expectation based on some thesis or evidence. In this case, something like "I'm resistant to it" seems more accurate.
I agree this is a change that affects every software engineer's lifestyle and workstyle. But I think it is important to separate personal motivations from critical, objective analysis when discussing new technologies (e.g. whether for or against AI) so the discussion remains valuable instead of becoming emotionally polarized.
I am sympathetic to this point of view. But also: I love reading books. But I'm aware that nobody will pay me to read books.
In much the same way, like you, I love writing code. And there was a time when "writing code" was a close enough approximation to what people wanted to pay me for that I could get paid for doing this thing that I love.
Unfortunately, this is no longer true. This thing that I love is now no longer the thing that people pay me for. It never really was. People paid me for solving problems using software. It's just that the thing I liked to do, the act of writing code, was the only way to accomplish that.
But now it just isn't. Now I can create useful software more quickly and better without actually writing much code. And that does suck, I do experience it as a loss. But I also experience it as a great opportunity.
Longshoremen are anti-cranes. Same thing.
The very premise of your question is very questionable.
> Over the past six months, there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
At the same time, there hasn't been a single day without several AI hype posts. The notion that HN has turned into an outlet for anti-AI sentiments does not match my experience at all. In fact, many users are already tired of the constant influx of vibe coded "Show HN" posts, AI model discussions and prompting recipes.
Also, AI is not only about the ability to generate lots of code very quickly. The potential (and actual) negative effects in certain fields and in society as a whole are very real and it's reasonable that people want to discuss them.
I call these AI tools "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet". They belong to american companies which can cut off your access if american government doesn't like your country's government. They fed from the free internet that many of us grew up in, store it in humans unreadable form and sell you access to it. If some day claude starts to spit out compiled binaries instead of code nobody will notice, and we'll essentially get proprietary cloud-hosted compiler that most in the world depends on to build software. With built-in telemetry and backdoors and clause in license that allow full overtake of your business if provider wants it ofc. It's a great shift from the internet we all know and love towards the new subscription-based access to world's propriatary knowledge base. It's a perfect "mind control" tool as well - you don't need USAID, "free media" and stuff like that in other countries when all people there including politicians ask chatgpt everything from meaning of life to recipies of pancakes. Once you see these political and philosophical dimensions it's hard to unsee how claudecode running on my PC won't turn into a weapon some day. But in blissful ignorance it's fun to use, and companies love it for the promise of replacing people. Amen
The argument that LLMs are "feeding me back free and open internet" seems to skip the most useful aspect of the tool.
I could never, as an individual read, let alone synthesize and make decisions with, the amount of information on the internet. The LLM takes that free and open information and feeds me back novel information based on that free information. It gives me ideas, opinions, and hard data based on that information.
It's the most powerful information synthesizing tool in existence. I don't find the argument that "it's built on free information and sold to you" fair or plausible at all.
It's like saying you're free to make your own bottled water. Technically true, but in reality not.
Nothing about the information it feeds you is novel. It's all stolen repetition of someone else's work.
You forgot the push forward towards more destruction of the planet we depend on to live, and the centralization of wealth in addition to the one of power.
To OP's point, I am curious why a tech forward crowd would consider AI-training/inference anywhere close to a significant contributor of greenhouse gasses? Datacenters are like a tiny blip on emissions plots [1]
I think AI is a convenient foil to get people whipped up and out to vote, but I know HN is not the forum for that. The technical data clearly says that closed-loop water coolers don't use that much water and energy use is a function of a counties energy infrastructure choices not the existence of demand.
But instead we're going straight to destruction of planet as the exact verbiage, which seems way out of whack.
[1]: https://www.wri.org/insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas...
Are currently, but at the scale AI corps are trying to deploy at they'll be the largest user of electricity.
But we have figured out how to create electricity without destroying the planet. It's true that we need to actually do that, and that we are to a large degree not doing so at the moment. But that's a problem we already needed to solve. It does make it more important to solve that problem, but it also improves the incentives to solving it (electricity is more valuable now).
They basically undo all the reduce renew recycle efforts we've been doing since the 90's
Reduce will never happen unless population falls. Not in a big way.
It should be: reuse, recycle, renewable. First try to reuse and make things more reusable. Then try to recycle. Last, substitute renewable for non renewable sources for things like energy.
And not even then with private planes being just as bad
> Datacenters are like a tiny blip on emissions plots
Maybe in 2023, but what about now?
A late 2024 international report https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from... predicts that by 2035, datacenter electricity usage will increase from 2024's 1.5% to 2-4.4% of global usage. Currently about 1/3 of datacenter electricity usage is for AI (0.5% of that 1.5%), though that will presumably increase.
You think we’ve built that many data centers next to coal fired power plants that the emissions have gotten anywhere close to the emissions of all the iron smelters and the billions of people that commute in gas cars?
We could triple the data centers since 2023 and run them all on coal or natural gas and then maybe they’d even show up as a significant slice on these pie charts.
Our bubbles have blinded us to the scale of the real problem.
I'm curious what part of the charts would data centers fall under?
I'm assuming it would be under the Energy emissions category, but I didn't find anything particular around data centers or "technology" or "internet" or something like that.
Would it fall under "Electricity and heat"? Or just general "Buildings"? or "Commercial buildings"? Or am I way off base?
Yea, it would fall under Commercial Buildings, which is a cut of a cut of a cut under Energy use. Less than a quarter of all building energy use, residential building use being much larger (probably just due to absolute numbers).
The wealth comment is valid. The resource stuff is overblown. Look up the energy cost of AI vs ordering a burrito on DoorDash.
Interesting point! How about if instead of a burrito I order yakisoba or chicken tendies?
That would be a world where there is very little value in local models. I don't thinkt that will be the case.
Creating and updating those local models on a regular basis still requires the massive datacenters, doesn't it? You're assuming that those local models will continue to be provided for free or a reasonable price instead of eventually being monetized.
I'd say the "threat" of local models and user independence is currently (successfully) being fought by cutting off the supply and development of general computing devices and hardware.
The mentioned big few are buying up everything regardless of need and making hardware unaffordable and unavailable for normal people (or smaller businesses). And some of the few manufacturers are already being convinced to stop developing/producing consumer hardware altogether.
And whats left might be taken care of via the rise of attestation. Just start framing local, unapproved models as "security risks" at some point.
Forcing people to go through you by buying up the market supply of a commodity at 10x the production cost is a strategy that will inevitably collapse. More DRAM will get made if prices hold.
In 10 years. 5 to realize the new prices are permanent and 5 more to build new fabs.
This would make you anti-OpenAI, not anti-AI given the explosion of local models. Two different ideas.
> the internet we all know and love
Only accessible via proprietary ISPs that require a subscription, actively monitor and censor (pirate sites). And managed by ICANN which is based in America (and though nonprofit, certainly influenced by money and government).
Meanwhile, local models package a large part of the past internet, can be stored in your computer and accessed by the most ignorant (but literate) laymen.
ICANN is incredibly corrupt now. They make money selling gTLDs which all have to play by American rules. Having American rules on .org .com etc is an acceptable accident of history - having them on every generic word outside of .us is not.
Open weight models remove most of the issues you list and require relatively affordable hardware like a MBP with 128gb of ram or even less.
Deepseek v4 flash is by any means comparable to SOTA from 6 months ago. It's more than good enough for AI-assisted coding and there are no reasons to believe that one year from now or so, they won't be even better and faster.
open weight models are released by the same companies who's revenue would be threatened by open weights - they won't continue to undercut themselves by releases free models once that happens.
128 GiB MacBook Pro is like $8k! Thankfully, you can run local models on a $1,000 Pixel 10 Pro, which is still a lot, but slightly less insane.
> proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet
Guy who just retired his use of “stochastic parrot” because he found something even more bizarre and pretentious to say.
Respectfully, this looks like coping with the fact that a fundamentally new technology is discovered but people can’t cope with the immensity of it so they end up throwing in shallow and spread out criticisms spanning sovereignty, USA bad, replacing people bad etc.
It’s my personal opinion and it looks extremely incurious analysis of what’s going on. Even if a person doesn’t like AI, I would expect a curious person to have more deep opinions. “Non deterministic database” clearly tells me this.
There’s not a single coherent critique but just throwing some polemic to see what sticks.
This is extremely inflammatory. It’s like you’re trying to start a fight. You’re actively degrading the quality of the discussion.
"Respectfully, <insert highly patronizing, incurious, belittling take about everyone who disagrees with me, which is completely divorced from any of the actual argumentation on the anti-AI side>"
Pure tech dimensions of AI are out of scope. The internet is full of tech critiques and praises, what's the point of yet another opinion on it. Can't open linkedin without seeing only AI-generated posts about AI replacing people next to AI dumb. But the political dimension seems completly abscent from the public discussion
the grandparent commentor described potential future paths of unfettered ai usage. it's not clear why arises the expectation that a discussion of future possibilities must adhere to a contemporary argumentative format (mainly because concrete evidence of future events does not exist). it's your right to interpret this discussion as 'USA bad', personally I think it's very likely that the USA will continue to exercise power until it cannot. do you have any arguments that support ai being unleashed en masse? at the moment it seems to me that students are mentally atrophying as a result of outsourcing thinking to robots, therefore from my perspective it's crystal clear that the current path of 'let it rip' is suboptimal
The USA is terrifying from a non-US perspective now, and it's never been great. We're furious at the states and sick of being dependent on its enshittified technology.
Anti-AI sentiment absolutely and correctly has a "USA bad" steak.
*streak
The internet is for everyone. I am proud for us for building something so awesome that we get to train an entire replica of human reasoning on top of it. It's sad that most of the "new" internet will be made by these machines, but that's cool nonetheless.
Yes it's billion dollar companies building it, but every technical revolution needs large funding before it becomes accessible. Even the internet itself was way too expensive back in the days. Now we access it from fridges and toasters. Electric cars had to start as luxury purchase, so did phones or even CD players.
Now that we know what quantization is most optimal so that we built optimized accelerstors, how to architecture/harness LLMs for our purpose, now we can start to reclaim it.
Especially now when LLM APIs are starting to get expensive.
I think the pro AI people are generally too busy with their AI than to spend time arguing with people on HN.
Why spend time arguing with humans when I could be more productivity arguing with AI.
Being honest about the limitations of AI is not being anti-AI. What a strange opinion.
To address your claim, that shipping speed is more important than code quality, that could be true so long as the code is correct. The problem is that AI can do a prototype reasonably well, but still starts falling down when the system becomes complex enough. When that happens, code quality absolutely matters as a human will need to go through it.
Perhaps in the future AI will have fewer limitations, but today, if you are building a product you want to have a long lifespan, code quality still matters, and so you need to use AI appropriately. The code quality debate isn't even unique to AI, people have debated this for decades with regard to human coders and how value senior vs junior developers are.
I actually hold both extremes inside of me simultaneously. The speed at which you can ship when you have a strong vision of the end product and the architecture is extraordinary (the part of me that loves AI-assistance).
The journey itself, at least for me, has been absolutely grueling though; I'd say ~30% of the time it's just straight up soul-sucking. Some of that could be because of my own incessant need for discipline and clean code. I don't know how people let agents run wild in hours-long workflows, I can't even get Opus to stop running my test suite repeatedly to look for failures even though cargo test fails fast (the model already knows this), CLAUDE.md has the exact steps and commands for running the test suite, every invoked skill explains the same, and the hook rejects repeated attempts with the same explanation. It STILL, 90% of the time, uses whatever command it wants, bypasses the hook's cooldown to try a different grep because its own invented command didn't return any failures, and if it doesn't bypass the command it tries to wait it out so it can try again. Such a simple thing that it can't get right no matter what I've tried.
Anyways.. Love the leverage, hate fighting with the model on the way from A to B. Everything it does should be challenged.
People that "hate" AI are either expecting it to do too much and are disappointed or aren't watching it closely enough and have to suffer through refactors after they thought they'd been making progress. People that are only over the moon may be working in less complex systems and haven't felt the pain of all the failure modes yet, or just aren't yet aware of the bugs hiding in what AI produced.
Anyone who has built something significantly complex enough probably shares the same love/hate relationship.
Same boat, although the soul sucking, I find, comes from the fact that AI can iterate on ideas so much faster than I could even begin to pull out a pen and paper that I find myself in an existential crisis when I use it too often.
What is the point of my work, especially when I must ship for a paycheck, if I offload all my thinking and understanding to a machine. I can certainly dig deep and understand all the code the AI wrote, but when you didn’t create it, it feels so much less fulfilling. How does one find fulfillment in the AI engineering age? Isn’t solving problems and coming up with novel solutions part of why most of us got into it in the first place? When you strip that away, what is left? It’s code casino - I pull the lever, it spits out something that either feels like a dopamine hit (it works), or it spits out garbage and I prompt and pull the lever again hoping to strike the jackpot.
I find the most insufferable engineers those who use AI and think they are geniuses because they have access to this tool. Or say “AI told me …” They mistake the tools output for their own creative output or ingenuity.
IMO we have been conditioned to believe that everything is "all or nothing" which is a mistake. AI-assistance provides undeniable leverage IF, and only if, you know what you want. I think the market, in general, is still finding where things level out here. The problem, which I have been guilty of myself at times, is offloading key decisions. Humans absolutely have to retain those. AI can be used to present options, but the accountability always rests with the human (at least for now).
The code casino is real and I don't have an answer to it, only share the sentiment. It is frustrating and exhausting to go through those boom/bust cycles.
The workflow that works for me is: I do the thinking, the writing, then let the AI review it. I am still doing all of the creative work and thinking. The AI keeps me honest and its code reviews are very helpful. The loop becomes competitive and makes me pay more attention to detail; I try to nail things on the first attempt. This gives me a sense of accomplishment and improvement.
Whether this workflow has its days counted, I don't know. But I also don't care. If/when software development as we know it truly stops being a thing, then I'll sadly just have to move on and work in another field. I am not doing vibe coding or programming in natural language. Fuck that.
But I have also noticed that, as much as the AI can process things faster than I can (I also use it to help me navigate the existing code base, and that is also very helpful), it cannot answer the question of whether we should do something, or whether X is more desirable than Y, etc. Maybe for some people, thinking about those things and letting the AI do the rest is enough. For me, personally, I like to navigate all levels of the development.
"AI told me" -- yes, absolutely insufferable dudes. I just don't even bother stating a reply.
Wouldn’t you rather they say AI told them than claim it’s their own idea?
I can only speak for myself here.
In the end it's an emotional response. I am "anti-AI" because it has caused a net negative experience for me, so I feel bad towards it. Confirmation bias makes it easier for me up-vote or voice concerns for "anti-AI" posts and stay silent for "pro-AI" posts.
When I first started working with claude at work, I had a mixed bag of emotions. On one hand, it was awesome, surreal experience that lets me go 10x overnight. Then the negative experiences started hitting me.
My team who has fully embraced AI now generate slop. They're 2-5x more "productive" and churn out code for me to "review". I point out things that don't make any sense, and their AI agent enthusiastically agrees with me, "You're right to push back, great suggestion! You're right that this didn't make any sense". I feel dismissed and it has contributed to my dissatisfaction at work significantly.
A lot of my work is seeping through the AI slob because I can't get away from it. AI PR descriptions like a novel and it's so _verbose_. It's tiring. It allows juniors who are being so extra with the new tool and give bad ideas with bad implementation. Shooting that down nicely doesn't work and because other people in the team who have embraced AI accepts it.
I enjoyed writing code and reading code. I used to take pride in writing a clean, maintainable code and writing a good documentation. AI has made bad developers think they're right, and very confident. It's tiring to talk to. So I don't like AI, because that's the source of all this frustration.
Yes, I am definitely more productive with AI. But the net result for me is decidedly negative.
I'm being completely honest about it. Hopefully this helps someone understand why some engineers dislike AI.
> Over the past six months, there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
because it's true
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.
How can you guarantee that it works though? You can verify, but it would be at the same speed as before the AI, or even slower.
> By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
By then you have a blackbox of a codebase which is unmaintainable, or in a worst case scenario you end up losing your data or get hacked or both.
Boggles the mind that people can't see this. You gotta keep the guardrails pretty tight to succeed with LLMs and code in my experience.
What this looks like it practice: enterprise SaaS vendor introduces bug, I report the bug, get a canned AI response because literally nobody cares, and it never gets fixed. The product continues to deteriorate.
No, it’s not just one vendor.
>because it's true
I mean, it's just as true that most teams “write bad code,” “introduce bugs,” “create technical debt,” or something along those lines. There is this amazing thing that happens where when we talk about AI code, it's always compared against some idealized infinitely capable professional following every best practice, purposefully and carefully crafting every line.
Which is fantasy. Most of you are creating absolute slop. That's just truth. Clutch your pearls and say it ain't true, but there's this weird reality that when people inherit other people's code, it's declared 100% slop, almost all of the time. It's the reason we are constantly tossing projects in the bin and starting anew.
AI is absolutely imperfect, just like teams of human developers.
>By then you have a blackbox of a codebase which is unmaintainable
Have you ever used Claude Code to work on a project? In what reality is the code unmaintainable? How is it a "blackbox"? Are you getting it to write LLVM IR or something?
In my experience, and with careful guidance and oversight, it makes spectacularly maintainable code. Better code than any human developer I have ever worked with. It helps to occasionally do cycles of refactoring as you've built out the foundation and the core becomes more evident and clear.
>or in a worst case scenario you end up losing your data or get hacked or both
This one is amazing. The industry is awash with garbage, insecure, exploited code. We were making that garbage code by the data centre full long before LLMs joined the scene.
> code is just a means to an end
that's just objectively not true. code is not just the thing that "builds" the final program, it's also the blueprint of that program.
it's both the most detailed _description_ of what the program does and also the instructions on how to build that program. and it's deterministic, which means that the same compiler will *always* generate the same program based on that code (search for bootstrapping, and you'll understand better why that is). you can think that a very detailed prompt is like a "code" in the sense that you'll always be able to build the same thing, but that's simply not the case because LLMs are not deterministic.
the other thing I like to comment is that you mention _"product"_ a few times, but you never mentioned a _"program"_, which is what it becomes after it's built (or executed, for that matter). I think those are in different levels of abstractions. if you're looking for a way to come up with a product faster than your competitors, good for you. code is waaaay more than that.
There are two different crowds using "AI":
- One crowd is using to research algorithms, libraries, write boilerplate code, write test harnesses, introspect and integrate with APIs, do hands-off refactoring, and automating what would otherwise be boring tasks. They still think about architecture, best practices, understanding things in detail and the general shape of the solution is in their hands.
- Another crowd is curating prompts, setting up autonomous agents, creating tooling and guardrails around it, anything else but getting actually involved in how the sausage is made. They are working on meta tasks around the problem, in the hope the solution will write itself.
These two crowds are currently living in very different worlds, and getting very different results. We'll see what survives soon.
Are we including just technical people in these crowds?
Because there's a third crowd: everyone else/the general public that are standing up vibe coded websites and don't give a hoot how things work in the background or know as long as money is coming in. There are people that are using AI and thinking less and less causing their brains over the long term to become more inelastic.
We're in for a very, very painful future that will have mixed results. On one hand, you can boostrap things a lot quicker with less mental effort and it helps get up to speed without having to know some complex things (e.g. deep knowledge in coding). This can help us innovate on basic things faster, probably.
On the other ... people aren't going to learn. If something breaks in that state where they don't know how something works, what, we're just going to ask another AI to fix it? I don't know how I feel or think about that. On a long enough timeline, there are people that won't know how any of this was designed in the first place.
That's the world we actually live in. And that's what will survive despite crowd 1 and 2 that you mentioned above.
That’s exactly what AI companies want, needing an AI to fix what an AI built is the ultimate vendor lock-in that would justify their valuatuons.
There's likely a much larger problem in between.
These vibed systems will not have security built in. They will increasingly handle user information, PII, credentials, etc.
We're heading straight onto a very profitable era for scammers and other cyber criminals.
You probably saw this, but future readers won't: just last week, anyone could steal any Instagram account by telling the AI support chatbox they'd lost access to their email address.
I’m working with an ideas guy, no skills and no capital but for the first time can deliver code
He wants my tech expertise, his code is spaghetti, he is making all the mistakes, he is experiencing AI psychosis, his AI makes md files warning him that its all going to burn him which he forwards to me lackadaisically without reading
But can he sale? Yes
Its tempting for me to proselytize that he isnt using feature branches or project tickets or even deploying with committed code
But I bite my tongue and tell him to focus on the MVP since he wants to prompt Claude Code for 48 hour sessions without there being any indication of how other devs could contribute
Because he has clients that wants what he described, and because he has no capital I get a huge cut of that
I’m fine with that, I’ll clean up the project very quickly
I've also have to work with a guy like that.
It could be okay if it wasn't for the fact that they have a high esteem of themselves and don't learn shit.
The first POC they vibecoded and managed to sell was a pile of trash that we couldn't realistically deploy as it.
So we spent two weeks to make it something decent enough to have the minimum confidence of the thing being reliable and safe enough to reach staging. Two weeks during they told us daily how we were slowing everything down.
After that we spent an hour explaining them how making something works on their computer, without tests, without thinking about edge cases... was not the same thing as deploying it and releasing it to actual users.
We agreed on, next time, asking us for an estimate on how much it would take to move the POC to something that could be released, before signing on any engagement with a customer.
Well, last week they came with a new deal they just signed on a completely new POC. Customer was expecting it for yesterday. To make it work, we have to setup a VPN between our infra and customer infra. Their internal process make it impossible to have this under a month.
Now, my guy and the customer, are mad at me because I can't deliver.
And the first POC? Customer wants new features. My guy don't want to deal with it because it's not their job.
and what do you earn from helping him maintain his app … platform
Why not make him vibedeploy it, and then you hack it to prove your point?
For good reasons, they don't have access to our infra.
I wasn't involved, but I heard last year they tried to vibedeploy, provisioning an AWS account in their own name with their own credit card. I let you imagine what happened and why they haven't retried this since.
I know LLMs are getting the majority of the attention of late, but there are others of us training and using AI to…
…reads MRIs and video to detect cancer
…analyze genomics for early target discovery
…assisting surgeons
…folding proteins
And the list goes on in other fields as well. Just hoping the recent AI counterculture doesn’t stigmatize other uses of AI.
Am I a fan of Claude code? Not particularly, but I have used it on occasion. And I’ll never understand someone using an LLM to write anything (especially a comment on a site like HN) intended for consumption by other people. Not because I think it’s subpar, but because the point - IMO - is to make human connections, learn, teach, and debate. That’s hard (impossible?) to do if you’re just typing a 30 second prompt and then copy/pasting the output.
This problem only exists because of the marketing move to call anything even slightly ML related "AI".
I see it as a double edged sword. People that want the category of AI to succeed can claim a victory when someone uses it to approximate protien folding and invent new drugs. But that also means the entire field is constantly being dragged down by low quality vibe coded sites, slop videos on social media, whatever horrific thing Grok is doing this week, etc.
>This problem only exists because of the marketing move to call anything even slightly ML related "AI".
We need to remember what "Artificial Intelligence" actually means. It refers to the field of research starting in the 1950's developing algorithms related to combinatorial search, planning, and reasoning. Machine Learning isn't AI in the sci-fi movie sense, but it's among the topics you'll find in a textbook like Russell and Norvig.
A problem like protein folding isn't tangentially related to AI, it's at the heart of the kinds of problems the field has been trying to tackle for decades. Yet when there are legitimate breakthroughs, people deride it as "not real AI."
I thought the point of HN was to help venture capitalists find ~~marks~~ projects to fund
I don't think thats really it.
For me personally I am vaguely indifferent to programmers using LLMs to make more shitty code. My worry is the second and third order effects
For work currently, as an SRE, I'm being asked to maintain and look after slop as if its properly built and instrumented. Our platform has clear rules and conventions, and AI isn't following those.
For the wider world, I fucking hate that image/video generation is evaporating what is "real". For memes sure its great, but for bad actors it gives a brilliant way to say "its AI wasn't me" and then the debate moves away from "did person do bad thing" to "is it wrong to say that things are AI?"
I also worry about the debasement of value of human work. Looking at history, say of the weavers, it didn't work out to well for them when the powered loom came along.
This is the opposite of a loom. With a loom you can very easily see that what it makes is exactly like cloth made by hand, except it's more uniform and faster. There also wasn't this weird drive to drive out the heretics so the AI messiah may dwell among us, this desire to put all eggs in one basket, instead of welcoming competition and a control group.
I would suggest that you are looking at the product, not the effect on the workers.
The powered loom produced more uniform, much cheaper fabric. It wasn't colourful or particularly flamboyant. It took a lot more work to get patterns (its where punch card come from)
But thats not the point. Powered looms meant that cottage industry that employed people close to sources of production (ie cotton/calico in india and wool in england) were thrown out on their arses. The majority lived on rented land/housing. Couldn't pay the rent and were kicked out into the loving arms of the poor laws. Lots of people had to re-train, the rest went begging. Combine that with agricultural reform, meant that Lots of people moved into slums in the towns, where they worked much longer, unsafer hours.
The rest dispersed into the wider world.
> I also worry about the debasement of value of human work. Looking at history, say of the weavers, it didn't work out to well for them when the powered loom came along.
They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option. And the world is better with the power loom. It's scary but we still have to embrace that eventually pretty much all valuable labour will be automated, and by then our society and economy needs to have been restructured for supporting humans providing 0 economic value.
> They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option.
Yes, but then whole swathes of the English countryside (and then the Indian countryside) was plunged into destitution for generations and it took rebellions, massacres and revolutions to get something like comfortable living.
Yeah there was no system in place then to ensure those who were left without means to survive would be able to survive. Shouldn't be the case with the knowledge of that history and all this time we have to actually change things. We quite literally know that it's a matter of only a few years now before the vast amount of knowledge work (at least) is fully automated away; governments should be making changes to make the economic transition more smooth. It'd be highly irresponsible to not do so, and I dread that most will be irresponsible.
> governments should be making changes to make the economic transition more smooth.
With what money. Knowledge work brings in taxes. Taxes are spent redistributing wealth so that the bottom percent are cared for.
But all that money will be concentrated into the hands of the few (even more than it is now) and china.
After all caring for the poor is socialism, and we can't have that.
>It'd be highly irresponsible to not do so, and I dread that most will be irresponsible.
This is why I can't stand people who talk about embracing AI. You suggest that society needs to adjust to AI, but then turn around and admit you doubt it'll happen.
You'd rather roll over, than take a stance.
It's like climate change: Earth will survive. I and my family won't. Therefore we get wars.
>They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option.
Who is they? The majority of British textile workers experienced destitute conditions following industrialization.
That's one of my two gripes with AI:
1) It's posed to take over knowledge work, and yet our societies have no safety nets for the millions of knowledge workers.
2) It promotes superficial understanding. It sounds so convincing and compresses complex topics into a few messages, leaving users thinking they know more than they actually do.
A lot of people doing the latter camp are people with the knowledge of the former camp, and who are sufficiently happy with the speed and guard rails to no longer worry about "molding the solution in their hands"
I'm not speaking from personal experience, this is what friends are doing at their startups
But I am not surprised at all, because the building blocks of major applications are all out there as boilerplate code - heck half the time AWS has the example you need for you, assuming you know what you want to stitch together and why
If you know the major AWS tool chains and how and why to use them and how to design a product in microservices, then theoretically Claude has no idea what the whole shebang is up to but happily writes all the parts
I wouldn't say those are 'camps' without seeing some data in support of that.
True... I'm in the first crowd personally
For me it is hard to invest too much time into being in first crowd.
This space is moving too fast for me and I have current job to do that is paying my bills.
I can invest time to watch/follow people from the first crowd.
But no one is going to give you a medal and it is not a „better crowd”.
I might need to pay for this expertise some day, but I guess it will be OpenAI or Anthropic that takes my money just like so far all the advances were introduced to frontier models or their own tooling.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster.
Show the receipts. Where are the mobile apps, the photoshop replacements, the video and audio editors, the games and game engines that took a decade to make in the past that have shipped since Claude code came along?
> By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
Again where are the receipts?
My experience with coding agents is that they’re perfectly good at generating a v0.1 that just about passes the sniff test. It does the first 90%, but the second 90% always takes longer than the first 90%. That second 90% is what coding agents are terriblle at, and are what make actually good products.
Being 10x (or whatever multiplier) faster at programming doesn't mean you're going to be 10x faster in designing a product or any other aspect that goes into making a good product.
Even if you hired an actual programmer, it'd take a massive amount of time to build a Photoshop clone.
Of course, at the end Photoshop is lines of code and it could be output as is, end to end. One problem is that users aren't generally giving very precise design documents which would narrow the way to interpret them into code in precisely one way. Or that a design document at any level of precision, other than code, couldn't be interpreted in multiple ways when it comes to a specific implementation.
LLMs also take a relatively long time to output acceptable code, often taking tens of minutes before giving you a small diff. The larger the codebase, the longer it usually takes to start producing code, even over an hour.
> Of course, at the end Photoshop is lines of code and it could be output as is, end to end
And yet it’s not.
> LLMs also take a relatively long time to output acceptable code, often taking tens of minutes before giving you a small diff. The larger the codebase, the longer it usually takes to start producing code, even over an hour.
The problem is that they don’t generate acceptable code, they generate code that needs to be edited to be acceptable. That has always been the slow part of engineering. Waiting an hour for a bugfix even if it cost $75 in tokens would be cheaper than hiring an engineer but only if it worked. And it’s a bit like hiring a snake oil salesman - it passes the sniff test but it’s only when you’re drowning in the fact that your ai now takes 4 hours to fix the same bugs, and it introduces new bugs _and_ you don’t have anyone who can reduce that complexity that you see the reality. For a lot of us, that is immediately clear from first glance at the output of Claude and codex and the likes.
> And yet it’s not.
That was my point as well. That it hasn't been output, even though it could be done by a talented solo developer given enough time, and that current LLMs definitely aren't able to do so.
> The problem is that they don’t generate acceptable code, they generate code that needs to be edited to be acceptable.
You've never had an LLM output a one line bugfix that is correct to the point where you don't have to edit it?
To make things more concrete, here's an example from the creator of Redis on how he utilizes LLMs in programming: https://antirez.com/news/164
> You've never had an LLM output a one line bugfix that is correct to the point where you don't have to edit it?
I have. I’ve also had IDEs and static analysers do the same thing. I can also take my car out of gear and have it roll down a hill but that doesn’t mean it can run without fuel. Only a sith deals in absolutes, and in the general cases LLMs don’t generate acceptable code.
Try it out, like seriously, learn to use it well. Spent a few weeks with it. You will not say these things if you were an experienced user of these tools. Saying their code is "unacceptable" is a skill issue. Describe what you consider "acceptable code" and watch it produce it in copious amounts. They don't have one mode, one setting, they can generate whatever the F you want in whatever style you deem "acceptable". You're completely in control.
That said, I watched many of my - generally pretty clever - colleagues struggle mightily with this. I can't put my finger on it yet. Regular "programming" - typing BS syntax one character at a time - always felt astronomically boring to me so I'm one of the guys happy with these tools. Not happy with how it will fuck up society though, but that's uh.. yeah.
Photoshop alternatives already exist and are cheap or free, like Affinity.
Why create a Final Cut Pro alternative when it’s so cheap from Apple?
Many existing apps can be mostly cloned by a small team over 6 months or a year, but the challenge is finding customers willing to switch. You still need to add something new and useful, then reach customers somehow.
That’s what I find funny about „end of SaaS”.
If you are a graphic designer you are not going to make your own Photoshop. Even if you could ROI is not there.
Graphics designers of course are bad example because everyone will just generate images directly from LLMs.
But restaurant owner for example could build his own website with menu - heck even with just slapping html without LLM making a decent website was easy but these people didn’t have time for that.
I work in insurtech, wet dream of all big companies dealing with insurance was customer self service so they were building those interactive forms - but no customer wants to do the filling, they don’t care they don’t have time they are busy running their own business and they want to call or meet with someone who knows what needs to be filled in those forms. Chat with AI is not fixing that because business owner will have to spend his time answering all these questions that were in the form but only now it will be chatbot.
It's definitely not at the make me a photoshop stage but I don't think that angle explains adequately explains the tone of the anti-AI hn discussions taking place at all.
If it was just a toy with no shot at making something real people would go "oh cool have fun with that" and move on with their life. Instead we see pretty emotionally charged posts.
What stage is it at then? Because every new model is met with people saying they haven’t opened an editor in a year, or how they’re 10x more productive. But I’m not seeing 10x more tickets closed, 10x more bugs fixed, or 10x more feature designs that we can smash through. I see verbosity and noise when used by the people who were behind, and I see the same level of quality and excellence from people who use it like it’s another tool in their toolbelt
>I see the same level of quality and excellence from people who use it like it’s another tool in their toolbelt
It's certainly currently an edge if you know what to tell the mystery box of magic in precise terms.
I don't think this distinction is going to endure though - every level of "it can't do it" has fallen and generally faster & more decisively than predicted. We started with it printing hello world, to autocomplete where you still needed to be able to know what the line should do, to autocompleting functions, to writing entire units, to working out architecture tradeoffs, to doing research planning architecture execution and testing all autonomously. That trajectory plus people retreating to nebulous "I'm adding taste" tells me this is going to sail straight past "tool in toolbelt" territory at Mach 10.
Everyone has their own perspective but to me "show me the receipt" at a specific point in time is a completely wrong lens for a tech that shows clear signs of exponential improvement (i.e. https://metr.org/ ).
I’ll agree it’s an edge. But edges aren’t worth the GDP of a middle sized European country.
> every level of "it can't do it" has fallen and generally faster & more decisively than predicted
I disagree. The agent + harness model was a huge leap and really moved the bar. The tools became genuinely useful for coding very quickly.
> Everyone has their own perspective but to me "show me the receipt" at a specific point in time is a completely wrong lens for a tech that shows clear signs of exponential improvement
At some point, the exponential improvements have to show results or it’s just a Ponzi scheme.
I get that results in your mind is a vibecoded full feature photoshop as the goal post, which is fair enough. That's no less arbitrary than say me defining the goal post as can it make me a useful script & thus has already delivered results with receipts.
That's why I'm saying this whole look at one point in time logic isn't useful here. Depending on where you set the cutoff you get diametrically opposed answers.
>Ponzi scheme
The IPO & bubble financial shenanigans are only loosely linked to the technological advancement. Tech genie is out of the bottle, people are intrigued and people with ability to tinker on this are spread globally. Even if the entirety of western tech & financial sphere disappeared tomorrow tech progress here would wobble and slow not stop.
Even the one global nexus where progress could have been killed globally - Taiwan - is looking like it'll de-risk shortly between CXMT and SMIC's rapid progress.
In my mind the base case assumption here has to be that the trend (that has been remarkably consistent) continues until proven otherwise. Stack enough improvements on top of each other and instead of a useful script you shall have your photoshop. Maybe...
> I get that results in your mind is a vibecoded full feature photoshop as the goal post, which is fair enough. That's no less arbitrary than say me defining the goal post as can it make me a useful script & thus has already delivered results with receipts.
I think vibe coded photoshop is what’s being talked about from Anthropic, OpenAI as the end goal - Dario is on record saying that AI will replace engineers and Sam Altman has said “ we will never ever write code by hand again. It doesn't make any sense to do so”. The cursor founder has said that he ships 10x what his other engineers ship. I want to know where people _genuinely_ think the cutoff is, because there’s a lot of talk about where it’s not, and that’s gmoving the goalposts.
> The IPO & bubble financial shenanigans are only loosely linked to the technological advancement.
Except they’re not. Someone is paying for this compute power, and energy.
> In my mind the base case assumption here has to be that the trend (that has been remarkably consistent)
Making wild promises, and insane promises about capability and then doing the same thing 3 months later when a new model releases? Isn’t it convenient that both OpenAI and Anthropic have models that are “too powerful” to release. How responsible of them.
At the same time; Anthropic, OpenAI and Copilot have all changed to usage based to billing recently for enterprises as they’ve been been undercharging by 10/100/1000x in many cases. Enterprises are limiting costs (uber limiting spend to $1500/mo this week).
If these tools were really game changing and integer productivity multipliers why aren’t major engineering organisations spending all their hiring grown on these tools and getting ahead of their competitors? Because they’re “not quite ready” just like they weren’t 6 months ago, and they still won’t be in 6 months.
>I want to know where people _genuinely_ think the cutoff is
I don't think there is/should be one at all. If you and I stand in front of a crazy fast growing plant the question on how tall it'll be tomorrow is initially interesting, but a couple measurements in when it's clear the answer is exponentially the relevant question stops being how high is it now / will be tomorrow and more holly shit how long can this keep going & where does this go.
>Except they’re not. Someone is paying for this compute power, and energy.
Certainly, and the questionable subsidizations may disappear but the tech won't. If APIs disappear tomorrow I'll be looking into building a LLM rig. And researchers at unis will continue to do research to advance the tech. And chinese labs will continue. Pace may be somewhat limited but IPOs blowing up stop this tech train
>The cursor founder has said that he ships 10x
CEOs say all kinds of crazy shit. I don't think their promises and marketing is a good reference point for how a technology is actually developing
>usage based to billing
I don't think it's relevant at all for general purpose technologies like this. It'll land where market forces dictate. Maybe some people go bankrupt. Do you know what the billing model on the first electricity grids were? I don't. And I don't care. If it's useful the market will figure out the economics.
>why aren’t major engineering organisations spending all their hiring grown on these tools
They are spending big. Just because they're not committing 100% of their budget right now doesn't mean it hasn't yielded results. It's an evolving situation not a mature technology.
I can't speak for others, but my main emotional issue with it is how it has addled the minds of my employers. If they would judge on output and I couldn't keep up objectively, ok fine I'll use AI. But they judge on usage even if output is worse! Anyone would be upset if forced to abandon their skills and work in a different way that produces worse results and is less enjoyable. It's just stupid.
That’s because it’s really hard to evaluate results but usage is comparable across people. It’s the equivalent of counting lines of code submitted or jira tickets closed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
If people just wanted to make their own stuff and have fun, that's fine. Knock yourself out.
However, it's launched this enormous tidal wave of mediocrity that emboldens the dumbest people to do the dumbest shit and make it my problem. I just had to yell at one of the IT guys for trying to hook up our Duo to Claude, and I'm still mad about it lol.
Stupid people are always going to do stupid shit. I don't think that makes the enabling technology the problem & the anger towards it is misdirected.
>trying to hook up our Duo to Claude
ngl that is hilarious
What's a Duo?
> Show the receipts. Where are the mobile apps, the photoshop replacements, the video and audio editors, the games and game engines that took a decade to make in the past that have shipped since Claude code came along?
For code in general, the various meanings of "I am {insert number here} times as productive" on Figure 9 page 36: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35275/w352...
Same document, Figure 12 page 41 shows a significant spike in iOS apps but also the users per app is way down (which you should expect, given this makes it possible for low-user-count apps to be sensible business propositions).
How many people care to spend a year making a replacement for something that took a decade? Photoshop, despite the complaints about price and subscription model, just isn't expensive enough to justify one engineer-year to replace. Unreal and Unity are free for a lot of people using them, and likewise are not worth the cost of replacing for those who do end up paying (because the teams using them know how to use them and don't want to be retrained).
For this reason, you should be looking at things which would have taken a year of human time but now take a month, or faster, so less Photoshop 27.7 (today) and more back when it was still called ImagePro (1988).
For games, I've seen games like the following take a month or more to get good enough to be interesting, and yet the following took me two prompts, the second of which was the single word "continue" (and only needed that because this was on the free tier and I used too many tokens); I didn't bother to look at the code, I don't care about the code, making the app itself was as easy as simply finding an app like this on the Apple App Store even though such an app was in one of the top-10 lists: https://github.com/BenWheatley/Piano-Trainer
Is this game "as good as" the one on the App Store? Who cares. Any random person who wants their own app can now get their own custom version doing the specific things they care about, which doesn't need to simultaneously support all the use cases of all the other people who would buy the app on the App Store.
From what I read on Hacker News comments, the same is happening with video editing, where it's not "Make an iMovie clone" (why would you, iMovie is free), but rather every time you need one specific thing, you ask your LLM of choice for a solution, and it gives you a shell script which calls ffmpeg with the right arguments.
The more close you are to the fire the more you understand how dangerous it is.
HN always have had a sizable anti-tech crowd (I don't want to say luddite because it's borderline pejorative). If you see the technology from close and you understand the human impacts of it then there is a reason some would rather stay clear from it. I know some FAANG engineers who doesn’t allow their kids to have smartphones or use social media even though they are themselves working at those companies. Why do you think that is? And you don’t even have to be a FAANG employee to see the social and human impacts of modern technology. AI is the same, in fact not even the same because it’s even worse and it will be only worse.
> HN always have had a sizable anti-tech crowd (I don't want to say luddite because it's borderline pejorative).
It's frequently said that technology is ethically neutral, and whether it's used for good or bad ends depends on how it is applied.
What you call the anti-tech crowd is simply the crowd that takes their ethical responsibilities seriously.
There are other potential points of view that could be adopted instead of tech neutrality. Some tech could be seen as inherently good, in which case there very little concern about how much of it is used. Some tech could be seen as inherently bad, meaning it should be avoided at all costs.
Anyone being honest about AI can see that although it has some positive uses, the potential for misuse is enormous. Therefore, if you're going to use it at all, you should think carefully about how to apply it. To people that have fully bought into the hype this caution appears like negativity instead of rationality.
I have recently begun to call myself a "technorealist". Technorealism is an old movement that I've found my existing views have been aligned with for some time. Technology is meant to serve man, and a solution that involves technology is not always the best one. We must consider the social and political aspects of technology, and discuss how it should best be applied before jumping headlong into using it. Solutions should be made to be sustainable in the long term, even when technology fails.
We've seen many applications of AI lately that aren't particularly sustainable, in several aspects.
I'd imagine nearly all here are positive about technology itself, what they're against is: hype, 'progress' at all costs regardless of collateral damage, consolidation, anti-consumer practices - tech as wielded for power. If you pay attention long enough, it's hard not to become wary.
AI Dungeon was pretty cool, and harmless.
The HN crowd is much less anti-AI than the rest of the country. But that's a low bar
A Quinnipiac poll showed 80% of Americans are "very" or "somewhat" concerned about artificial intelligence, with only 35% feeling excited about it
https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3955
Gallup found that 71% of Americans oppose the construction of AI data centers in their local communities.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-ce...
A Fox News Poll indicated that 80% of voters believe protecting the public's interests and enacting regulations should be prioritized over unchecked technological innovation.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-voters-see-ai...
And Pew Research found that the majority of Americans are "more concerned than excited" about AI, with that number increasing over the years
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...
Ah yes, The Country.
Fair point. I looked it up and I didn't realize that possibly only around 40-50% of HN traffic is from the US
https://marcotm.com/articles/stats-of-being-on-the-hacker-ne...
I do wonder what similar polling/surveys would find in other countries
> I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
You will need a lot more to make yourself my enemy, but this is the divisor between us... not that you like to use Claude and I don't.
I think it depends a lot on where your interest in (self) development lies.
My main motivator has always been to understand how things work, and myself being able to create as elegant solutions as my technical role models (in the range from colleagues and mentors to the elders of our field), hopefully even pushing it further. Having the LLM just create the product robs me of that, or at least of the most rewarding parts of that. And that's why I don't like to use it.
Different people are driven by different things, I don't think either trumps the other in the objective sense, we're just wired differently.
That's well said and where I ended up as well. This whole thing did reveal that a lot of people really never enjoyed programming at all and only saw it as some irritating necessity. I don't really like that crowds presumption that everyone else disliked it too.
For me working through the programming part is the understanding and solving. Programming languages are pretty beautiful and encourage different ways of thinking. Hopefully we can understand it and contribute.
> My main motivator has always been to understand how things work
Which things, specifically? I got started programming in order to control scientific instruments and analyze the data I collected. I care about the systems I'm studying. I don't really care much about the software I'm programming. As OP said it's a means to an end.
I think you're right that people on HN are generally more curious but it doesn't have to be curiosity about every single element of software. We don't write assembly code anymore either, half of software is about making software easier and faster to write.
> Which things, specifically?
Low level systems programming mostly. Embedded systems, *nix userland programs, API and library design, sometimes including writing assembly although in very small fractions.
I am with you. Over the last 40 years I've spent a great many hours enjoying the process of creating software. I did a PhD in mechanical engineering, but the ductility of programming won me over. I started following PG when I read his two Lisp books many years ago, and some of his examples (implement OOP in one chapter!) blew my mind. And they enabled my first company.
These days, however, my time is spent managing agents. I have lost the joy of craftsmanship. I don't spend my day in emacs anymore.
But I am learning to enjoy it. Maybe because I have always had a utilitarian streak, and I actually care for the ends, so husbanding incredibly efficient means is thrilling. I am actually having fun.
> people are driven by different things
This is important to understand. I have been coding since I was 11 when I got my first C64, and it is a genuine passion for me, but I also love working with LLM tooling.
One of the biggest things for me is that after decades of sitting in front of a computer I have chronic back and wrist pain that makes it impossible to do the long deep focus sessions that were normal when I was younger. Using AI tooling to handle all of the procedural tasks (running tests, debugging, managing git, etc) dramatically reduces the physical strain of programming, and allows for a much healthier workflow, with regular short breaks.
That's awesome, I'm happy for you finding such great value in it!
Not sure if it's important or not, but for the sake of OP's discussion I note that your value is not necessarily tied to "speed of execution".
I have no general answer. But some themes I see:
• - Larger Context: I believe this is the biggest negativity driver. But it is sublimated in practical discussions.
Humans are not divine. Not ordained. Entities passing us in intelligence are a species-level threat.
This exceeds any normal range of pro's and con's. Acknowledging it directly derails any practical discussion, so it gets sublimated. But it indirectly colors many views.
• - Hype Trampoline: Lots of people get sick of hype, and have a Newtonian equal-but-opposite reaction to hype, and the inevitable unrealistic or over-optimistic claims.
• - Adaptation Style: Adapting new tech to ourselves, and adapting ourselves to new tech, are different things. In this case, the fast self-adapters are getting value sooner than the fast tech-adapters.
Never has this Rorschach test been so clear.
• - Negative Lens Effect: There are a large percentage of engineers who are contrarian or cynical all the time. These are smart people, but they tend to approach judging new things by processing limitations first.
To me it looks like kneejerk negativity and an obsession with dotted i's and crossed t's.
But I have noticed it does not slow them down from using the tech and getting good results. Just a foreign mode of processing to me.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster.
That's not true, or true only for you or very specific/narrow scenarios that are trained inside the neural net. You can't rule out that's true for everyone. I spent months trying to speed up a novel idea I have only to be frustrated and eventually start it all over via hand coding, and the journey was actually worth it because I learned a lot! And no I wasn't using the Agent in the wrong way
First of all, I expect to be a loser in the socioeconomical effect the AI brings. This isn't really about the technology itself but about the political systems we have now. From the pure job perspective, I will either lose my job, or will keep it but it will be increasingly more stressful and less interesting. There are literally zero benefits for me as a worker. The only hope is that the economic effect will be so huge, the trickle-down crumbs will be enough to live a decent life, but that is unlikely to happen in my country.
But, even if I had generational wealth behind me to be able to leverage the AI to my advantage, I still see a lot of cons in the way cheap content generation worsens the world around me: facilitating fraud, political shilling, disrupting online conversations (now everyone just sends bot summaries to each other). In a way, I feel a similar change that from the "pre-facebook" Internet to the "pre-chatgpt" Internet that happened in the early 10s.
You don't need "generational wealth" to leverage AI. If anything the opposite is true; AI empowers people with less to do more. Hiring humans is expensive, tokens are much cheaper.
Also, programmers will be least negatively affected by AI. Humans will need to be in the loop in the forseable future, and programmers are a good candidate for those kinds of positions.
But more generally, I'll never understand this attitude about jobs. As if your job is this thing that you own that someone might take away from you. To me, my job is is something useful that I do in exchange for money. If I cease to be useful then it's fine if I lose my job. I'll find somewhere else to work, somewhere I can be useful. It might be paid worse of lower status but, to me, being useful is the whole point.
They were saying you need it to benefit from AI. AI users aren't the beneficiaries as now they need to work more for the same pay.
I use AI tools daily and find them genuinely useful.
However I am increasingly annoyed at how everything has to be framed as a conversation about AI, how every tech-adjacent company has to brand itself as AI-first, and most of all, how overblown predictions are about an LLM being conscious, etc.
In short – it’s a useful technology reshaping tons of industries, but the hype is grating.
Great take.
I have spent the last 3 months away from family, I caught up with my brother & his wife and they also got back from an interesting vacation recently. I tried to get information about their vacation but at best got 2 sentences that it was enjoyable. But they spent more than 24 hours(sleep over to see the nieces) ear bashing me about AI.
I truly don’t care that people find this stuff exciting, just leave me out of it and tell it’s AI content upfront and we’ll get along swimmingly.
This has been my issue this whole time. Why isn't it just framed as a useful software tool that helps you automate tasks and write code? Use cases beyond this have exceedingly high social cost and negative externalities, and it's arguable that besides highly specialized local models with very specific training data, AI is not reliable enough nor deterministic enough to truly "replace" humans in the vast majority of roles outside of tech.
Obviously the answer is $$$ and the fact that this admin's economic policy has further encouraged the market to go all-in on AI as it's the only thing that's trending in the black for the economy right now. I don't think you'll find many people on HN who won't readily admit that even if they're anti-AI, LLMs are genuinely amazing pieces of software that can be transformative and useful in many different environments, and it's mindblowing how they work. The issue comes from the very harmful way it's currently being commercialized and marketed.
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.
Software never worked even decently before AI let alone right now that we have AI. I'm a user too like many of us we see every day software built by people who don't care. AI is not a force multiplier if it can let you be lazy you'll be lazy, not being lazy requires a lot of discipline. IMO Agents requires a lot more discipline than hand coding, that's why I use them both, I let AI stress test my code and viceversa, rarely I let my code(usually an interface) let AI write better code, or I ask AI a lot questions about the codebase. That's totally different than some narratives pushed by people you can find here or on X I believe the criticism comes from pushing back doomers and astroturfers. AI is good but not as good as they claim to be, to me very far away from what's claimed and you still need to care about software
I'm not particularly anti-AI. I have some concerns about the intellectual property aspects of it, but my opposition is really the (a) functionally illiterate MBAs who think (?) that AI is a thinking machine that will take them right to the C-suite by allowing layoffs of 90% of the workforce and (b) evangelists who believe they're entitled to do whatever they want with other people's information to make their machine god.
Define “anti-AI.”
I think some folks believe that anything other than slavish adoration is “anti,” and some folks think that only vehement contempt is “anti.”
I think it’s great. I’ve been using it to significantly improve my development velocity and scope.
But it is far, far from perfect. I can’t even envision the disaster that would occur, if I just let it do its thing, unmoderated. It can very well be an AFU force multiplier.
It is likely to achieve a state that approaches “perfect,” eventually. There’s still a lot of elbow grease to be decanted, though.
A lot of people on HN are anti-overhyping, which comes across as being opposed to the thing being overhyped. It was similar when cryptocurrency overhyping was popular.
That's what I feel. Whenever I see someone writing something to the effect of “LLMs will replace X” (where X could be literally anything including software developers) I get an intense urge to write something against it. Not something nice, mind you.
I also find takes from the anti-LLM to be exceedingly dumb at times. Oh this text has this and that, it must have been written by LLM and thus is not worth even considering.
^^^ Yes, exactly this! ^^^
I'm personally amazed by what "A.I." is actually capable of, but I have a fairly solid understanding of what's going on "under the hood" of it, and therefore have somewhat realistic expectations of it. Then I see folks go overhyping it's capabilities because they've drunk themselves stupid on the lies they've been told about what it is and what it's capable of (and it's simply not capable of what the liars at the top of the A.I. corporations are telling everyone). Just try to temper their enthusiasm with a bit of reality and you're instantly "anti-AI" or "doomer" or some other just completely wrong characterization. At this point I'm convinced that for a lotta folks, A.I. is just another literal cult just like politics these days, or crypto-coins not that long ago... Drink that kool-aid, I guess... ~shrug~
I also don't think that many of the so-called "anti-AI" folks are so much against AI itself, as they're against the unethical ways that certain folks "at the top" are using it to do massive harm in an attempt to try to satisfy their bottomless greed and lust for power, and against the ways that some other folks are using it to basically escape the need to think at all, even when their job requires actual thinking.
Sounds like me. It's awesome. Only the sheer amount of very clear fraud and the way an entire way of people who, not too long ago, where barely functional, have jumped on the bandwagon (same as with crypto) just sours me on it.
That and Jenson screwing those of us who made him over the last decade.
It'll be better once the fraudsters are in jail and once we're able have boxes with ~1TB ram running off of our solar in the garage.
> "It's awesome."
Well... It's got that potential, that's for sure. It could pretty easily be pushed straight past that line into "awesome" if not for those absolute clowns "at the top" holding it all back decades behind where it should be, all to play their little game of "He who dies with the most money wins" at the eventual expense of all life on Earth (at the rate they're going). It's just so sad the petty misuse and waste of resources the ultra-richest of the rich are choosing to be. Actively working against the betterment of themselves and the world around them, for the most insane reasons, when they could be using all this amazing tech to build a genuinely better world for themselves and everyone else.
Honestly, I look at where technology's gone since my early days (300baud acoustic phone modems, 64kilobytes of RAM, 1Mhz 8bit CPU days) being utterly fascinated by how actual science was so quickly catching up with science fiction (Star Trek being one of my bigger influences in that area of interest), and I see so many truly amazing things that we've invented / built along the way; if we were a more cooperative society instead of "Law of the Jungle" hostile greed-driven society, we'd already pretty much have that Star Trek reality today (minus the faster than light travel bit, as that's apparently "impossible" according to current theory and math AFAIK).
We've already got a bunch of Star Trek level tech, and we could have most of it I suspect. 3D printing? Not terribly far off from ST: TNG "replicators". LLMs? Not too far off from the Star Trek computer interface. Smart Phone? Pretty much a Star Trek PADD (tablet computer). Tricorder? Well... Smart Phones are gettin' pretty close. A few more fancy sensors would pretty much do it. Holodeck? Well, that one's a bit more tricky, but who knows where VR would be today in a society that wasn't totally 100% beholden to the cult of money?
also, not instead of.
Oh absolutely! This made me wonder and there was an exact post with similar title but instead of AI it said Crypto
Ask HN: Why is Hacker News so anti-crypto? : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302494 (Do note that the post is flagged and there might be some good moderation reasons for that)
This is the reason that most of us at HN might dislike overhype. I have seen a lot of these crypto users move from crypto hype to AI hype.
Every few years, people forget the last shiny thing and move to the next and think why is X crowd not invested in Y? They must be anti-Y!
Oh speaking of crypto, bitcoin has tanked so bad, its almost at an all time low at 60k$ sinking to levels of october 2024: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/bitcoin-dismal-week-price-be...
60k$ is not an all time low.
The hype was totally justified for AI now that coding has been completely transformed for the most part.
Trying to “correct the hype” just looks like clowning in hindsight.
It’s like people in 1990s were trying to correct the internets hype: oh you know it won’t change anything and the tech bros want to create hype out of nothing!
So it’s not neutral to be anti hype for AI. It is just wrong.
The hype was completely justified for blockchain now that money has been completely transformed for the most part.
Those of us who were actually there in the late '90s also remember the insane overhype, grifting, and fraud that led to the dotcom bubble and then the painful dotcom bust afterwards that took the entire industry years to recover from. That pattern is playing itself out again.
Those who analogize today's AI frenzy to the internet adoption frenzy of the '90s in a positive light abjectly fail to understand what an incredibly bad look that is.
Underhyping internet as a tech (not specific companies) in 90s is foolish imo
Ok Sam.
HN is not anti-AI. HN reflects a reasonable ratio of pro-AI and anti-AI sentiments (sometimes held by the same person! because AI covers a lot of ground).
Alternative wording: HN is not twitter
Exactly. Look at lobste.rs if you want to see what "anti-AI" truly means.
I have many diverse friend groups. And HN is lot lot more anti AI then even the worst of the non technical groups I am in. e.g. [1] is so detached from reality and got to front page for multiple days recently. Or [2].
I have never seen a positive story(I am not talking about things like current model, just how positive AI could be like the Sam Altman post) in front page for a long time. Feel free to disprove me.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48323101
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48259784
dang posted a good one in this comment section.
I would also suggest that if you believe your two links are "detached from reality", you may be struggling with your own bias. They're both perfectly reasonable takes that you are totally reasonable to disagree with. Try to come down from that feeling and realize that disagreeing does not necessitate that the person you are disagreeing with is insane.
> I have many diverse friend groups. And HN is lot lot more anti AI then even the worst of the non technical groups I am in.
"I listen to both kinds of music, country and western."
I have made very falsifiable statement.
dang falsified it. Also, if you visit this URL at time of writing, three of the top five stories are pro-AI:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ai
>AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
Which is undeniably true. I am not "anti-AI", in fact, it helps me immensely in my current job, but in my experience, using these tools still requires quite a lot of involvement. Otherwise, updating existing or adding new functionality becomes increasingly difficult as the system grows. The funniest thing is that when you start to lose touch with the internals of the system you are building, you cannot even give the AI proper context to pinpoint the problem or guide it to make specific changes, which results it a lot of wasted tokens, wrong assumptions and mountains of sloppy code.
Exactly this. I've been using a lot of AI, both at work and on personal projects. It's a great help, but it needs a tight leash.
I see arguments saying "what does it matter, since you're not going to be touching that code anyway?"
Well, what you said about not being able to give it context is one aspect. Another one is that what the LLM is writing is still software. The more brittle and complex that software gets, the harder it is for the LLM to maintain it, since you get either spaghetti code or a house of cards where you can't move one bit of the system without breaking stuff on unrelated parts of it.
Oh, but the LLM can fix it, as long as you have some formal verification of the functionality! Sure, but it compounds.
All of this is absolutely fine for some projects, but for most enterprise and commercial software you need more rigour or you'll see yourself with a long, expensive and risky migration in the near future.
Calling it AI is where the problem lies. An LLM is not AI. It is a next token prediction function. That is a very powerful function but just one function out of millions in the overall stack. As an engineer you still have to have the right framework to call that function with the right inputs at the right places and validate the results. But if you focus on the technical details and not the marketing hype you can get amazing results in the areas where it works.
Personally, I don't know a place more hyped up about AI than HN. It turned from my daily dose of tech excitement into a daily dose of tech anxiety.
As for your argument, there's no such thing as elegance. Code "elegance" is mainly maintainability (and, to a smaller degree, some other aspects like security, performance, etc.). The importance of maintainability greatly varies between projects, industries and individual subjective viewpoints, resulting in the diversity of attitudes to AI-assisted coding. That, of course, assumes that AI cannot match humans in maintainability. Which seems to be the case to me right now. But it also seems that the gap is closing, not as much through AI writing "better" code, but mainly through it being increasingly capable of maintaining "bad" code.
It’s a boosting strategy to go where people are mostly positive about AI and complain that they’re too negative. As in “guys, are you true believers or not?”
That said, I agree with dang’s read. This site is big enough that both camps are decently represented (expect “mine”, of course), but anyone sees only what they want to see. The boosters see only doomers, and viceversa.
> Personally, I don't know a place more hyped up about AI than HN.
Other than every boardroom on earth you mean? ;-)
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Go develop a non trivial videogame, a performant compiler, an embedded code in a microcontroller that don't allocate and so on instead of developing a web app. Why?? Why in hell bloated code doesnt matter on the web? The state of web just sucks because of that
I've seen it before and over time it always plays out similarly.
- the cloud was invented and we were told CTOs would be able to just point and click and make infrastructure and apps! What did we actually get? Another layer of abstraction to debug through. Does it have is perks? Yes. Does it have it's own problems? Yes. Is it more expensive than setting up bare metal and having a solid team? Well that depends on what you're doing and the economics of it and the team.
- then document storages came along like and got wildly popular like mongo and people were calling it the end of SQL! And no more complexity or relational nonsense. Everything is JSON and life is great. What actually happened? These companies realized over time their data was getting trashed, adding things and fixing bugs became complex in pure docstore systems. So the initial v1 was easy and looked beautiful but only 4 years in you have a production db with orphan data that's twice as big as it should be. New features take forever to see a clear path in adding it to the model because it's no longer as intuitive to get performance for a feature.
Anyway. I see AI taking both of these roads at the same time. In 5 years I believe the code will be a giant pile of unfixable mess for most vibe coded things. I also don't see it getting rid of programmers but just adding another layer of abstraction to the mix that yes is helpful, but only if you already know what you're doing, much like what came of the clouds.
What's wrong with the cloud? I get the point about a hype cycle but those two examples don't seem even remotely in the same universe of similarity. SQL is still around, but the cloud won pretty comprehensively no? If you're starting something new, there's still a debate around what's the best database to use and stuff, but I'm struggling to imagine a content where the idea of managing your own hardware would even make sense as something to consider outside of the context of an existing large company with pre-existing on prem infra? And at least in the web world, 90+% of the time you are just going to go and click some buttons in vercel and posthog and whatever and that's your infra. The generic saas webapps that make up a huge chunk of the new projects that would be making architecture decisions where you might theoretically consider on prem are pretty well covered by the point and click abstractions - most of them probably wouldn't exist with the friction and overhead of having to actually manage bare metal
Like US politics now, AI talk is just a team sport where there's no room for nuance. If you want to talk about such things then you need to anticipate this and work around it from the jump, making clear the expectations about the scope of the discussion and ground somewhere concrete. For politics it's gotta be economics, data, specific policy. For AI, it's gotta be research, benchmarks, very specific workflows or use-cases.
Even establishing the scope of the discussion is tedious, and most people have no patience for that, so the practical choices are basically having a dumb rah-rah type of discussion, or none at all. I'm breaking my own best advice by even writing this down but the only answer is: Read More, Talk Less. If you're in school and talking with other students or if you're talking to colleagues with known background in the context of known practical problems they would like to solve.. it's different. But the forums? Read-only is not even effective as far as "checking in" on the "collective culture" in engineering to get an accurate picture. Actually engaging is even more effort for even less profit. I regret having opened the thread, so back to burying my head in more research and hands-on projects :)
> They care that the product works
This reminds me of Anthropic's post where they say they ship 8x as much code as they used to.
And I stopped to consider how many times I've used an app and thought, "You know what this needs? More code!"
Unsurprising, agents' solution to everything is writing more code. They'll happily reinvent the universe (a really crappy one).
Bug? More code. Unexpected behavior - read the docs? Couldn't find anything. Let's try another 1000 lines of workarounds. Still doesn't work? Write another 1000 lines to monkey-patch behavior. It sort of works now.
The actual solution is removing those 2000 lines and passing the correct argument on line 25 which is clearly documented. Most humans would never do that because we're too lazy but it's so easy to generate slop at an exponential rate and blow up the LOC metrics.
I think that in my career I have absolutely seen multiple times people making absolutely horrible architectural approaches where passing a parameter would suffice. Inventing and building basically whole universe instead of doing a bit of research.
With LLM coding I already have seen agent pointing out easier solutions because agent is not scared of or tired by reading existing code. Whereas most of developers want to write „their code” not read someone’s else’s code.
I joined a team where the previous boss measured productivity by LOC on a weekly basis in public.
This team eschewed libraries and shared code. Copy/paste everywhere.
Every defect had to fixed in 100+ mini-applications. It was a telecom MMI product.
Is this why Claude Code uses React as a game engine to run a TUI?
I believe that all the speed gains are running on loaned time, and that time will need to be spent sooner or later.
Being critical is not the same as being anti.
If you're not allowed to be critical of a subject, then one should question if the subject has any true merit.
> but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
yes and an end has to be worth the means. people disagree about whether it is worth it. some people see a benefit using LLMs and agents to such a degree they're willing to look past the noise and water and air pollution produced by the unprecedented data center buildout that we've seen over the past few years, or the unprecedented increase in things like spam and deepfakes, or the way that it is decimating the job market + funnel, or the way that it reinforces existing antisocial incentives in society. some don't/aren't.
>> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
Really depends on what you are shipping, what your users expect and what your personal preference is. I do not want to go 10x on products that need high performance / high reliability, is deployed at large scale where its not easy to undo. But for other stuff, sure why not. The problem is everyone just puts everything in same basket. Either way, AI is useful but not to the same extent people claim it to be.
Well said. In creative spaces they talk about “Dirty” vs “Clean”. Dirty they say lets you move fast. Clean is slow.
Happen to be a startup that isn’t mission critical to someone’s health and well being? Great, now you can use AI and be as dirty as you would like.
Are you working with dangerous chemicals that are ingested by others, or systems that control hunks of metal flying through the sky with hundreds on board? Maybe we should stay clean in those environments until we make AI itself clean.
It's extremely useful for UIs.
As a front-end guy, if I owned a project I would have the API AI-assisted and UI AI-driven.
as a back end guy, UI is a savior when it comes to UI, it's not perfect but it's much better than what I can code on my own.
Because a lot of us are engineers. It's our mindset and our job to question hype and broad strokes and easy solutions, to go a few levels deeper and ask "okay but does it really work?". I don't think most people are anti AI more than they are anti any tool.
I think that anti-AI sentiment is caused by the business bunnies, over-selling what AI/LLMs can do. Mass retrenchments, re-hiring engineers again a year later to clean up the shit storm caused by over use of AI.
Put even simpler: We, engineers/tech people/tech heavy industries, we are the ones who's lives get the most disturbed, uprooted, messed up by the use of superlatives, the "promises" of AI.
Don't get me wrong, I use it all the time, got the AI psychosis myself, but it is still daft, thick as bricks. It is no replacement for a human.
Because for many people writing code is exactly their job, it isn't a means to an end.
It is like replacing people at the supermarket with self checkouts and expext they still feel fulfilled on their job, replenishing products from the warehouse.
Additionally only optimistics cannot see their job is in jeopardy.
If you deploy 10x faster, than me as business owner need less of you for the same amount of work.
No, the need for work doesn't grow exponentially every year, there is a physical limit to distribute among all people offering delivery capabilities.
Finally its environment impact destroys all the progress that was made in the last years, and brings computers prices back to the 1980's.
> If you deploy 10x faster, than me as business owner need less of you for the same amount of work
An important consideration here is that velocity is not zero sum. If you are delivering in weeks what used to take months you are creating an entirely new realm of what is possible to do with software within a corporation.
In the real world, I have never worked for a company that doesn't have a huge backlog (either tracked or in engineers heads) of work that would never be done because it wasn't economic under the old model. This tends to apply to the internal work of engineers (developer tooling, infrastructure, tech debt, etc) more than anything else. 10X faster doesn't necessarily mean shipping 10X product code. You can use that productivity boost to accelerate prototyping, ship betas faster, move the iteration loop faster, all while shipping higher quality code with less tech debt and having the time to continuously improve the engineering side of things that the business never sees.
Most companies aren't software houses.
If you fulfill your delivery contract in half the time, great for me, you now need track down another customer.
Or put in another way, an agency now only needs a third of previous team sizes to deliver the same amount of work.
The other two thirds might be lucky to have another project assigned, or get to seat on the bench, and depending on the world region (offshoring shops) get their salary halved, before being fired if seating too long on the bench.
But less people to build something means more companies will he able to build something, this math will be interesting in the future. Also there will be a exponentially more stuff to maintain.
No it doesn't, that is the MBA thought process of exponential curves of endless sales that always ends in layoffs when real world physics reality check kicks in.
The amount of customers willing to buy a specific product is limited.
At my workplace, we outsource a great deal. Of all the companies we outsource to, the employees of two are very upfront that they use LLM "assistance". Their output has been getting worse and worse since that started, about a year ago. Firmware produced with LLM assistance results in hardware that does not work reliably. Tools created or maintained with LLM-assistance do not function reliably. In short, LLM-created product doesn't work in my direct experience.
I think it's the subconscious telling the conscious parts of our brains what's coming. We're in the foothills now, and we're starting to feel the difference in how thin the air is. It's getting a bit colder and not as many trees grow here. Looking up, we see the snow capped summit of the mountain looming above us, and we know we can't survive up there.
Because AI use correlates with sloppiness, and due to the fundamental attribution fallacy us engineers don't like sloppiness.
This is a lot of it for me. "All users care about is that they can drive a car across the bridge. They don't care if an AI built it."
I want a solid, proud, well-engineered bridge, goddammit!
Many users may not care which bridges they drive over, but I personally would like to avoid driving over the original Tacoma Narrows bridge[1] or any others of similarly flimsy engineering.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)
The engineers who hype AI the hardest are the mediocre ones. They lack the skills (or the motivation) to write quality code themselves, so they ask the LLMs to do it for them. Then they get to pretend they wrote it themselves, and a business idiot hands them a gold star.
I totally get why there's so much hype for AI.
I am not totally anti AI but I don’t use coding harnesses. I see my coworkers using coding harnesses decline in basic engineering mentalities, asking me questions easily answered with a modicum of research or thinking, but claude told them something so they ask me.
I don’t think these are bad guys or bad engineers, it’s concerning to me though. Engineers should be getting sharper in their analysis over time not weaker. When someone tells me they haven’t even looked at a few lines of code they submitted it’s shocking and a sign of sloppy thinking. It’s rude too because is expecting me to pick up their slack.
I’m sure the AI companies are in love with the idea that people are growing dependent on their product for things they could easily do themselves. That’s a great business.
> It’s rude too because is expecting me to pick up their slack.
I just had to deal with this, they never pushed back on my PR comments, just copy pasted everything I said back into Claude. Its just second hand vibe coding at that point, might as well fire the middle man…
My boss was fired yesterday, in part because every single document, email, meeting agenda, performance review, and PR he's written for a year has been pure AI slop.
His defense was always "everyone uses AI, including you" and I'm like yes i do use it for code but never communications, and my code is always 10x better than the untested slop I was constantly asked to review.
This is a guy with 30 years engineering experience, reduced to submitting untested and unreviewed slop code of a quality drastically worse than the least-experienced juniors in the company.
That phenomenon on a global scale is concerning to think about. That people are using these things outside of tech to get medical advice or as therapist replacements is even more concerning.
Interesting. What factors led your boss's boss to this decision? Does he not have AI psychosis? I thought the further up someone was in an organisation, the more AI they used.
LLMs as provided by Antrophic and OpenAI represents an enormous centralization of computing, and are black boxes that end-users are completely at the mercy of.
HN probably has as much as 5 million monthly users. This is not just a small group of insiders, but more of a broadly representative sample of startup and engineering people.
So there is a wide range of judgement, and more importantly, a diverse set of worldviews. These are beliefs that form the foundations of cognition and perception. In the general population there are a massive number of people who do not understand technology and/or do not really appreciate it at a deep level. This includes a significant percentage of startup and engineering people unfortunately.
Is 5 million a guess or a stat? I've always wondered how "big" HN is.
I’m pro AI as a tech but against current economic power structure. I usually prefer not say much about it.
Interesting, my impression is that HN crowd is aggressively pro-AI, and on a level that is simply bizarre. E.g. the 'spec driven agentic engineering' that seems to be all the rage right now is pretty much a return to the 1970's waterfall development model, just with faster implementers. But initial implementation speed wasn't the bottleneck then as it isn't now - maybe people are too young to notice that we're (more or less) just witnessing another rotation of the big wheel of reincarnation ;)
Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
This isn't really related to AI because it relates to manually coded things just as much, but on this point specifically this is only true for your very early I-gave-it-to-a-bunch-of-interested-people-to-try customers. It's much less true for your first paying customers, especially if the 'major issues' make their pain worse (e.g. data loss, time wasted, etc). You lose those ones for good, or until there's a critical mass of social proof to tell them the early problems are solved.
'I can dash out an early prototype with AI and then fix it later' is a dangerous mindset. If you're working in a small market with a limited number of customers you might piss off enough people that you won't be able to recover. There still has to be some level of quality. But it is a balance.
I’d be willing to bet that most of us can see both the positives and the negatives of AI just fine.
It’s about the greyest subject I can think of.
The post asks a question and then presents a strong opinion with the confidence of it being a fact. There is a pretence of curiosity veiling a complaint. I think it is this perceived lack of curiosity, casual exaggeration (“10X faster”) and implication of the “one true way” (“Let’s face it”) among AI supporters that grinds my gears at least.
It is more of a reaction to misrepresentation and falsehood, which AI and its rhetoric seems to have generated a lot of.
If you enjoyed programming prior to LLM’s, like it was actually a fun thing for you to do, why would you use an LLM? You wouldn’t, it’s depressing.
Similar to an artist who enjoys drawing or painting, would they use an LLM? No, because they like doing that craft.
Would a programmer who loves programming use it to create marketing materials? Absolutely.
A lot of modern discourse makes sense when you realize that most people, when they express an opinion, are not making a claim about objective reality but rather using it as a badge of membership for their in-group. They see being "anti-X" as a proxy for identifying "good people" and being "pro-X" as a proxy for identifying "bad people," or vice versa.
The elegance of the code is not superfluous at all. It correlates with the developer's understanding of both the code and the domain.
Many kinds of software cannot be yeeted 10x faster with AI. Someone has to sit down and understand what the right thing to do is, first.
It also matters how many users you expect to be able to reach. If you're Facebook you can afford to use the first 10,000 users as unpaid QA. If you're an indie shop that's barely getting downloads you really want to make a positive impression on your initial users or you're toast anyway.
There was an article created by I think creator of HTMX with the headline: "Code is Cheap(er), Understanding is Expensive(er)
https://htmx.org/essays/code-is-cheap/#understanding-is-expe...
I’m more of an “AI centrist”, as I think the topic is extremely nuanced. As with most tech hype, there tends to be a black and white “AI good” or “AI bad”. I think reality is somewhere in the middle, personally.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
It’s takes like this that remove the nuance completely and ignore so many facets of the debate. That being said, let’s assume this is true because I think vibecoding a CRUD app does make this realistic on the face of it. When I say vibecoding I mean prompting and dropping, not reading the code.
You do your adversarial reviews with multiple agents, you have your UX agent look over it, your security agent etc. Under the hood there are architectural issues. The code is probably passable, but rough.
You release, customers start using it for their business that they depend on for income. Issues start cropping up, you burn more and more tokens to fix the issues as they come up. Expedience starts sacrificing quality even still, architecture (if there was any) starts being violated and it degrades more and more.
I consider myself a professional, I would never want to end up in a situation like this for mission crititcal products. So, what do I do? I read the output, I make sure I understand it. Why? I care about my customers and secondarily I’m the one with the pager when something breaks down.
Now, for some fun hobby project to track my hobby paints for Warhammer… who cares? I agree. I have used Claude for such projects and not really cared. But your statement does not hold up in the enterprise world with mission critical software.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
This is reductive. You’re assuming people’s concern is “elegance”. It isn’t solely elegance. It’s domain understanding. It’s quality over all. It’s being a professional.
Writing the code was never the slow down for large scale enterprise products.
There are medical devices and stuff that will always require slow deliberate testing and changing.
If you have an application that real people use in everyday work and depend on stuff not moving under their feet. Execution speed is not something you aim for because you have to adjust to speed of users adopting changes.
As a startup owner of course you can’t really care about those people using your software because you have to pivot as quickly as possible to an investment that pays the most and boring every day app is not going to be a unicorn.
There is another option at the end of the spectrum. You aim at posthuman world where humans are not required and your software doesn’t have to bother with earning money or users that are slow or have emotions.
I think it depends on which side of the regression-to-the-mean machine that you land on (above or below the mean) for any given skill that is being disrupted by AI. From above, AI is frustrating; from below, it's magical.
https://halecraft.org/software-engineering-is-the-new-manufa...
> Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
For most software engineers LLMs represent future financial uncertainty, pushing them into a tailspin. For a substantial subgroup the challenge runs deeper IMO. They are experiencing an identity crisis, as a central component of their self-concept is being violently stripped away on top of the financial uncertainty.
I think it also has to do with the experience after using AI for a while.
I have decided to leave what has been my workplace for over 15 years - mainly to do other types of work. Why? I stopped thinking in my current job as a system architect and dev. AI output is better or on par with my thinking, and I lost all feeling of achievement in my daily work.
I still want to use my brain, so I will find a job where I can continue to do that.
this is already a thread that is superlong so I think this will get buried, there's the common camps of people but I'd like to explain why from my perspective too; because I don't often see people reflecting my concerns as openly.
Every single technological improvement that has helped "developers" in the last 16 years has been worse for users (with very few exceptions).
I tried constantly to reconcile this fact, but I find it hard because I don't "speak" finance, I don't "speak" PM, and I don't "speak" sales. I speak: goals, outcomes and product.
My industry niche has been reliability, and I've all but seen my role be eliminated because nobody wants to pay for things to work properly, they don't want to pay for the friction of someone slowing the gears of business in order to actually satisfy requirements: unless they're forced to.
Every abstraction on top of an inefficient system: that speeds up development, but slows down (or makes the runtime expensive) has a direct or indirect impact on users respectively.
If you build your programs using electron, they're laggy unless you're on a <3y mid-level machine or greater they use copious amount of memory and they don't even integrate with accessibility toolchains of the system itself.
Heavy web-frameworks exhaust compute so completely that we have to run complex orchestration systems and deployment schemes to operate them now, what was once considered slow because it was interpreted is now many orders of magnitude slower anyway due to those orchestration overheads. We run containers, on VMs, inside of dedicated sandboxes, on generic CPUs with low single-core clock speeds, on expensive vendors..
An issue that compounds.
.. to save developer time from writing something more efficient, or in running closed loop systems.
You can, as a developer: enjoy these times. But make no mistake, they want to minimise the amount of time you spend making things because they want to employ less of you.
AI is just another step in this direction. LLMs generate passable code, it's not good, I will definitely have to go in and clean it up when it inevitably fails. You will generate your first $10M with a good idea, but then you'll hit a scaling issue and I will have to come in and add to my grey hairs: and you will resent me the entire time I am helping you.
AI will make worse things more ubiquitous. Eventually the public won't even want to use technology, because we made it so fucking awful.
I'm not sure what the question is in your comment but this sentence is the only one that has a question mark:
>> I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
The answer is that, yes, most people do understand that. Some people like writing code regardless of whether they realise the extent to which that code is useful to others or not. Some people write code just as a means to an end and couldn't are less how that code is produced. There is, from what I've seen, a general expectation that the people who care about code are better at writing it but my experience is also that they just aren't. Some people who are "passionate about prorgramming" are horrible coders, some who are lukewarm or don't care at all are great coders.
I honestly don't know how AI comes into all that. HN is certainly not anti-AI. Just the other day a post made the first page with a title like "HN front page without the AI" but I can't find it now. There's as much AI stories submitted as anyting you could consider anti-AI.
The other day, I had a similar thought about the relative importance of code.
I'm working on a game, and I've been fussing over the code quality. And yeah, having code that isn't awful is important for various reasons. But with a game, it got me thinking, the code is literally the only part of the game the player doesn't experience.
The time I'm spending on the code, I could be spending on the art, the game design, the music, the story...
But my natural tendency is to hyper-focus on the only part of the game nobody will ever see. I thought that was interesting.
(That being said the codebase is ass and I do need to clean it up!)
My point of view is that code is the experience. Dealing with the constraints of code is one of the ways game design evolves as one iterates over what could be cool and filter for what is possible.
The code working is everything the player experiences. They don't experience consistent indentation or comment block style, but they experience what it does.
HN crowd is quite pro-AI. Many reddit forums like r/programming have simply banned AI topics.
Frankly, your opinion on HN being "anti-AI" is eye-rolling - it means you are living in a pro-AI bubble and have never seen anti-AI. There are many on HN who will defend AI to the death.The only places I've seen profoundly pro-AI bias are places full of programmers specialized in fields where they have to have extensive domain knowledge outside of what the coding part does.
Typically there's a lot of acknowledgement that problems are coming rapidly, if only in the form of amateurs flooding the domain, but there's also an assumption that their domain knowledge is going to matter, in terms of staying viable in the market. This is far from a safe assumption.
Even if you assume you are ONLY needing to sell products or services to humans, also assuming that humans will continue to thrive and spend money, you're assuming people will be able to identify superior products you assume you can produce and market, and that they won't be misled by false advertising, at scale, generated by other AI to optimize its effectiveness.
If you instead assume the domain experts are going to need to sell to AIs (either as owners of wealth and power, or as the agents of the humans we're assuming will still thrive and spend money) you're making a hell of a big assumption that the agents will be trustworthy market participants with perfect information able to evaluate stuff in the best traditions of market capitalism. Humans don't manage that, even when they're a lot smarter. If this assumption fails, all the money goes to whatever exploits the AI agents most effectively, also at scale. At that stage there is no use being a domain expert in anything but hacking people's AI agents to trick or puppet the agents to do your bidding. Anything else is wasted effort.
Sometimes I also see pushback along the lines of programmers criticizing the quality of the AI coding itself. This is gonna be domain-dependent and it's fair to counter it through developing less fragile languages, but we don't know that'll work as an answer. There's a lot of handwaving.
I'm pretty sure people's experience of AI, as a rule, is the bad, damaging forms, where it's burning stupid amounts of energy to make everything worse while openly promising to take away everyone's ability to work and replacing it with the need to pay the AI owners a sort of extra tax just to be able to exist and think. The HN crowd is WILDLY pro-AI compared to the general population.
It's not going to look any better in future for the general population. What I've described leads to 'AI' increasingly producing shockingly bad outcomes for people in general, through simple market dynamics. It's going to be way more profitable to produce the bad outcomes.
You live in a bubble. HN absolutely is profoundly pro-AI. All the most celebrated thought leaders here do nothing but post pelican AI bench marks and wax poetically about building a Matryoshka brain around humanity.
I think there are multiple aspects at play.
People have reasonable concerns about the ethical, political, economic dimensions before we even get to the technical capabilities.
Even within the narrower question of the technical utility, I think there are a lot of factors which differentiate people's different experiences which are largely unacknowledged and lead to people talking past each other and failing to understand how others have such different experiences and opinions.
The sentiment that "users only care if it works" for example implies that all considerations beyond "does the feature work today" are developers self serving their aesthetics, but overlooks many other concerns which _do_ impact users at a later point.
I wrote about just this division of experience and the polarisation which manifests on hacker news just last week as it happens https://www.julianhaeger.com/posts/Disparate-Results-with-AI...
I use AI for small, stand-alone utilities, with limited risk/impact. These are things I make for only myself to use.
For anything something else will use, this is a real problem you can’t simply wave away.
> AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt”
Bad code is hard to maintain, for the AI as well. While all code eventually becomes technical debt, the throw-away nature of AI code, and the sheer volume it creates, tends to turn it to technical debt more quickly. If code is “cheap”/“easy”, and the AI is bad at maintenance, why not do a full re-write for every update?
Bugs are bad for users and harder to find when you don’t have a deep understanding of the code. Logic bugs are the worst of these, because the AI and linter won’t necessarily find them. Some logic bugs can cause a lot of real world issues before they are reported and found. If doing a full re-write for updates, because the AI doesn’t care, each run is an opportunity for new bugs to get injected into the code.
If I’m expected to understand and answer for the code when there are issues, I need to be able to read and understand it, not just deploy quickly.
This does not really match my observations. While it does feel to me the sentiment is shifting towards a more negative one, overall HN feels reasonably balanced between those that are pro-AI and those anti-AI (with the middle ground somewhat absent).
Unlike what many other comments here seem to suggest, HN seems much more pro-AI than what I see in real life amongst developers - at least where I live.
And I do think many users would care more than we might think, but unlike art etc. it is often more difficult to tell.
I think it's very useful but the hype promises so much more than it delivers. And a lot of the proponents are all in on the hype it gets annoying.
I use claude to write a design, review the design, turn that into an implementation plan, spend 2-3 turns reviewing that, but still when that is turned into code it misses things or creates helpers that's not actually used or... It creates massive files and unless I explicitly tell it to it never refactors them. It often just silences errors and warnings instead of actually fixing the problem.
It saves a lot of time, and I'm building things I couldn't have on my own. But it makes a lot of mistakes, it's far far from one shots which the hype keep going on and on about. It's tricky to put firm limits on what it does. A lot of the mistakes I catch because I've spent 15 years without an agent and sometimes it's just "hm, this smells weird" and I begin digging. I worry about the next generation.
For me the mental framing of "It's all hallucinations, some of those hallucinations are useful" is helpful to keep frustration in check as I ask it to review the same implementation plan for the 4th time and it turns up different issues because the input was slightly different, or review the output code and see allow(dead_code) despite my claude.md forbidding it.
This is very much my experience and process as well. Lately I've found 4.7/4.8 telling me not to fix problems lol: "outside the scope of this PR," "not caused by your changes," "safe to ignore" etc. Robot, I decide what to fix, when, and how!
It hates following project conventions, loves mocking so much out of tests that it fails to test anything at all, and yeah constantly leaving dead code around.
And yet it's still very useful. It's just nowhere close to as good as it's hyped, and yet there are professional developers who are using it as though it is.
Yea, and a related annoying thing that started in 4.7. It often stops halfway "Do you want to continue?".
Then I want to shout at it "Is the work done? No it isn't so yes of course continue, are you stupid?", but then I remember it's basically a big matrix and for the 58th time type up "Yes, ultrathink and continue"
A junior developer would learn, claude doesn't. I've tried adding this to CLAUDE.md but it doesn't help.
I am against it simply because it corrupts reason.
Humans are trained for easy wins, not thinking about long term consequences and assuming risks will not play out. It's the lethal trifecta of emboldening our worst characteristics.
Not only that the majority of problems that we have with software engineering are self-inflicted and everyone has forgotten that they don't have to be. All this does is allow us to operate the pile of shit we built over the last 25 years with somewhat less efficiency than we did 25 years ago.
The customer does indeed care that the product works. But the engineers should care what they build and with what. And they don't any more. The status quo is using a statistical model to assemble a pile of trash.
Go back 30 years and I single-handedly built a full custom ERP system for a company in 3 months without an LLM in sight, with no internet connection and thus without pulling a single dependency off the internet.
Add the me-too culture over the top "we have to have an AI proposition" and it's a gold rush but the gold is muck.
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand
This is very much not settled, and very much depending on your market. Selling games to gen-z? Yeah, they are going to care a lot.
They only care if you tell them, so don't.
Lying to customers is shitty behavior. They'll ask.
Do you feel this way about apps that gather information about you? "It says it has no tracking cookies.." Or apps that sell your email address? What if I claimed my product was vegetarian?
Like, wtf kind of attitude is "just lie about it".
It's a gut feeling.
We _know_ LLMs can't be _that_ good as they are promoted.
I've spent the last 6 months creating a production grade app from scratch with Claude where I wrote no single line of code. I've reviewed code and it was looking good, almost completely following my templates, workflows, skills.
Now I've started to make minor manual updates and I'm horrified. Claude has no idea why there were those templates and instructions in place. It followed them blindly without grasping their spirit. The end result is like a very junior dev copy-pasting answers from Stack Overflow into the codebase. No consistency, chaotic application of different conventions, duplicated code, ghost code (does nothing), and perhaps more as I'm digging in.
The pros: The code works, all tests pass (43% code / 57% tests, 1:1.3 ratio), the UI looks good with visible glitches
The cons: I'll have to rewrite most of the code on the long run, make it fit, easy to maintain.
The verdict: I wouldn't started this project alone. Claude get me through to v0.1.0 / MVP where I've focused solely on the product: technologies, architecture, functionality, and usability. Now it's easier to refactor all for v0.2.0 manually without Claude.
So this might be our gut feeling: we know it's something good, but not as good as the stakeholders might promote. We know it helps in some ways but it's a nightmare in other ways.
We are not anti-AI but rather pragmatic: Not that AI enthusiasts we are expected to be.
> No consistency, chaotic application of different conventions, duplicated code, ghost code (does nothing), and perhaps more as I'm digging in.
I didn’t understand this part. You said you reviewed the code and it was looking good, so how did the cruft creep in? Were you reviewing every diff, or taking an occasional sample?
Personally I'm not anti-AI, I'm anti-Stupid.
I also don't consider LLM's to be AI. I put it in the same category as PageRank.
But if you thought of an LLM that way (like pagerank), you should be getting very bad results from it.
AI has done widely-accepted-as-bad things (e.g. spamming social media, datacenter physical consequences) and seems to have done less widely-accepted-as-good things (code improvement, but many people aren’t convinced. Is software today better than 1-2 years ago? I can’t find clear examples.)
Good or bad, I believe the genie is out of the bottle, and we should do the best we can using and mitigating AI. But I don’t blame or disagree with anyone who’s critical.
I tend to agree with your overall point, but I think you reveal far more about yourself than you accurately reflect anything about HN. Just read back what you wrote:
> AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues
You want to ship major bugs to your users, let them find them, report them and fix them afterwards. You passively assume this is a good way to build software without even really questioning it.
Aside from some people just not liking this in principle, there are a lot of contexts where bugs cause actual harm and cost actual money. In some cases, "people dying" and "go to jail for it" type harm.
If everyone does it and the majority of users are captured in ways that they wont or cant seek out alternatives then shipping bugs to users, letting them find amd report them and then fixing them is business-optimal.
What keeps users themselves from vibe-coding their own software?
If you don't own quality, why should I pay? You're just a middleman at that point.
It would potentially be more business-optimal to ship fewer bugs if everyone else is shipping more bugs. Your development cycle would be costlier, but users would prefer to buy your products over others.
Skipping airplane maintenance is business-optimal for an airline. For a few months.
"Business-optimal" is not the same as "optimal".
Pathetic state of affairs that this is said with a straight face. Jesus Christ. Software engineers deserve every hate that's coming for us.
I believe is just an impression given “Anti somethings” people are usually more vocal and likely to comment on the topic
Saying "code is just a means to an end" is like saying a Car is just a Vehicle to get from A to B. Which is true to a certain amount of people, but certainly not to people who need a special car like a truck and certainly not to the people who build cars. Developers are car builders.
> there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
Confirmation bias. There has been pro-AI post every single day too but because you already decided that HN is anti-AI you didn't notice that.
I have loved using AI technology for 45 years (symbolic AI, old fashioned NNs, … to the present). I am also skeptical about the apparently desperation-driven ‘bet the farm’ approach we are taking here in the USA.
Slow is Fast.
Are you really surprised people feel this way? People have pigeonholed themselves into this field and now they find themselves horseshoe makers in this new age. It is scary and concerning. People do have legitimate fear. The whole pitch with AI isn't really that it empowers you to make some CRUD app easily. It is that eventually, sometime very soon, people will wise up to the fact that prompting is not a six figure job. It can be done by desperate low skilled people halfway across the world. Eventually those people will also hit the block.
I think people who aren't scared right now aren't really considering the larger implications of what is actually being pitched. The fact that the AI evangelicals don't realize that they too have no moat is going to be so ironic if only it wasn't so sad what is actually happening.
I mean, we are devaluing humanity. That is what these tools are promising really. It isn't just software. It is art. It is sales. It is poetry. It is C suite. It is filmaking. It is surgery. Every job there is, is at risk. Maybe not tomorrow, but on the horizon. The remaining jobs on earth will become the next target to automate and remove humans out of existence. An ever larger target until there are no targets left but AI controlled companies infighting among eachother for the energy coming from the sun and the nutrients in the 6 inches of topsoil.
Earth will be for the birds and the machines by the end of the century I'm guessing. Keeping us alive will be seen as a liability and a great risk to power structures. If we are allowed to live, and that is a huge if, we will probably devolve back into the hunter gatherer stage, fearful of the machine gods and their robot soldiers and temples of data and compute.
I can only speak for myself. I mostly write C# and the code they generate isn’t of my liking. Too many var statements, async everywhere even for the most trivial things, and then a lot of times when I ask something difficult they fail spectacularly. I asked Claude the other day to propose an algorithm for Named Entity Recognition for brand names and all it did was to build a heuristics based on the type of business entities. And then in order to do that it went and created four classes. They overcomplicate things all the time for no apparent reason.
I built an Asterisk dialplan using Gemini a few months ago and it has so many hacks and quirks in it that I don’t dare touch it. I just leave it there hopping that it will keep working. I excluded Asterisk from future OS updates to avoid something fucking up that travesty of a dialplan.
Couple of weeks ago I wanted to explore an enhanced version of a PPMI algorithm that tries to flatten rare pairs. I went back and forth with all three major LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) and they couldn’t agree on anything. They kept changing each other’s algorithms all the time. The “reasoning” part seems laughable, it’s just a probabilistic infinite loop.
And that’s just for the programming part. Whenever I’ve asked them about SEO their answers are highly inaccurate. All in all I just don’t fucking trust anything they say.
Many reasons. Each person is an individual and you will learn most by seeking to engage with all the individual stories to empathise and understand. Ultimately it’s a very human thing to care, this is a big change and everyone deals with change differently. It’s a great start to see you caring and wanting to know more.
The reports of AI powered 10x development speed are greatly exaggerated
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Also: at some point the elegance of the code starts to matter more than execution speed. :)
Is it? As mentioned by another comment, it's probably more divided than 'anti-AI'.
Also, 'Over the past six months, there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI ...' probably means the opposite is simply not news worthy anymore - no one wants to read another article that says AI could write fairly reasonable code.
> enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues
You think the real world has nothing better to do than test your shitty code?
Because it's the crowd that sees reality of the results, not just the marketing.
You can ship a 1.0 10x faster and leave bug hunting to your users and tank your reputation before you have one or you could do like what we've been doing for 30 years and ship quality. There was no problem to fix there that AI fixed.
It feels like the "Hype Wave" is going through oscillations before it damps down.
You know, it starts with hype about this new thing that is, perhaps, smarter than humans—or at least may soon be. And then the backlash comes and AI's reputation follows in descension.
And from such backlash and hate, some people start to say, "Hey, it's not so bad. It works for me." And maybe AI's reputation begins to swings toward the positive…
I suppose this is to be expected and perhaps ultimately healthy. I know for myself the swings in attitudes regarding AI have caused me to give pause and consider both sides with more regard than I might have. It has blunted some of my criticism and praise, sharpened others.
A few observations I’ve made.
1. Many criticisms of AI’s usefulness focus on the present/past. They may well be right about the current state, but the trajectory things are improving at (unless we’ve hit a brick wall) means they’ll probably be wrong in a few years.
2. Some of the most vocal anti AI statements I’ve heard have come from people the most impacted by its disruption. Does the concept it cheapens your prior work, or perhaps threatens to replace you, not lead to a huge amount of bias?
Like any technology, AI has good and bad aspects. There should be criticisms of it, we need those. But focusing on where it’s headed, and being aware of bias, is going to produce the most important discussions.
My honest take? Hackers and builders value not just the result but also the journey. There is a feeling that AI is a cheat code to get to the result without having gone through the journey. I am fully on that side, and like everyone I’m using AI because I can’t afford not to, and because it’s also admittedly, fun and addictive and even within it, you can build skill (no pun intended) and for now at least, talented people with good taste and problem solving skills seem to manage to just use AI as a multiplier.
But because AI made everyone have perfect English, and above average design skills, everything that 4 years ago would be considered elegant, well written, well working anything, now looks like yet another low effort AI slop.
People appreciate not just the result but also the effort.
Also the entire AI will replace you marketing bait from all BigAI CEOs is tiring. And the entire you have to adopt AI to survive is nauseating. It takes mostly pure will to become an expert in AI, just prompt what’s the latest FOMO skills repo and you also can be an AI influencer.
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used.
But users also include users of the code. There's no value in self-flagellation via terrible code or pointlessly complicated frameworks.
If you think HN crowd is Anti AI, try to talk to a random person on the street. HN crowd is generally more measured on the topic. Current AI is not the perfect solution, and comes with many many soci economic problems and general HN statement reflects that alongside the mindblowing strides made
The root cause if of course AI's role in loss of power on compensation (coding as a skill is no longer as valuable), and loss of power in labor vs capital.
It's hard to face this, specially for the one oasis in the job market that pays well.
The contrarian bet is that being able to code (by yourself) may be more valuable in the future. It will certainly become rarer.
We shall see. My area of coding for a living is SO specialized and SO far from 'skill at literal coding' that I'm making that bet, because I don't stand to benefit from anything else: if I go for AI it will directly relegate me to sheer vibe-coding as the AI will immediately go for abstractions that are more sophisticated 'code' than I know. It'll do them wrong but I won't know the difference and won't be able to criticize them.
That's so worthless and doomed to failure that there's no point attempting it, so I do the coding my own primitive way and focus on the specialty I do.
I can tell you the risk: any sufficiently motivated AI can go after my userbase by simply lying and claiming it's doing my thing better than I am. There'll be people who can't tell the difference, so if the AI is able to leverage more marketing and resources it may well succeed.
Only defense I have is to continue to do what I do, like some artisanal box-maker able to survive because they're doing exquisite work making something you can get a cardboard version of at Home Depot for a buck seventy-eight. Then when I die, there is ONLY cardboard, assuming there aren't people learning to make artisanal boxes.
I think some of it is just needing to be a counter balance to the unending hype train from the AI companies that have an existential need for AI to be the next big thing. That and seeing these amazing demos and press releases, then trying it out yourself and finding that it's not nearly as capable as advertised and many of those demos are bullshit.
Even the "programmers are now obsolete" predictions have really not panned out as more people discover that while AI is an absolute boss at solving college homework level problems, it entire falls apart completely or requires a ton of babysitting to work on problems larger than homework exercises.
It's certainly useful at times, but you always have to keep problems about homework sized and generally focused on a single thing that has been done many times before or you'll have a bad time.
Good uses of AI: Asking it to implement a GStream Webp to backing store module in a GTK project.
Bad use of AI: Asking it to implement a libnftables interface for adding and removing firewall rules. The AIs completely hallucinate the entire API and output useless garbage. Plus the API is high level so even when you try to input it into the context the AI engine gets very lost. You can fight with trying to get it to understand, but in the end it's faster to just write the code yourself.
I think it's because too many people have released tools that's clearly not ready for production because they don't know what to actually check. So it's now just easier to pattern match away any good tools that might surface.
I work with junior ops "engineers". Even though some of them won't admit it, they want to do everything with AI, and they do not care much about testing. Even their peer review is done by AI, you can tell by the way the comments are written. They want to deploy stateful clusters, manage VM lifecycles, and even deploy our own Kube cluster, probably entirely vibe coded.
One of them tried to use tabs in yaml instead of spaces, didn't know what a virtualenv was, and didn't know why Kube jobs asked for xp in writing operators ; yet he is pushing multi-files features in less than a day that are meant to manage our backups, and is pushing for managing our own kube clusters in front of management (which finds that it is a lovely idea). At this point I am not sure what to do but it won't end very well I feel.
This is not a question of ideology or personal beliefs. It’s just a matter of fact that AI systems, especially LLMs, are not capable of producing reliable results.
This is a fundamental issue and for many uses we still need the old school way of computing that produces reliable results. It doesn’t happen accidentally, you know, a lot of resources went into this. AI just isn’t there yet and probably won’t be there anytime soon, no matter how much compute we throw at it.
Many of the people reading HN will be making a lot less money in two years. Some will be unemployed. Some will be homeless.
Human intelligence becomes less valuable in quantity as AI gets better. Being big and strong was once valuable. Not so much any more.
"When this machine learns your job, what are you going to do?"
The question is whether AI / LLMs gets better.
I'm not an ML expert, but regarding code _quality_ I see no progress at all in the last couple of years. LLMs still write code by using probabilistic calculations vs. applying rigorous thinking and logic.
This is only good while no one has to look under the hood. When trying to understand and fix code written by LLMs you'll realize what a mess they produce. It's a codebase without any systematic thinking inside. Everything is ad-hoc, wired together to pass the tests, and to conform to some templates. No deliberate practice, no intelligence at all in the code.
This can't be a long term strategy for an entire industry.
We're going to need some mid-level representation of what software is trying to do. Formal specs? UML? Semi-formal specs in natural language? Design rules? People hate updating such representations, but AIs don't have that problem.
You are going to be asked to do your job, faster, and you are going to have a massive headache managing a bunch of machines mostly doing your job.
That is the status quo now. If LLMs get better and better, managers will simply direct them, well, directly. That's what the parent comment means by the machine learning to do your job. It completely, not mostly, replaces you.
I have some doubt here, because I do know that managers of at least some seniority have the political antennae to be wary of taking responsibility for something they don’t understand blowing up in their face. If they use LLMs directly, then the number of production outages will increase with the use of these powertools in unskilled inexperienced hands. The causes will probably just tilt towards design mistakes and unforeseen exceptions rather than coding language defects. I can see them wanting to keep some techies around simply to have someone to blame. You don’t get far up the ladder without learning how to cover your ass.
> managers will simply direct them
that Made me laugh. what you say won't happen. it's not that AI won't be sufficiently intelligent, it's that managers are not.
I wonder what "management" will look like when many of the players are AIs. Humans may just be too slow to manage or coordinate.
I don't think they'll let the chain of managers above you handle the llm directly. That is just too much risk of incompetence. Instead, there will be micro teams (1 dev, 1 sre, 1 product owner) that are meta manageed by a LLM. And their llm reports directly to a higher up's llm. And software will diversify to prevent all these supply chain attacks we've seen lately.
Managers can barely direct me without shitting their pants. What saves them most of the time is my ability to say "No". Until LLMs can do that, which seems quite hard to do so far, good luck replacing me.
To all the managers reading this and thinking "phew. so long suckers!", I'd be willing do what you do for 50% of the pay. Surely it is _I_ that will be irreplaceable!
It’s just a big forum so it has lots of people. Personally, I block most reflexively anti-AI people because they’re boringly repetitive. But this has always been the case. Over a decade ago, my friend made a user script to block Snowden news[0].
There are just some topics that a lot of people like to act as radio repeaters on. I just block everyone who seems repetitive to me or who talks in a boring way. In the old world you’d go to a forum and you’d find that many of the threads are occupied by abrasive old timers of one or other type who have driven away all the people who’ve written the information on the forum. This is the standard thing that happens over time. Those for whom the group is the thing prioritize spending their time expressing group membership over being useful to the group.
As forums grow bigger, they attract these participants and then these guys drive out the rest. But you don’t really have to give in to the whole thing. I just remove them and their threads from my comment feed. It’s a pretty good experience.
Other groups that I find undesirable are those with whom I cannot relate. Programmers in crappy companies spend a lot of time talking about how they’re defending their work from useless managers who take credit for everything and so on and so forth. Or they might invent psychoanalysis to express why bosses want people in office rather than remote. There’s just not very much to learn from this kind of person. It’s just a generalized complaint machine which, unlike on sites which have topic-forums like Reddit, leak into general space here.
But you can clean up your own feed. And it’ll get better. It actually doesn’t take very many.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5929494
There are coders and creators. The first identify as their tools, the second don't care about the tools (too much).
This explains to me 90% of the reactions I get when I talk to people.
AFAICT hacker news is only slightly less positive on AI than the average tech industry gathering, which is still like two standard deviations more positive than any average gathering of random people in a city. I think the culture of silicon valley reads anything less than gushing hype as negativity right now, which is a weirdly polarized place to be, but the discourse around this technology is bizarre in general, being an absolute gamechanger that nonetheless still somehow feels quite oversold by its most ardent boosters, who are themselves a minority, but one with rather disproportionate voice and reach
It's in the name "Hacker News". Hackers are people who enjoy doing the programming themselves, because they get satisfaction from it. Often they program in their spare time, and sometimes what they develop has little to no practical value, and is done as a learning exercise. Using AI would defeat the purpose for them. If they're forced to use AI in their job, it decreases their job satisfaction.
There are others who just want a problem solved, and it doesn't matter to them how the program which solves it gets written, as long as the program (appears to) work and it's done as quickly as possible, so they outsource the development to AI. That is not hacking.
If I was an end user of a working product (AI or not), I wouldn't care.
At work generating and fixing loads of slop is less rewarding work than doing old coding, troubleshooting, article writing, whatever. The internet is full of fake blogs full of fake information. Youtube is full of fake videos and people reading LLM scripts. It feels impossible to share or appreciate small projects because it's so much harder to tell if any effort or thought went into something at all now. My parents can't tell what's real on social media. I'm less sure in my career path because I might spend my time learning skills that become useless in 5 years. I have conversations on the internet or Jira where people respond with LLM output (half the time saying "Claude says..." half the time not.) Kids are cheating their way through school. I'm probably getting dumber by using it.
There's plenty of reasons to be "anti-AI". It's not just a tool that's making programming more convenient.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Having seen bad (human) code behind award winning products, and good (human) code take so long the investors get cold feet, yes.
Some people claim (or seem) to know which corners can be safely cut. But what I've seen suggests those who cut corners got lucky, rather than using skill to know what could be safely ignored.
The other side of this is that I have come to view things like "Clean Code", "SOLID", "VIPER", and use of mocking in unit tests, the same way as self-help books: survivorship bias.
GenAI in code is likely to give us enough feedback fast enough that we can turn the survivorship bias of SWEng self-help guides into actual science; but unless progress stops suddenly (could happen any time if investments stop), humans coders aren't likely to be the beneficiaries of this research.
Because it's a power drill being treated like a genie lamp.
I "hate" AI[0] because I believe that elegant code is a different bulding material to ugly code. Ugly code is harder to change. At some point, it becomes impossible to change.
I notice that a lot of people say they'll be able to write 2.0 faster than I can write 1.0. This means that their 1.0 must have been so bad that they had to rewrite it. Why, then, would their 2.0 be any better? Because they got some feedback? At some point, your users are just going to leave for a competitor.
[0] Meaning I use it, think it's neat, and will continue to use it, but would prefer to use it a lot less than my boss wants
> I believe that elegant code is a different bulding material to ugly code. Ugly code is harder to change. At some point, it becomes impossible to change.
I believe the same thing and it’s also the main reason I hate AI code.
AI tends to not have much regard to “architecture” or even really considering how code should be organized. Need a function to read a base64 string into a private key? “fn base64_to_key” right there next to the code that needs it. Need to take that key and encrypt a blob? “fn encrypt_blob” right next to it. No thought about maybe pushing that code to a crypto module, or representing the invariants as types, or even just putting the functions where they might logically belong, just spews them out everywhere.
But, I have a problem trying to prove why this is an actual problem in the end product. You can say “it’s harder to refactor later” but the LLM is already pretty good at just changing bulk amounts of code to behave differently. In fact, having utility functions “nearby” the code that needs it might be better for its own context management. Most of the reason humans prefer the “single responsibility principle” and “modular design” are to make the code easier for us to change and reason about, but an LLM with a finite context window may actually do better with code that doesn’t match this premise.
I find myself reviewing code that others on my team generated with an LLM, and I tend to focus on these sorts of architectural “problems” the most because it’s the biggest gap between the way I program and what the LLM executes. But sometimes I worry that I’m fighting a losing battle, and that the focus on good architecture isn’t as important as I think it is. Or at least, I’m having trouble proving that it actually matters tangibly. Will it result in an unmaintainable mess? Maybe. It’s not guaranteed that LLM’s have the same limitations we do when it comes to maintaining code.
I actually felt the opposite. HN is full of AI crowd.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
This precisely why I still have mixed reaction towards AI, even AI can produce functional code but might be filled with foot guns. I personally don't use AI (the full automated ones, e.g., Claude code, Codex, Cursor) but also I don't complain about people using AI.
This also reminds me of Jonathan Blow's Software is in Decline[1] talk. Even when the humans coded everything, we gave up on quality a long ago for speed. So people complaining about low quality AI code is ignored.
Simply put software engineering is not as rigorous as other engineering and most of the time when software ultimately fail there isn't major consequences.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeAMiBKi_EM
It seems weird to be "pro-AI" or "anti-AI" in general. It's a tool. It's like saying construction workers are pro-hammer
People definitely have preferences of tools. For your construction analogy, I'm anti hammer. I prefer screws in almost every instance where a nail could be used, and hammers aren't the right tool for screws. Hammers suck.
Back to AI, it's a tool, and you can definitely be for or against it. Someone against AI might prefer other tools, like a canvas, camera, word doc, or visual studio (depending on the application they could be using the AI tool for)
Weirdly common I would say. US dockworkers / longshoremen are anti-automation big time.
https://ilaunion.org/the-ilas-fight-against-automation-prese...
The lack of productivity-growth in construction is also telling that this industry as a whole may be a bit too pro-hammer and anti-innovation
https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/why-has-produ...
People would be more pro-automation if it didn't entail losing their livelihoods and ability to access food and shelter.
That is my point people are pro-AI / anti-AI and pro-automation / anti-automation, there is nothing weird about it.
You can be pro- or anti- nail gun. I'd expect carpenters are pro-nail-gun when working professionally, but good ones avoid nail guns in at least some of their own projects, so they can stay in touch with the underlying physics.
I think the technology is fantastic but the current trend of larger and larger proprietary models will bring a concentration of power/money like never seen before.
It's like we are 19th century farmers and suddenly there are the latest John Deere equipment available for huge amounts of money raising yields 100x. Most of us can't afford the equipment and will be pushed out.
And look who Anthropic is partnering with: the absolute worst of Wall St. like Apollo.
Why do workers dislike being charged to rent scab labor from their oppressors?
Because we include people who dislike the hype machine and the initial "it's alive" push triggered a reaction, coupled with a different reaction to what we might call legitimate fears of dis-intermediation: much code is derived from prior code and so LLM are a good fit for reducing the need for coders in some contexts.
I think few of us are blind to how good some systems now are, but we're concerned by reports of worrying trends like swamping free software with machine derived CVE and a decline in critical thinking, not to say outright exam cheating.
I am guarded on today's LLM after much unit testings myself.
For as long as LLM use the probabilistic predictive next-token for an algorithm, there shall be glaring errors when encountering a complex-logic (or even compound-logic).
In short, use AND, OR, NOR, XOR sparingly when doing AI prompt. Elevate your err-dar when doing so.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Yeah, when your code runs on more than one machine, more than once. Then it's worth it to spend some time to make it actually good. RAM usage also matters.
I have similar thoughts a lot. Actually, bugs and technical debt existed even when humans wrote the code. However, while low‑level layer coders might oppose AI interfering with their 'artwork,' someone like me, who mainly assembles libraries like Lego bricks on top of frameworks, would probably find LLMs useful.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
This works better in greenfield deployments than in existing ones. We all know AI "hallucinates". This is reasonably easy to work around on new code where you can take any number of paths to get the right answer.
In existing deployments, being flat-out wrong has a greater cost. I've worked with AI in a ton of examples (working in existing codebases, troubleshooting system problems, etc) where it simply wasted my time, and it would have been better to solve the problem myself.
When I first started working with LLMs in 2019 AI was in no was synonymous with LLMs. I personally realized pretty quickly that they’d eventually be able to write software that compiles. Not necessarily good software, but software that passes a minimum threshold.
Then again there were all sorts of hallucination-adjacent issues which are still present but rarer as models get bigger. Wondering about the consequences for software engineering as an industry was a little bit of an “overpopulation on Mars” problem since GPT2 could barely string a paragraph together.
Another factor is the industry’s continued insistence on evaluating the ability to write software using leetcode. Well, Claude is probably the best leetcoder in the world now, but since our industry never figured out better evaluation criteria for candidates of course we are backed into a corner.
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand
Users don't. Question is, do developers, who are tasked to read, modify, and maintain the code?
That's the point though isn't it? Those readers / maintainers / modifiers won't be developers.
Will there be developers at all then? What would they do? What would define their role? What skills/qualifications would they need?
I don’t know why people have to pick one side or the other. AI speeds up development at the cost of oversight. Whether this tradeoff makes sense depends on the real world consequences of getting it wrong and the quality of the foregone oversight, which is very much case by case
There is a large contingent, both on Hacker News and off, that believes AI not only doesn't speed up development but it doesn't work and everyone talking about it either a booster or undergoing psychosis.
It's an absolutist disagreement without any common ground.
Different people have different opinions (including opinions in favor of AI, and opinions in between, and more nuanced opinions).
I have several objections as well, including the Dijkstra objection (i.e. it is not as precise as using a computer code), as well as concerns about the commercial intentions (and terms of use and other related issues) of whatever companies makes them, and wastes of power and other things like that. There is also expectation of use even if it does not help, and that what I have seen often does not help and is better to do by yourself, or to use different software rather than LLM/generative-AI software. (Many people have different objections, although in some cases I do not consider them significantly important.)
Claude calls it enterprise and production ready. I now have to spend the next two days dealing with the fallout, page, outage.
Because the HN crowd is composed largely of developers — the profession that is first to fall to the Axe of AI.
I suppose you end up hating it either way, if you're a better developer than it you don't like it because it sucks, and if it's a better developer than you then you just feel obsolete
HN has been very pro-AI over the last several years. It's only swung back slightly the other way recently. I suspect this is due to tensions in the gulf causing some institutions to reallocate their investments, which results in reduced bot activity.
It's the opposite. There's documented evidence of China recently funding anti-AI bots in the west in an attempt to weaken the US's AI lead, I imagine that such bots also inhabit HN.
I mean, I'm just reporting my experience. You're saying you think it's been generally negative over the years? Like, up until now?
There is a huge difference that is missing in this question.
Anti-AI does not mean anti-AI-coding-agents. It's the new vibe-mindset being created by vibe coders/vibe thinkers (AI companies are also promoting this), which is that I can make my ideas from scratch on my own and then blame AI for the mess created by the maker.
As a software engineer, I cared about architecture, code and technical responsibilities/duties. To achieve maximum and optimal results I'll take assistance from anything — AI, non-AI and whatnot — to speed up the process either 10x or 100x.
> Users don’t care
Suppose one proved that a sizable mass of people don't care whether they eat dog food.
There are people who won't feed them dog food even so.
There are people who will see ways to extract more profits.
> just a means to an end?
Indeed.
Which means?
Which end?
There are as many unthinking raving fans as there are unthinking raging haters. The reality is that the decision-making power-wielding bunch will make dumb, uncaring, probably some form of "evil", people-harming decisions via AI. Because that is what they do. Almost invariably, until forced to do something else.
So, again, which means? Which end?
This weird "my perspective is universal" thing is among the worst features of humanity in general.
Mainly because noisy people are most visible. Both pro-AI and anti-AI (so to speak) crowds have them.
This question goes a lot deeper than AI.
You can infer a developer's position on AI with 100% accuracy if you ask them a related question about the customer and how much overtime they'd be willing to pull to meet a deadline for one of their internal projects. It's the same question, just worded a lot differently.
The general form is probably something like "are you willing to sublimate your ego in order to care for the parties who ultimately justify your compensation/career?"
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works
A lot of people here are not users but creators, they do care about these things
The current AI tech (LLM and other Gen image stuff) is impressive as heck, but it has flawed origins (facebook torrenting the books, everyone scraping the web and anything they can without attribution) and downright evil boosters advocating for the elimination of humans livelihood (they are talking to CEO). The “hyperscalers” moving fast and breaking things (their local environment mostly) don’t help.
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand
They absolutely do care if the code was reviewed and tested. Which, if it was written by AI, it definitely wasn't.
I think HN “crowd” on average is smarter than a random or some hype eating crowd on the internet.
Smarter people tend to be more sceptical and resistive when something gets shoved up their bottoms too much or much more than it seemingly deserves.
Nothing special about AI here, it’s a general tendency.
I use AI daily. But not with agents. Those feel like cars before there were safety measures, like seatbelts. I'm no anti AI. I'm just waiting for the seatbelts.
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand
That's true, but they care deeply about the consequences of that:
> about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
So whomever your strawman is, they got a point.
Note that I'm "anti-ai", I use it a fair bit and even received the trendy email asking me to watch out how much I spend in it cause it's expensive. I'm also not delusioned into believing the "it's 10x faster" and "code doesn't matter anymore" marketing. If the thing fails it's my name on the git blame and my number they call at night so I'll review that code thank you very much.
I feel like past the wow effect it's pretty easy to see the seams and the limits, even on "frontier" (god do I hate that term) models, and nothing replaces human skill for now if you're working on something with any significance.
Dang sums it all, I dont perceive hn as being pro or against AI, it's a mix, but if you're polarized, whatever "side you're on" you'll feel the other side is over represented.
> Dang sums it all, I dont perceive hn as being pro or against AI, it's a mix, but if you're polarized, whatever "side you're on" you'll feel the other side is over represented.
It doesn’t feel that way to me. I remember reading the recent thread about Bun being rewritten in Rust with LLMs. Definitely not a 50/50 split of positive and negative comments. It was a pile-on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48132488
I actually see surprisingly little "anti AI" in that thread at all, and mostly just concerns about merging 1,000,000 lines of code with minimal review, which i think is a reasonable thing to be concerned about even if you use LLMs yourself and aren't "anti AI"
Seems to me you're proving dang right
What AI is (a part of) HN against?
The actual uses?
The "it will get sentient next year and take over the world" bullshit?
These two things are simply unrelated, and my experience with coding assistants (that I do use daily, because they are useful) says whatever OpenAI and Anthropic say in their marketing is 95% lies and hyperbole.
Any technology that is marketed as a religion will get the same reaction from me.
Most people in general have a negative view on AI, the HN crowd isn’t special
I am anti-gun despite guns being extremely effective at propelling metal at high velocity. I am not anti high-velocity metal, nor do I believe guns should never be used under any circumstance.
This post is absurd, childish binary thinking.
Everyone knows eventually AI will impact their career prospects. How can you be in love with that
Everyone knows AI will impact their jobs eventually. How can one be in love with that idea
I'm just absolutely mystified by this attitude.
It suggests to me that you don't see really any of the potential rewards for excellence. It's almost exactly the same thing as saying "there's nothing left to invent." I've watched software change the world SO. MANY. TIMES. during my short-so-far life that I must call such a proposition as the death of creativity bull fucking shit. Using AI makes you less likely to create any LASTING contribution to the world, even as it makes you look very busy.
If you want to be the best, you do the fucking work and learn from it. There Is. No. Other. Way. There never will be.
Given a large majority of the HN audience is likely directly employed by large orgs responsible for creating this garbage, it definitely doesn’t skew negative.
There is now more, and likely only an increasing amount, of AI content.
As someone interested in what other people, not machines, are doing - I don’t want to spend time reading superfluous prose/code that LLM’s generate.
More like, HN crowd is anti-HYPE
I think it's a negative feedback loop: If you are convinced that AI is worthless you are not going to be willing to spend $100-$200 to try the best tools, and if you're not using the best tools or you have to work under severe token limitations you are going to have a bad experience which is going to further convince you that AI is worthless.
> Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI
Take your pick: Anxiety over the possibility of redundancy and consequent financial precarity. Concern about our children's futures - their education and careers. Sorrow over the loss of the craft of software construction, with the potential for reduced autonomy and creativity. The atrophying of human cognition. Disgust at the excessive hype. Dismay at the environmental impact. Worries about the social and political impact, including further enabling authoritarians. Horror at the inevitable use of AI in warefare. Just plain exhaustion at the rate that the world is changing.
Like you, I'm a software engineer. 30+ years. I find the technology of AI genuinely facinating. I also enjoy making software.
> do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
This has been extensively discussed here and elsewhere. Its obviously a simplification, but some people prioritise the end-result: the product. Other people prioritise the practice of building the thing: the art/craft/engineering of coding and software construction. There seems to be a certain amount of mutual incomprehension between these two perspectives.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Ultimately, I think that financial pressures will mean that software inevitably becomes much less the product of a craft and much more an industrial mass-produced product, extruded by AI. So, if you're frustrated by current contrary attitudes on HN and elsewhere, then perhaps you just need to wait a few more years.
I spend quite a bit of time every day on HN, I see the vast majority of posts are about AI and how AI is accomplishing more and more.
> Code is just a means to an end
No, it it's not just that. Don't you realize your opinions are just, well, your opinions?
AI is a threat to the livelihood of many people on HN. So, there is a portion of the community here (small but very vocal one), that is against AI.
That is the simple explanation.
AI is not supposed to write excellent code, it is supposed to write the “most likely” code which equates to your average engineer. People who are below the curve are going to see a much higher benefit than people who are higher than the curve.
AI is no doubt powerful and i think that's reflected on HN. However, a lot of AI news these days is alloyed with hype and falsehood. Some amount of sceptical counter pressure is warranted.
And in my experience with AI doing personal projects, 10x as fast probably understates it by at least an order of magnitude.
What line of work are you in, if I may ask? Who are you going to sell to if your users start getting laid off due to AI redundancy?
> They care that the product works.
And that's the problem.
how so? When you buy a phone, do you care about how it's built?
I bought a Fairphone exactly because I did care, so yes.
The point is that bad code pretty directly leads to a product that doesn't work. It might work today (though... I wouldn't bet my life on it with how hit and miss LLM code is). But a year or two from now, with people just piling on more and more poorly written code, the system is going to suffer. It'll be slow, it'll be buggy, etc. Yeah, your users won't be able to say "aha, this is because they used AI!", but they will certainly notice the negative effects from you having done so.
Why do you assume the code will be bad in the first place?
Coding as someone without experience in coding? Most probably yes, but from someone with some kind of expertise who can act as a guardrail for bad code piling up? Probably not.
The AI spits out _some_ code => the developer needs to review & cleanup the mess, or accept that it worsen the system for the sake of delivering more rapidly.
That's the dynamic with AI and a lot of developers hate working like that, yet there is pressure to work this way.
I don't assume the code will be bad, I directly observe on a daily basis that it's bad. Since the widespread adoption of AI, all but the best developers I work with have been writing worse code with a higher number of more severe bugs.
Yeah absolutely. How it's built has a direct impact on the end result. Like with everything else.
Both of them can be true at the same time? Many people on HN are at the forefront of this technology, we're testing it in prod and telling each other what does or doesn't work. It's not anti-AI to use the AI and then document a failure.
We're still waiting for a model that can draw a pelican on a bike, you're not zero-shotting every problem with AI yet. If we want improvement, we gotta start by being honest.
>but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
yes but then why do you need programmers to sit in between users and ai when ai can generate code on the fly and give users what they want
I like AI but I'd like it to be a different ratio of non-ai/AI posts here bc its a lot and kinda irritating by now
Cause people here see the loopholes and want to solve them to increase efficiency which does'nt means they are pessimistic about AI.
This is an extremely short-sighted and surface-level take.
AI is great for prototyping, but that is far different to AI in production-grade software, including with the hidden cost of maintenance. You have to know what you are doing.
Why even risk using AI directly in mission critical high risk software powering cars, planes and financial transactions or control systems with no human oversight?
If a disaster happened and an investigation was launched and the inquiry found that the software was "vibe coded" and no-one understood the code, would that look great towards the software vendor's reputation?
If your bar for good software is "released asap", more power to you. Fortunately though, that's not everyone's stance. Not everyone is aiming to shit out the next big crud app.
Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works. -> if the product does not work, you as a developer you need to fix it.
> AI “writes bad code,”
> execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Have you considered that some mean by bad code, slow code?
Sometimes AI produces code that is the equivalent of tables in tables in tables html styling.
https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/157043617/Homer-Simpsons-B...
The users don’t care, but they only see the front
> AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
It is strange to me that your question is so narrowly scoped, as though code is the only current use of AI and as though bugs are the reason to be against it and not a clear existential crisis that the world has not demonstrated any capability to meet.
The end goal of AI, literally the goal, is to make it so that workers aren't needed anymore. Ignore for the moment that AI isn't good enough right now to have eliminated all the worker roles yet. That is still fundamentally its goal. You will tell the AI what you want, the AI will give you what you want, ..., profit. No nasty employees to deal with.
I would rejoice at this if I lived in a society that decided it would use the fruits of each new labor efficiency to provide for the populace instead of telling me that people who don't work should die in a gutter. But I do not live in such a society.
No need to overthink. Most people, pretty much everywhere, simply don't like new things.
This site is the gathering place of the biggest AI zealots there are. If someone posted that they have stopped talking and started communicating with the world solely through a camera pointed at their face and having claude interpret their facial expression, I would not know if they were joking. That is the caliber of AI fandom here.
AI anecdotes posted here are also clearly exaggerated. When someone tells, it's a story of extraordinary feats, something truly spectacular. But then when someone shows, it's always some below mediocre slop. It looks like shit and the program does not work etc.
This is not a recent development either. Ever since chatgpt came out there have been people here posting that they use it for things it can't do.
And I'm not even of the opinion that LLMs are useless technology. They clearly are good for many things. Recent security vulnerability findings have been impressive for example. Automatic spam and astroturfing is an obvious use case. And it's actually easy to come up with potential use cases. This technology is not bitcoin.
I will meet your question with another: why is it so important to you that LLM-driven coding succeed?
You made some good points about users only caring that something works. Perhaps folks who are reluctant to hand everything over to some of the worst people running companies since the Internet has started have reasons for thinking that mass LLM codegen adoption might lead to bad outcomes for users.
Look, if modern LLMs mean I never have to find the lowest performing junior on my team to perform manual data entry because our clients think sending a bunch of PowerPoint decks counts as "giving us their data", that's great. But I've seen the code the latest tools produce. If you're happy shipping code with the LLM imjust straight up doing a SQL injection vuln... IDK, I don't know how to bridge that gap.
I have never seen so many people respond to criticism of a technology as if it were an attack on their own identities as much as I've seen with LLMs. And I used to work in the VR industry.
The only product of AI is labor displacement and, by extension, wage suppression (as the duties of the displaced become free labor from those who remain and those who remain aren't asking for raises).
So ahy are so many on HN anti-AI? Because automation has finally come for them. Now it's personal. While it wasn't personal, you could pretend that people who had their livelihood taken away was a result of personal moral failure. You would see that 10 or 20 years ago when people would quite callously say "you should've done computer science" and that was that.
There are a lot of reasons to hate AI, not least of which is the externalities. It's essentially profiting off intellectual property as well as user-generated content for no compensation. Software people can actually identify with that in a way they just didn't when it was music, art or literature.
The data centers themselves nobody wants. They get massive tax and electricity breaks. Everyone pays for the upgrades and gets to live with the water pollution ,noise and higher utility bills. And because the data center is powering labor displacement, unlike, say, an auto plant, it produces negative jobs.
This all comes at a time when society is at the breaking point. Unaffordability is a massive problem (only getting worse) while we rapidly approaching minting our first trillionaire. Wealth inequality is reaching levels that historically have resulted in violent revolution.
AI in particular and automation in general could be a good thing for society. In another version of society it would allow people overall to work less and more menial jobs could be automated away. We don't live in that society. We live in the society that will make 99% of people poor so a handful of people can have $500 billion instead of $400 billion. All while the world seems to be getting ever more violent and cruel and major issues like climate change are going to start biting real hard.
You say anti-ai; I say pro-human (warts and all).
And I think there is a debate about llm biases [1].
And the obvious question of who owns and controls llm/ai technology. The wealth of humanity should be invested in humans and not a handful of llm’s and corporations who “own” them [2].
I think these are examples of thoughts which run through people’s mind——biases—-which direct replies even if they’re not directly expressed.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48401243
[2]: Senator Bernie Sanders’ legislation “American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/bernie-san...
1. because they know better. You don't have to understand it, for them to be right.
This comes from their years of experience. When you also get those years of experience, you may come to similar understanding.
> why anti-AI
I suspect because most people that participate on HN have something to do with writing or shipping software. Most discussions around AI feel like children pretending to be adults in the room, except everyone else still just sees children pretending to be something they are not.
That isn’t new and it certainly isn’t limited to AI. For example, it’s come up in the past many times when people pretend to write JavaScript but can’t or when people believe they can replace JavaScript with WASM and yet can’t. What is new that Autism (absentee introspection) or Dunning-Kruger feel of it is both wider and deeper. It’s the feeling of someone professing their expertise without ever actually producing anything before.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster.
I just don't understand what you mean by "let's face it". I repeatedly face it at my job, all our code has been AI assisted since March, and not once have I observed such a 10x speedup. The only 10x examples I've seen in the wild have been on tasks like cross-language code rewrites that completely fail your "code is just a means to an end" criterion.
Your post is talking about only the code itself, the quality, the speed. Other people are already debating you on that, but I suggest that you also look into what's surrounding AI that's making people very averse to it.
Many see AI as the biggest representative of the world and the internet getting worse. It accelerates the decline that was already there, and when people see their favorite websites become littered with garbage, themselves not being able to find a job or the supposedly enlightened tech elite becoming 10x more insane than they already were, the obvious thing to look to is AI. And what about all the companies that are trying to hop onto the hype bandwagon and are enforcing AI usage or laying off half their staff and demanding that the remaining half 'just use AI' to work twice as hard? Also not very good for the image.
The kind of people who only care about code quality and ignore the above issues, in my experience, are people with no horse in the job market race. Old people, rich people, non-techy people who don't have to do this for a living. They're having the time of their lives churning our small personal projects and not caring about anything else. Everyone else is suffering too much from the other causes to take them seriously.
I feel like the negativity is mainly due to lack of understanding on how LLMs work under the hood. The more you learn about it, the more you realize that it’s just a glorified autocomplete machine and the reason why it looks so capable is the engineering behind prompt and harness.
Unless there is another breakthrough in model training, I don’t see AI taking over anytime soon. However I do agree that’s it has become another tool, the engineers can use to increase their productivity which is a positive thing
> glorified autocomplete machine
It is a next token prediction function and it is important to understand the technology accurately based on what it actually is.
What is unique about a next token prediction function though is that every computer program is just a string of instructions. At the theoretical limit a next token prediction function can generate the entire instruction stream (boot loader, OS, application) so a next token prediction function can theoretically generate any computer program, which means that it is a universal predictor for anything that a computer can simulate. Still not AGI/ASI in the woo-woo non-technical interpretations of those terms, but incredibly powerful.
What you’re saying is correct if the model is trained with all the knowledge humanity had, has and ever produce. But at the moment the next token prediction is quite limited to the training data.
Things could change if the model supports re-inforced leaning. That way the LLM would change the weights in real time based on a feedback loop, but again that could vastly improve the quality of the token prediction or completely degrade it as well
The distinction I would make here is that computer code is logical transformations on arbitrary data, not the actual data itself. An LLM can learn the entire space of logical transformation patterns from existing code, and can hallucinate new logical transformations, using a computer as a validator for the logic, so an LLM can create new logic as well as repeat existing patterns, and that logic can be applied to novel input data that the LLM has never seen before.
That’s not how LLMs work at the moment as far as I understand. LLM would not hallucinate any new logical transformation, rather just predict a transformation from its training data.
I understand that there can be many different combinations for all the logical transformations in the training data. But still the number of combinations are finite and I would assume that large number of those combinations would not result in any meaningful outcome.
Best outcome is that it just predicts a new pattern we haven’t discovered (LLM randomly connected the correct dots) one example is protein folding.
> the engineers can use to increase their productivity which is a positive thing
This might be the underlying hidden psychology: being more productive and efficient isn't benefitting the working class. It won't make them more money or make them work less hours, it just means overall more work for equal or less pay or less jobs for programmers outright. It doesn't make things cheaper or better, it just translates into more profit to the owning class. Of course nobody can articulate their anxiety's like that in a hyper capitalist society, but that might be the real reason underneath anti ai sentiment.
That’s not true. If you look at the history of humanity, every invention (internet, automobiles, telephones, vaccines, etc) has increased the productivity of human race and in-return increased the quality of life and lifted millions of people out of abject poverty. Productivity increased through AI is basically the same. Over the time it would elevate the living standards of millions of people.
As for making more money as a software engineer, it’s individual responsibility. You need to change your mindset of being just an employee and think as an entrepreneur. AI has made is so easy to build an MVP in record time and try things out. If you want to make money a nine to five job is not what you should be focusing on.
This is the underlying split on HN. The temporarily embarrassed millionaires, the prophets of capitalism, hyper individualist "entrepreneurs" vs. people who are disillusioned from real world experiences over decades that stripped away all the LinkedIn lunatic fringe of "change your mindset of being just an employee and think as an entrepreneur".
I actually don’t understand what you meant in this comment. This actually looks like some LLM generated slop to be frank.
From my perspective it comes down to two factors.
First is the corporate push for AI. We are constantly getting told to "use AI for X" and not "explore if it makes sense to use AI for X". It's pretty obvious that quality doesn't matter, only cutting staff costs does, and I dread to think how software and service will look in 5 years.
The second part is how people use it to do their work without shame. You can't get a bug report without someone saying "here's what Claude thinks". Great, is it right? I can ask Claude myself, at least verify. Outage reports will be summarised and pushed by AI without anyone verifying. I have to argue with a bot to get my PRs through, and nobody reads anything anymore.
It's not that AI can't be useful it's that it seems like nobody cares how good the quality is, only that it does the work.
The genuine answer is that many people who hold a lot of power over me (the executive suite of my industry) intend to do me harm with it (put me out of a job).
Years ago Hacker News became deeply resistant of and resentful toward new technology, not coincidentally around the same time that it became more Reddit-like (consensus-brained, left-leaning politically, defensive, sclerotic). It's all part of the same phenomenon.
AI threatens the programmer identity.
Is HN crowd any more anti-AI than other places e.g. reddit?
There's a lot of people talking about the technical aspects of AI, but I think the (for a lack of a better term) marketing of AI is just as important. Insisting that anyone who is anti-AI is on the wrong side of history does not tend to make people who leaned in that direction reconsider their opinions, it tends to make them think that pro-AI people are arrogant and thus push them even further towards being anti-AI.
This is even bigger with AI because of a couple of other recent trends that have been marketed the exact same way and have failed to live up to the hype: cryptocurrencies ("have fun being poor"), NFTs, the metaverse, etc. None of these have turned out to be the absolute use-this-or-you'll-be-unable-to-participate-in-society level changes that their proponents have claimed. Now AI proponents are making the same claims, but people have seen that the last few times this has been claimed (often by the same people) and therefore don't believe the new claims.
I read a lot of comments talking about pro-AI or anti-AI. The world (and each of us) is much more complex than a binary split.
What surprises me most is some of the virulent reactions that code generation appears to elicit, sometimes citing reasons such as craft, artistry, and originality. As if the entire disciplines of computer science and systems engineering never depended on assemblers, code generation, compilers, JIT. Or really, just writing bytes that can represent machine code, P-code, or bytecode.
A reaction that doesn't appear to make the very direct connection with the systems of exploitation, but chooses to target the tools, or the users of tools is difficult to justify as extremely sophisticated.
> assemblers, code generation, compilers, JIT. Or really, just writing bytes that can represent machine code, P-code, or bytecode.
All of these things have something in common that LLMs don’t. They behave in a predictable, documentable (and usually documented) way.
Compiler optimizations are pretty unpredictable.
But you can, in principle, understand a compiler. Also they're made by the same people who use them. Did blacksmiths get mad when they invented the first anvils?
While optimization may be done in unpredictable ways, it does not (by definition) change the effective behavior of the program. If you write a program to calculate prime numbers, it will always calculate prime numbers, no matter how the compiler optimizes it. If you tell an LLM to write code to calculate prime numbers, you are at the mercy of chance. (Maybe not for such a simple program, where the solution is directly in the training data, but you get the idea.)
They loved having an identity built around a skill most people didn’t have and the power/money that came with that. Losing that is tough.
Just like with politics, you see large numbers of people dividing up into two different camps. Pretty soon every statement that raises a legitimate concern about AI will be seen as 'hating AI' and every observation about how AI helped in a particular situation will be seen as coming from an 'AI fanboy'.
Could it be the new car effect. You get say a Mini then see it everywhere. Personally I see diverse views on AI here.
> code is just a means to an end?
Exactly. Which is the reason why code that increases maintenance friction and costs, or decreases the product's operability or fitness for purpose, does not properly serve the end of advancing the business. Not in competitive industries anyway.
There's this whole manufactured narrative going on geared toward reframing the quality of code design and structure as an aesthetics problem. If you think code design and structure is an aesthetics problem, you will not understand the pushback.
A much more interesting question, I think, is why bad AI code is perceived as a worse problem than bad human code.
My observation is that bad human code ultimately slows down its own maintenance: the speed at which the human can add bad code decreases as the human adds more bad code. So it's a self-limiting problem. Whereas AI will quickly and efficiently add extra layers of bad code to work around the issues introduced by its own earlier bad code. If you let that go on, you can end up in runaway complexity scenarios where only AI can maintain the code at all, until even it can't. There have been a lot of arguments on HN that such scenarios are not a problem because AI will keep getting better, but to me this amounts to a Ponzi scheme for tech debt, which I find undesirable.
And that's not to even mention the externalities.
So, basically, depending on whether you care about all of the above, or not, the machine that supercharges your LoC-per-day metric will be seen as a good thing or a bad thing, and it's not a divide that can be reconciled because it boils down to what individuals care about. We can all agree about the end of writing code, but that doesn't mean you can't be wrong about the ways to get to that end, I guess.
Generally I've seen no signs that HN is anti-AI. I haven't ran the statistics, but there is as much excitement around AI especially when new opensource models release as there's cautionary tales around it. Even being pro-AI I have to admit that I scream at the black box and throw slurs at it quite often because it's genuinely a fustrating tool to use when it does not understand basic instructions, but also makes you understand that this is not magic.
However, people do need to make peace that AI as a tool is the future of programming at bare minimum and especially at coorperations as it becomes part of performance reviews and you have to compete with AI assited collegues. As I've said before at least for me AI replaced the boring part of writing code, but reignited the joy of designing systems and problem solving.
If you're impressed by something which was done by AI, then you're not qualified enough to judge it.
How's that supposed to work?
If I'm impressed by $SOMETHING, then I'm not qualified enough to judge it?
This means that only negative judgement is valid?
Generally speaking the local crowd is anti-hype, and so it's easy to get the manifestation of that conflated with with what you're describing.
(I fit your literal description, but primarily from a nomenclature perspective - I'll call them generative models and LLMs - and I appreciate this puts me in the minority. BUT I do believe part of the hype feedback loop was the intentional mislabelling of these technologies from the outset. AND I understand why the marketers did that.)
I suspect the older crowd has lived through the hype playbook enough to recognise it early, and that the pattern this time around is becoming a bit a bit more obvious now, so I expect increasing levelling out of expectations & understanding.
Its complicated, this is how its going to be. People are going to have opinions and take sides or take no side at all.
Fun question, we can speculate a bit of course.
We're talking about vocal minorities expressing their arguments for and against AI. And some people here are just very vocal and dominant. Passive aggressive/obnoxious even. But that doesn't mean they represent the dominant opinion. If you've had the pleasure of attending a lot of meetings with developers, many of them barely open their mouths and some of them can't shut up. You find a lot of those types on HN. And looking in the mirror, that's me.
Most people that come here are hackers. Many of those probably use paid subscriptions for agentic coding tools at this point. At least, I don't know many professional developers that don't. But I know plenty that grumble a lot about AI and how they are still relevant and not that easily replaced by a tool. This stuff is a bit threatening to many people and it's triggering anxiety, uncertainty, anger, etc. And a lot of that leaks through in the discussions here.
And there's an uncomfortable reality that HN has been around for a while and the demographics are maybe a bit skewed towards people in their forties and fifties. People that are a bit set in their ways and maybe a bit conservative and change resistant. I'm in my fifties myself and I have to actively fight that tendency in myself.
So, all of that adds up to a lot of negativity.
Because being critical of AI is the second most boring activity on HN.
I don't think it is a large number of people creating this perception, I think it is more their depth of feeling about the issue.
I am often struck by the similarity with bigotry about migrants, where they are portrayed as unreliable and undtustworthy entities that are threatening jobs. Simultaneously arguing their inability and ability are problematic.
You have a second vein of behaviour that object on more religious grounds. There are people that believe that any real understanding of models would deny biblical truth, much like evolution, it is a spurious claim, but at the same time the Discovery Institute is putting money into AI disinformation.
I am unsure how much the Future of Life Institute has influenced thinking, they reputedly have a war chest of half a billion. I have certainly seen videos on YouTube that have been sponsored by them.
It is truly vile to compare concerns about LLMs to anti-immigrant discrimination.
There are concerns that are not in this area, regarding privacy, access, fiduciary duty, and the right to contest automated decisions. These are all things that people want to address with regulation. People make the problem that they have clear and propose a remedy, then seek consensus on that issue.
But when the message coming from people is "We don't want that kind around here" then it falls much closer to the mark.
Sadly this isn't even the only comment equating LLM skepticism to racism, even more sadly I'm not even remotely surprised that there's HN commenters that think this way
Why were weavers so anti-mechanical loom? Is it more complicated than that?
Actually hand weaving produced better quality products than mechanical looms for the first several decades of their existence. It was just much more expensive.
because anti-ai crowd is loud and stupid. They don't know how to use ai tools and keep complaining ai does a bad job when prompted "build me a Twitter clone".
Old guard doesn’t like new guard.
People started treating HN as a tech subreddit. It’s Reddit crowd
As someone who looks at both regularly, HN is an order of magnitude higher quality than any tech sub on reddit.
If you visit /r/technology about 50% of the comments are calling for the deaths of tech ceos.
Well it’s a fear of being replaced in the ones hating on AI so bad.
What bothers me most on link aggregation sites - where (in theory i suppose) humans are involved in submitting and upvoting - so much of comment threads "yuk it's AI slop" like it can't me judge and discussed based on the actual ideas. What bothers more is when this shows up in non-/new posts because the implication is that whoever upvoted the post just has bad judgements on what could be seen as worth sharing. To me this is no different than brigading and cancelation
Bad submissions have always existed, if you don't like it, move on, don't engage.
There is a real divergence of experiences. That is one factor. There are people who are domain experts in some narrow complex domain who do such complex work that LLMs are still not there. I see some of that in my work place with large complex, domain specific languages, etc.
This is also challenging people's view of themselves as craftsman and the "crafting" of software. Something like carpenters who disavow power tools.
There is the worry about slop which is also real. I.e. that AI can and does generate garbage that ends up making things worse.
Worries about job security, the future of the industry, people's economic future and place in a new world where parts of their job get automated away.
I agree with you. Users don't care how the code is generated. This is purely economics there is no big market for "craft code" (like craft beer). There is only market for working software. And yes, LLMs are non-deterministic token generators, but so are humans, and LLMs are mind blowing. We live in the future. They don't replace software engineers quite yet- they are power tools.
Are they? Seems plenty of AI pilled to me. What they don't care for are the bs narratives and can see through the CEO excuses for axing jobs because of it.
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.
Users hate when a bunch of unrelated things break for no reason, and then get fed a pile of slop for months about why the thing that is clearly broken isn't actually broken.
I know two well-know games going through this cycle; one of them had a community manager accidentally leak their usage in the changelogs due to a slug left in a link, the other's owning company has been on the hn frontpage for their mandated llm usage.
Oh, users care about this.
The way I see it, there are three possible outcomes:
1. AI works worse than expected.
Our economies are depending on this not to be the case, so it triggers the Greater Depression. Widespread poverty and misery ensue.
2. AI works as exactly as expected.
This means whoever controls it gains enormous power over everybody else. There's no possibility of resistance: the Second Amendment doesn't matter when your oppressor has fully automated murder drone factories. We enter a dystopia beyond anything Orwell imagined. Note that this is an arms race, which means there's no limit to resources it can consume. Billionaires are fighting over who gets to be king of the world and they don't care how much you're paying for RAM.
3. AI works better than expected.
This means the "recursive self improvement" plans succeeds, and the "intelligence explosion" scenario happens. This, with probability very close to one, results in the sudden extinction of all life. Human values are a highly complex result of our shared evolutionary history. Something that did not share any part of that history will have profoundly alien values, e.g. "minimize training loss". If it's vastly more intelligent than us, it will be able to fulfill those alien values which extreme efficacy. There are very few goals of the "make number go up" kind that don't result in everybody dead when taken to the logical conclusion.
But our oppressors do have automated murder drone factories and have for years. AI doesn't need to work for billionaires to keep building their dystopia.
More like anti mindless hype and braindead evangelism.
But the AI hypebeasts are incapable of differentiating that from an anti-AI stance.
I don't spend much time on HN but from a glance it seems more middleground (reddit f.ex is extremely anti-ai). I think what you see generally just comes down to human nature. This new technology comes out which is going to change a lot and introduce much turbulence and uncertainty. Some people are happy to put in the work of learning these tools and are confident in their ability to land on their feet. If thats you this is an incredibly exciting time. Without a question a single individual has never had as much leverage as they have right now. And at least currently software engineering skills is a force multiplier in what you are able to accomplish.
But then you have a second group of people who don't have the time or inclination to learn a new way of working, or are worried they won't be able to keep up. If thats you this is a very scary time because the value of your current skills and position in life is decreasing day by day. Some peoples approach to this problem is to just stick their head in a sand with the subconcious belief that if they can convince themselves and enough people that this is not happening, it's not going to happen and their position in life will be safe.
A very common blindspot people have to rationalize this position is focusing on unskilled use of the current models (and often not even using the current best models). Then use that to make judgements about why AI won't be able to do something even in the future. The models are obviously going to keep getting better and I think even the best users are still just scratching the surface of how we can get the most out of the current models.
I mean others are saying its divided and that's true.
I guess the other side of your argument is... Is it better though? One could easily argue much of software development is promising projects strangled by their own technical debt and short sighted designs. It still has yet to be seen if AI can make well architected systems unsupervised. And this really was one of the few places where technical people shared their labors of love and appreciated the technical skills of a community.
Also, all the externalities whether that be environmental, social, or even technical and hn is really bad at actually talking about these things directly so we have to couch it all as the tool being bad. That's the part you're missing for many its more like its not good enough to justify the costs
There's a reason why this tech is called disruptive.
The same phenomenon can be observed on Reddit. You'll see a lot of knee-jerk reactions to anything that looks AI, as in 'Thanks ChatGPT' or 'AI slop' top comment, and at the same time you'll see entire subs raving about any new AI advance, or massive upvotes for somebody's vibe-coded project - because it's just... good.
Like others have said, we're becoming more polarized, partly because of the nature of social media (anybody can share anything, anybody can comment), and partly because of the effects of said media on the human brain. It'll only get worse/more amplified as we go forward.
wth are you talking about
Isn't the mere fact that every HN frontpage is filled with AI-related articles not indicative enough of how much it holds interest here?
> post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
Many people here are engineers and are interested in solving problems. First step to solving problems is to identify them.
I'm not against the usage of AI as a first principle, but there are a lot of problems with it currently that make me against its use.
The losing jobs problem. The controlled by a few big companies problem. The sycophancy problem. The devaluation of human purpose in our culture problem. The loss of human communication problem. Writing code a bit faster is not worth all these problems.
Separate from that, I also don't think it's good enough. By the time you stand up all the processes and guardrails that make it viable, and account for the lessened understanding slowing velocity in the long term, I don't think it really speeds things up. Obviously it speeds up small things that you don't need to understand much, but that's not what I typically work on.
lazy so copying from a different thread:
you might be drinking some of that AI koolaid, conflating our suddenly hypertrophied abilities to produce code regardless of our familiarity with the syntax or the APIs with ability to produce and deliver good quality products, but this delusion is getting reality check as we speak.
a realization is propagating through the industry that being able to produce more code than you're able to review, comprehend and internalize is actually not a great thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48381598
that said im not anti ai, i just think it is being applied in the most moronic ways during this hype cycle (gary tan anybody?)
HN has disparate groups, and the truth is that biased groups, even small groups, can push things that support their bias to the top of HN with ease. So the shakes-fist-at-clouds group might be small, but if something negative about AI is submitted it will always make the front page. During WWDC in a couple of days you'll see similar "DAE hate all the dumb Apple posts?" on the front page, like clockwork, despite it being a tiny percentage of the userbase voting it up.
Like yesterday there was an "HN sans AI" submission where the linked site didn't even work (maybe they should have consulted AI in their design?) and the submission kept racking up the upvotes, despite the irony that it was a submission arguably about AI.
Everyone is just working AI into their workflow that best that is possible. Others choose to tilt at windmills. Eh.
They called it AI instead of calling it neural networks and therefore provoked unrealistic expectations for this technology. Criticism will never end because of the fraudulent naming of this technology.
The field has been named "Artificial Intelligence" since the 1950s, It has nothing to do with neural nets per se. It just is about systems that do what was previously thought to be only something people could do. Traditionally the big names in the field like Minsky actually despised neural nets -- Minsky even wrote a book called Perceptrons (1969) which trashed the early version of neural nets and discouraged most research on them for a couple of decades.
What field? They brought back up that old sci-fi term AI specifically for neural networks to create a false impression among people that this is a technology that can "think."
It's not SF. Again, artificial intelligence has been a recognized branch of computer science since the 1950s, with journals, conferences, and applications.
Why are you so pro AI? I find HN well balanced on the topic. LLMs are consistently referred to in proto-mind or cognitive frames. This is whats truly eye rolling. Push back should be a given. We are not even accurately describing them as semiotic infrastructure yet. We’re just getting started. Expect haters.
people have already become accustomed to low quality software, luckily just in time for ai llms to finally start generating somewhat usable code (in small context) for h1b prompt pilots. silicon valley rejoicing
>I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
>Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.
I will tell 8 year old me that his interest in coding was simply a misguided abstraction towards providing customers with business value.
Certainly these AI agents will get the time machines ready for that any minute, or, well, any major software/app/website breakthrough that has happened every 2-5 years. They work 10x as fast, so it should be easy, right? It's not like everything's been bottlenecked by product and engineering is the slow burn skill that PUT FOOD ON OUR TABLES this whole time... right?
The following does not answer your question. I am me; I'm not "the HN crowd", if there is even one. And if there is such a crowd I wouldn't be the one knowing what it thinks.
The following is only a perspective on the argument of "the product works" and what "code elegance" means. I don't really care much about LLMs but the following is not necessarily tied to them.
Also, I'm retired from professional programming so feel free to ignore all of it as antiquated and irrelevant.
---
Code is not really "a means to an end". Code is better described as a liability.
People you write code may have different perspectives on code but those with more experience generally end up with this idea engrained in their minds. Code is a cost.
Thus, you'd want to have less of it, and you'd want to have code which:
- you at least have some grade of confidence that you can understand as deeply as possible, because that means you can maintain it better and more efficiently. It means that you can, when if fails, quickly/easily find where it failed, sometimes even why it did.
- you can manage in its entirety, which becomes exponentially more difficult when there's more of it and you didn't write it yourself. Not only that, it becomes more difficult to manage it when it has been incorporated in very large chunks that reach all over the codebase, and it becomes a lot more difficult when it lacks consistency, coherence and a certain uniform style.
What you call "the elegance of code" is not an aesthetical quality but a practical one. A developer obviously wants to have something that works, but that it does so well, reliably well. And they want code that is manageable enough that when shit happens -and it always does-, the fix will be hopefully easier and will hopefully make the resulting code more reliable, not less.
And, sure, in some circumstances development speed does matter. The problem is that the circumstances in which it does are frequently "unwanted" ones, usually external pressures, which we already disliked. Usually, you need to develop faster because someone else is pressuring you into putting that speed above reliability, not because it is intrinsically better to do it faster.
The one acknowledged situation in which development speed is tolerated above these other qualities is when doing a prototype. But then again, experienced developers know that prototypes can very easily turn into traps. When doing a prototype, quality is relegated because it is understood that this will not be the final product. It is understood that a prototype's code is disposable. But too often prototypes then become either the product directly or the basis for it. And again this happens because of external pressures. Most of the time because someone says "hey, it's working" without realising that it is barely so, that it's fragile, that it relies on constant tweaking and manual adjustment. But as it appears to be working, it gives the impression of being good enough to make financial sense to build on it.
And when you "ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace" what you're usually doing is shipping prototype 2.0, an unreliable system that requires more constant tweaking and manual adjustment. A system that entraps the developers into more maintenance on each iteration, when they'd want the opposite.
---
All in all, using LLMs to produce code may have its place. But if you focus on the idea of producing vast quantities of it faster, then that may not be the best use.
Because no one has shown profitability, only made claims that are unproven so far. This combined with being one of the largest investments of capital since the rail system, and being backed by known conmen like Musk, make a subset of the population(myself included) sceptical.
If you are blind to or don't care about those caveats then AI looks amazing because it can legitimately produce novel results. Its just that for the subset that I am part of, it looks like they are doing so by burning a dollar to make 50 cents in revenue and that is not sustainable.
I just simply don't think it's that good.
I think ever since @dang posted the updated rules against LLM comments/posts, the tide has turned.
You have no obligation to agree with them, but after all this time I don't know how someone on either side could be ignorant of what the other side's main arguments are.
> I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, but do people realize that code is just a means to an end
The means to an end I care about is that writing code was a means for me to make a living
People can pontificate all they want about how software engineering was never really about writing lines of code and at some abstract level they are correct
Your average software engineer still spends (spent?) a lot of their day writing code, it is the activity that delivered the actual value of our skills!
How do I deliver value to keep earning that paycheck now? It has been massively undercut away from me by AI systems. I do not see a good future for myself anymore
Am I not supposed to feel so negatively about it?
Edit:
Do you think the dinosaurs felt negatively about the meteor that wiped them out?
Do you think bombing victims think negatively about the planes dropping the bombs or the people flying them?
My question is this: Powerful people are trying to replace all valuable labor with AI. Why aren't you negative about it?
AI the thing that experts say 20% chance will destroy humanity? Yes, why be anti- that? lol.
It isn't. Other forums are much more radically against AI.
Either
- in principal, the "AI racists",
- for legal fears (no GPL code in my business project),
- or the AI slop haters, the other "AI racists", because AI is no slop anymore as in the first years.
So here is the thing, this community by it's nature is mainly powered by people that actually understand what they are doing, enjoy actually using their brains to make things happen, and are likely filled with the ability to actually create real life changing technology.
AI cannot think, and just processes requests through input and generates output based from training data.
There is no passion, there is no human brain improvement or anything that we as a human race evolve from over time.
The best creations have been creations built by us and will continue to be that way.
Yes, we created AI, but what is next after AI, we still like to create things ourselves which is what fuels the creation of the next best thing.
People who pride themselves on using a prompt to get something output miss out on the intellectual stimulation and brain development that comes with doing the work yourself and collaborating with other humans to get the work done.
These build memories, group bonding, and other things that exist in the real world that will never happen if AI does all the work.
You will also notice those that offload everything to AI are horrible at thinking for themselves over time. It has to be a balance, AI has some great use cases, but should not be used for everything as that takes away the natural challenge we as humans need to have.
I have seen the devaluation of what should be done by seeing a coworker say we built this thing. When I say oh you and your girlfriend built it, amazing, then they say no me and AI did it.... I say so you mean you told it to build that thing. It give a very real false since of capability and accomplishment while not highlighting the hard fact that the prompter is not an engineer, architect, scientist and has not built any real technical skill and wastes away sending prompts to a machine while not actually growing their own capabilities.
Then said person gets frustrated because they are stuck in their job, tired due to vibe coding with no visible results on their investment of time except for loss of money they have spent on tokens. Tokens in little to no financial return is what the bulk of people are seeing because the bulk of us that spend money do not want to see the same vibe coding mess that has been spammed everywhere.
There is also the massive security issues that vibe coded apps have at scale which is very hard for a human to maintain, follow, and keep secure. As we don't know why x code is there and the logic of it being there would need to be reviewed by a human that is the only thing in the equation that can actually think.
So use it as a tool, but still continue to do the bulk of the work yourself so you continue to grow is the best route to success over a very long period of time.
I guess you can describe me as anti-AI. I use AI everyday to write code. I can’t deny that it makes me more efficient. And there’s pressure from the people that pay my bills to produce more and more with it. But I still hate it. I hate the code it writes. I hate what is turning my job into. I hate the main companies behind it. I hate all the resources being poured into it. I hate that most of the real profit and benefits from it will just go on to make more delusional tech billionaires the likes of Zuckerberg and Musk instead of actually being distributed somewhat fairly amongst all of us.
But yeah, I can vibe code the same crappy app as millions of other engineers in a weekend. And we will all pay Apple $99 a year to upload the same crappy app to the App Store hoping to catch some of that AI-wave money.
One problem is that people trust the bot. To give you an example. If you submit articles for scientific publication you will get reviews that are at least co-authored by the bot. People defer their own judgement to what the bot says.
I don’t think HN crowd is against AI, this crowd is just more pragmatic than others. They challenge things - in a constructive way most of the times - but this does not mean an anti movement.
I run an AI newsletter on top of HN, I have seen the sentiment from the grass level: I think there is an inflation of Show HN vibecoded products that annoy a lot of people here, but other than that, I think it just pragmatism what comes up.
HN is actually one of the more AI-positive sites around. Some people just generally hate or fear AI because it's called AI and that comes with 100 years of scifi fearmongering baggage and modern fashionable doomerism. A lot of people hate AI because it enables behavior that they don't like: spam, slop, and other low effort content that drains energy and attention but provides no value. Others dislike being pushed to introduce AI into their workflow and tokenmaxxing policies. A few fear job loss or may be unable to find employment in their desired field due to AI tools. I've personally never used AI at all (because it didnt interest me) but have been growing interested due to HN articles and comments extolling it's virtues.
classifying things into two camps here is kind of a mistake. it remains to be proven that AI represents some kind of real general intelligence with reasoning, and that you can give it high level goals and just have it manage your entire codebase. I personally have seen large balls of vibe code that crossed the line of just being huge and unmaintainable, even for the AI.
It's also clear that it's valuable enough at minimum around the edges in prototyping, testing and analysis that it's not going away.
So any reasonable person would understand the situation is still evolving and maybe push back on strong claims of software development being already completely obsolete. is that anti-AI?
edit: you know, I might just be old, and maybe about to be irrelevant. what I don't understand is why that seems to make people so angry. I'm sure the future will sort itself out.
People who are in tech have already started observing that newcomers' skills are diminishing dramatically, and the reliance on AI is getting worse. This naturally triggers graybeards.
Software Engineering was inherently romantic before AI.
People took time to understand the inner world of computers. Some people built brilliant solutions that represented the finest examples of human ingenuity. Knowledge was impressive. Side projects were impressive. The right engineer in the right place could make or break a business. Any industry that operates like this, where human skill and intelligence is valued and a key component of the process is beautiful.
With AI, all that has been snuffed out. No one gives a fuck. There is no skill required now. Talking about code with humans is pointless, talk to your AI. The meritocracy is over, this industry will soon be all about who you know, not what you know. Fuck your resume, your list of skills and experiences are quaint. You really think anyone gives a shit about languages you know or how many features and products you shipped? Anyone can do that shit with a few prompts of an LLM. So how else will you get a job? Know someone? Blow someone? Just hope you win the random selection?
A lot of people aren’t against the AI tech itself, they are against how it will change the tech culture. The old world is gone and the new one looks like it sucks, many people just don’t realize it yet, they are slow boiling frogs. They have not yet experienced being unemployed in the AI era.
Because it isn't, the HN crowd is wildly pro-AI.
I don't know how you got that impression, but I have a even harder time believing that you "honed your craft" for 20 years.
That can't possibly be the attitude of someone who ever cared about software development.
There's a huge difference in outcomes depending on the skill of the operator. People who aren't good operators get poor results out of AI and so develop a negative opinion of it. Given operating AI well depends on having excellent written communication and specification skills, and engineers are notoriously reluctant to specify and communicate clearly, there's a significant number of engineers for whom AI produces much worse code than if they wrote it themselves.
Knowing how it works means knowing that it'll always hallucinate and will never be more than the sum of its parts.
That being said, there are positives. It does things today, albeit imperfectly; I use it like a supercharged search engine. It's reinvigorated the AI race and raised such vast quantities of capital that it's more likely new AI techniques will be discovered.
But yeah, the current iteration is just a statistical model that guesses things. With a bunch of tools and probably an expert system bolted on. Definitely not useless, but also underwhelming given the hype.
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.
If I wanted to care about what users want, I would have been a founder or salesman, not an engineer.
I find the way AI is pushed for extremely offputting. It is as if someone took thr worst tendencies of tech sociopaths and concentrated then in one place.
The condescention, the attempt to make everyone afraid of jobs, the vision of hellish dystopia that is somehow framed as thing to work toward, the lack of actually positive vision. This is the first programming tool that is forced and pushed as much and negatively.
And also, the forming monopoly, the token based payment that just screams for future frauds and abuse. The political connection, the companies taking advantage of all the work others did just so they can destroy those who created it.
Because, at least numerically, there are more people here who represent labor than capital. AI is a win for capital, loss for labor. That simple. This creates this surprising effect, approximately for the same reason more people support Palestine than Israel here, and Ukraine than Russia.
It's not actually, people outside tech are even more anti-AI than here. Tbh I think AI submissions at least get really hyped here by the system at least.
Outside the tech bubble people either don't care or already associate AI with increased prices.
The HN crowd isnt as much Anti AI that you imagine. I am unsure where you are from but I recommend looking at general public.
some part of that hate is getting mis-directed into datacenters and others, but most if not all people dislike AI.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
And so can your competitors if they wanted to make something that you make and why wouldn't the people themselves use AI to custom-tailor their own solutions Why pay a middleman like you?
Also because you are deploying things faster, you are also dropping them faster. For some people (& ideas) that is considered a plus but I find it grating or missing the point if I create software that I have not written and then leave it asap.
And this has also made a race to the bottom for the attention of people with 20x the products so you have to compete 20x more for eye-balls.
There are also aspects of job insecurity within the normal public regarding AI.
Prototyping as a use-case is something that I have recommended multiple times but with all of this in mind, I must say that the situation looks murky.
This is why we are anti-AI because imo AI as a tech isn't bad but the way society is handling it is really really bad.
A shoe brand adding AI into their company name shouldn't logically change anything but the market is so down bad that it increased its price 4 times iirc and oh btw the shoe brand had sold its brand and everything to someone else before hand so people just bought an empty thing!
We need better societal discourse on the norms of using AI, when to use AI and when not to use AI and to create a social structure to help people from completely and solely relying on such technology and forms of psychosis.
you know how in third grade you have these confusing feelings about a girl and it's upsetting and you pretend you hate her and tease her etc? people here are in love with AI, it's that simple. can't stop talking about it. go ahead and deny it, that will just convince us more.
I think it's because the extremes are simply not equivalent.
On one hand, you have smart people are doing cool and interesting things like dang referenced: breathing life into old projects and cleaning out old bugs in EOL hardware.
And then you have people who use it to do things like "chatGPT can this trailer pull this car?", "gosh, my electric bill is high I should use an LLM to figure this out" or "please write this email to my subordinates".
So yeah, it's cool that LLMs can work on software(. And now, the profession that intersects between highest earning potential and least amount of schooling is able to be done significantly faster, so wages will be diluted faster than the workers will ask for raises commensurate to their output).
But it's more obviously terrible because a large chunk of people are losing their critical and creative thinking abilities rapidly, obviously, and with seemingly no end in sight.
The overwhelming majority of people don't just dislike AI but are aggressively anti-clanker. Tech is a bubble of mass AI psychosis so you might miss this fact, but it very much is the exception not the norm.
For many if us, being anti-clanker in our day to day jobs has an actual negative impact on our careers and livelihoods so we need to shut up and hide the obvious reality anyone with more than 3 braincells can clearly grasp. HN is anonymous so you can see what people actually think instead of what they're forced to pretend they think at work in order to not be punished by our billionaire-owned companies.
We particularly hate the malinche retards like you lining up to glaze AI. Do you think it makes you special or something? That you'll be the ones to survive layoffs and be AI tech leads once the Epstein class pushing clankers cleans house?
> AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,”
Is bad because
> Users [...] care that the product works.
Is true.
If you want your project to work for more than a few weeks/months at a time, you need to put actual engineering effort into designing a product that works. "The AI can fix it when it inevitably breaks" doesn't change the fact that it broke, and now you have to pay for more tokens to fix it.
Well engineered software still breaks, obviously, but the class and severity of bugs is generally a whole hell of a lot less. When you have an engineer who understands the product, fixing problems is faster than naive "pls fix" prompts.
The fundamental misunderstanding is that "code" represents the entirety of a project. Your premise is that code is a means to an end, which isn't wrong, but your conclusion is "therefore code quality is irrelevant". These two ideas put together are extremely naive and outright incorrect.
In many ways, the code is the product. The functionality your users want is literally encoded in the program. It's true that the aesthetic qualities of the code are largely irrelevant to that goal, but the code needs to be correct. Otherwise the functionally is incorrect and your users are unhappy. Moreover, the product needs to stay working indefinitely under practically infinite use cases. The only way that happens is if you put actual engineering effort into designing a system that works and is correct. The way that happens is if you write good, correct, and readable code.
AI generated code is not a bad thing in and of itself.
The bad and objectively incorrect idea is that you don't need to put thought, consideration, or engineering into a project because you have an infinite code machine.
These two notions are not mutually exclusive. You can have hand written slop that blows up on launch. You can have well engineered and architected AI written code. The problem is when people think that code is all that matters and thought is no longer required because any problem can be fixed with more code.
This is something fundamental that comes up in literally every domain. If you want your solution to work for the next ten minutes, you can slap together anything that works. If you want your solution to last a generation, you have to engineer it to do so. Bridges, houses, sewer systems, cars, medicine, code, interpersonal relationships. To do a job well, you have to put effort in and you have to think critically.
The bulk of the "anti-AI" sentiment you're complaining about is not about AI. It is the objectively correct rejection of your attitude that infinite code can replace thought, design, and engineering. Code isn't the problem, it's that you're ignoring everything else that makes a project work. This is plain and simple reality. Having infinite nails does not mean you can build a three story apartment block. Having infinite rivets doesn't mean you can build the golden gate bridge.
Infinite code does not make you an engineer.
What are you even talking about?
There are more articles in the HN feed on AI than any other topic, by far.
A certain amount of the push back is just because of how much it displaces all other subjects.
Another amount is just trying to overcome explicit fan-boi-ism. A year and a half ago, I was a total skeptic. The tech has evolved considerably since then. Now I find it has very strong results in some applications. But there are still certain demographics who want to believe its great at everything, which is just not true.
I can only speak for myself:
1) I'm incredibly allergic to hype. To me, LLMs are very technologically impressive. I don't doubt that they're useful for many things – adversarial code review (including finding exploits), refactoring, search and math exploration are some shoo-ins in my view. However, these and other applications speak for themselves. They are impressive. They don't need people running around telling everyone how they should use more LLMs. How "the old ways" are obsolete, etc. Awesomeness does not need a fanclub.
2) Usefulness in some areas doesn't necessarily extrapolate as well as the fanclub seems to think.
3) The fanclub happens to be aligned with some pretty unsavory people, and some powers that have very little regard for our shared planet. This is, of course, not the fault of the fanclub, but many in the fanclub certainly could do a better job distancing themselves from certain people and acknowledging certain regulatory necessities.
4) I think this revolution has revealed a dichotomy in the set of people who enjoy programming: those for whom the end goal reigns supreme, and those for whom the journey is the point. You yourself seem to be in the former group. As a member of the latter, I have to say we feel a bit invisible. We're also often accused of wanting to halt progress so that we can keep doing what we want. I think that's an unfair characterization (I won't go into details of why here).
5) A lot of people in a geeky community like this are naturally skeptical of relying on things that we ourselves can't control. It's part of why the FOSS movement succeeded. This is all very much on a collision course with at least SOTA LLMs.
6) A lot of us do intellectual work. We therefore rely on a functioning system of intellectual property. It seems that a large fraction of the pro-AI crowd subscribe to the idea that passing IP through an LLM can strip it of its original ownership. For points 1-5, I believe we should have a nuanced discussion and try to understand each other. On point 6, though, I think these people have lost their minds. I completely fail to understand how they themselves don't think they'll soon encounter face-eating leopards if their worldview holds water. There seems to be very little acknowledgement of this, and it makes me angry.
> the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster.
Prove it.
> as someone who has spent more than 20 years honing their craft
Proving it should be exceptionally easy. So.. why haven't you done it? Why is it always prognostication about what AI "could" do and never what it "actually did for me?"
> but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
They do. They also might realize that your post is just a means to an end. Is it actually a genuine question or something else entirely?
> I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
Do you realize not everyone shares the values that caused you to say this?
It's way more than code. Sure AI can crank out code at prodigious rates. Gary Tan, Y Combinator's CEO says he ships 37,000 lines of AI code per day [0]
And so can I. (oops)
"In the Beginning" (I was there) people wrote accounting packages in BASIC. It worked, the language allowed rapid prototyping, and out the door quickly, but BASIC lent itself to spaghetti code, and for anything really serious, the programs were too lightweight, and were very difficult to document and maintain, so that bugs could be fixed and esoteric features added (for $$$) without the fix breaking something else. Every damn line of code had to be commented so that someone else could pick it up when you left and maintain and upgrade it.
So, AI's got a mind of its own, and from what I hear, every time you get a solution (code) it's different from the previous. At this point, no solid libraries, such as mathematicians, physicists, medical researchers and yes, rocket scientists can rely on as 100% solid and "bet your life on it"
In addition, the hype has extended AI into more general areas, including "bet your life on it" situations where people are using it for therapy, with fatal consequences at times [1] "Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. Adolescents and Young Adults Use AI Chatbots for Mental Health Advice" (RAND) and it's so flawed.
And also, it leads to cognitive surrender. [2] "AI and the Psychology of Cognitive Surrender" (Psychology Today)
Key points:
In a very brief thread about Siri becoming AltSiri [3] my comments regarding the wide use of a tool that is IMO overextended and using the general population as guinea pigs:---
I view and use computers as tools. They (mostly) do what I command.
That's because I am by nature a problem solver, and so are others. In fact, if knowledge consists of understanding a particular domain, and wisdom consists of applying knowledge across different domains, creativity of a sort, one of them being that unknown called the future then "button pusher" answers kill my ability to deal with future situations which are not recorded in "The Book of Common Knowledge" (a SNL reference).
When "computers" wrestle control of the situation and solve everything, then, as someone said in the early 20th century "Everything that can be invented has already been invented" then there's now no need for computers at all, since "Every problem can be solved by a chatbot" and no need for creative (genius) things like the famous "Wordless Workshop" that ran in Popular Science and Family Handyman magazines.
Just answer machines. No need to learn anything, nor to create.
Creativity and genius move us forward. That's why we have Hacker News as opposed to those "answer forums"
---
And YES, code that you have to reverse engineer in order to maintain must be understandable and well-architected. If that's "Elegant" then So be it.
I rapidly prototyped in-house apps, quickly and well, and they had a limited life span.
But "enterprise" software isn't going away. And whom [4] do you call when some CTO calls you at 1 a.m. when their business takes a header? Claude?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414607
[1] https://www.rand.org/news/press/2026/06/nearly-1-in-5-us-ado...
[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48413555
[4] I was born in Boston. Cheers!
I am not 100% opposed to AI and I spent multi hundreds of dollars across the major players right now, but I'll see what I can add.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
This sentiment has been with us for a long time, and AI has only made it worse. Many people have experienced the damaging effects that focusing on execution speed have had on our lives, and you would think if AI makes us 10x faster, we could spend half that time actually making programs more performant and secure. But all of the gains always funnel into speed, when we have the golden opportunity to make things better.
Then there are the players that make it. Casey Muratori recently did a video called "It just Happened" where Eric Schmidt gives a commencement speech and washes his hands of the negative things that have happened in it, even though his decisions at Google and the technology he helped create made a lot of that happen. A quote from Casey's Video
> This is a case where someone who had direct decision-making authority during the time period when the very worst most dystopian parts of the technology business model were developed, perfected and entrenched. And he is giving this commencement speech to a group of students who have known nothing but that their whole lives. They're not like me. They didn't know a time before all of this. They didn't experience technology in the 80s or something like this.
One of the most important things in that quote is that there are people who have known nothing but a predatory, privacy invasive technology world. When that is your baseline, new technology that could advance that at 10x speed does not feel great. And now it requires only a couple bad actors and a subscription to make that happen.
At work we are mandated to use AI. That feels bad for a lot of reasons. But one of the worse is having to review AI generated code. I have never liked reviewing other peoples PRs, and now with the speed AI code is created, I could spend the whole day just doing that. So now my job is worse because I have to do more of the part I like the least.
Next, I've been thinking a lot about "the human scale of things". To me that means slowing down, and not consuming things faster than my lizard brain can understand. While I might be able to go 10x faster, unless I'm doing something I've done a million times before, I will not be able to keep that much code in my head. So I quickly lose understandings of projects, and I have to fight hard to rebuild my knowledge.
Lastly, as someone who has "vibecoded" an app, It feels completely impersonal. Yea I had the idea, and yea I had to type the prompts, but producing a whole mountain of code over the course of weeks or months (I've done both) just leaves me feeling empty on the inside. There is still a selfish human component to the programming that I and I suspect others do, and AI takes away from that
I'm not sure what the solution is though. Do we say, if you don't want to take ownership over the bad things that happen then we will down play your part in the good? Do we try to set up organizations that persecute those accountable? Should Eric Schmidt be in jail? Should he be fined? Do we as developers try to use the tools "for good?" I don't know, and I'd love to know what other people have to say on this
Technology is not some pure thing detached from emotions, society, feelings, and consequences.
Code isn't just a means to an end for a lot of people.
More people are now realizing that society has no protections around losing your job - what little power they had is going to be stripped away. Or its going to be used to reduce their power - you know have to work more bc you can use ai to do it! Ive already seen this.
Sure ai in a vacuum is a really interesting thing, oh its cool it can produce code or whatever. The underlying issue however is capitalism.
I have realised that my own "anti-AI" position is little to do with AI itself, and a lot to do with the flatly appalling culture around it, and my reluctance is partly to do with what navigating it has meant for me and people I care about.
I am willing to accept that I must learn these tools, so I am learning the tools. (Essentially: open source, open weights, open culture: the true state of the art.)
Now that I am learning these tools at my own pace, I can evaluate them all as the future boring technology they will soon be.
It has helped me see what I am "anti-", with clarity:
- I am "anti-" the way that tech people have brazenly underestimated the complexity, values, culture, traditions, and principles of the creative industries they have gleefully and derisively fucked up (I have a foot in multiple camps here so I can see this easily)
— I am "anti-" the exhausting burden-shifting of it all. Everyone has new stuff to deal with; every creative community has to develop new rules to stop "fix my AI generated thing" crushes, PR slop, "I asked AI and it said..." spam etc.
- I am "anti-" the tethering of this technology to "e/acc", and the "in the near future we will destroy all your jobs, we're deadly serious about this, sorry, I guess you're fucked haha, maybe learn AI" mentality that it has been riddled with since the earliest point
- I am "anti-" the sort of new tech industry imperial default: hey you can just change your business so it is dependent on pouring money into one of two American cloud startups that have demonstrated little commitment to openness or behaving in a predictable manner, that have subsidised pricing that will one day blow up, and is like Uber did, YOLO-ripping through regulations, legal principles and foreign commercial cultures, and at the end of it will get the government to change the rules so it doesn't have to do anything little people have to do like make a profit, and will leave said litle people holding the bag while they yomp on towards the next thing to fuck up.
In short, I am "anti-" the brazen, entitled, trollish trend of devaluing all of human culture and denigrating anyone who is not in the tech industry as expendable, inferior, quaint, classist etc.; it is like what happens to any social group when the spoilt children of the local overgrown rich-kid come to dominate it.
The technology? A bit less world-shaking than people realise, but possibly worth it for code-generation.
(This is just what I think and I'm not going to argue with your dissent, not least because as a middle-aged British man I am always right)
It's not anti AI, as many other comments point out it's simply heterogeneous enough that it's mostly the "theme" of a discussion dictating which subgroup will be more vocal in a discussion.
In any case I think that some in the anti-AI crowd are simply very defensive.
They have staked all of their careers on the technical part and skills of writing code. Now that they see the average developer (which study indicates can barely write a fizz buzz) outputting software at a great velocity they have a mixture of disgust for the (alleged) low quality of the software and fear for their own careers.
I think the biggest factor is fear. When we first started discussing LLMs a few years ago, it was easy to be amused and reassured when looking closer at all the inaccuracies. The models have improved at an alarming rate. Some of us have spent decades automating the roles of others, and now it turns out our own medicine doesn’t taste very nice. The timing is also terrible because the rise of these tools is coinciding with a dramatic post-COVID tightening of the jobs market.
On the other hand, it’s frustrating to see the trend and tools go towards vibecoding and fully agentic development. Many of us have also been in the business of inheriting (and supporting) code, so it goes against the grain when non-developers produce something without even attempting to understand how it works. Because we’ve been there in the trenches trying to diagnose and debug a serious problem out of hours under pressure, and know how essential it is to have a decent mental model of how it is meant to operate.
As a personal anecdote, I was working in an area with someone business-focussed and not particularly technical. There was some functionality we had been discussing, and one day they wanted to discuss it on a call. They then went on to demo something that seemed to have a working implementation of all the features we had been discussing, and more. I was curious, so asked them to screen share the code… at which point they started to get a bit cagey. I managed to get them to show it to me, and it turned out they had vibed the whole system as a single massive React component. And had no clue how any of the code worked. I told them I couldn’t possibly integrate that massive ball of spaghetti, and we agreed to treat it as a throwaway demo prototype and develop any production system properly. That sort of mess is inevitable when banging Accept All like the LLM is a casino slot machine.
So personally, I have spent the last few years trying to amplify my skills and experience with these tools rather than bury my head in the sand. Three decades as a freelance consultant developer (with several stack pivots) has taught me that new technology trends don’t simply vanish if they are providing at least some business value. Don’t wait for all this to go away, because that day will never come.
I also think this technology makes us all generalists, unless somebody’s specialist knowledge and skills are very deep and highly unusual. It won’t be so easy to be a backend-only guy who doesn’t touch frontend, when your project stakeholder thinks he could have a stab at it with his free Claude account.
On my journey with this tooling I’ve struggled to find the line between how much I write versus how much I generate, and tried to maintain the balance between velocity and quality. I gravitate towards a workflow of insisting that I understand and approve every diff, and use the knowledge ingested by the LLMs to keep learning, and try to be sensitive to when the convenience has become laziness and there’s a danger of de-skilling. I combine my experience and instincts with the new powertools and feel that we are greater than the sum of our parts. I just have to hope that when this all settles down a bit, there’s a solid market for that type of work rather than being replaced by non-technical vibecoders with only velocity to offer (back in the day we used to refer to them as cowboy coders, but same idea).
I just don't want to read about it. I came here to read about my craft. I want to hear about cool new database tools. Or someone's project that will inspire me to do something. I don't give a single shit about someone's opinion about AI or some crap someone made with it (I've made plenty of personal tools with it; I never posted them here because they weren't interesting, much like all of these Show HN!) It has raised the floor for engineering, nothing more.
Because unlike crypto and other tech fads, it’s hostile:
- job losses are immediately associated with AI in news
- privacy invasions, AI profiling, AI aggregators, etc.
- annoyance, AI chat bubble, AI useless tech support, AI interviews, etc.
- bandwagon “wrappers”, you know, wrap gpt api in saas and try to sell it in subscriptions, flooding show HN
- slops, slops everywhere. Codes, graphics, you name it.
And a lot more. AI to tech world is what smartphones did to internet, flooding non technical people into technical people’s space and basically ruining the fun part. Additionally, it didn’t bring any substantial breakthrough, in the past 3 years or so, did we have any breakthrough innovation in any sector as a result of AI? Barely, so you end up with a lot of noise flooding the internet, bots now are more than humans.
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.
That is one part of the problem. Too many people who are not 20 years seasoned senior developers shipping out products that are nothing more than letting Claude or whatever go rambling unsupervised. And frankly, when I see a project that has Claude in its contributors, I do not want to have to waste time to check if the person directing the AI actually has a clue what they are doing.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Dead internet theory. In the end everything will just be piles of hacked together slop that no human can even begin to grasp and bugfixes or feature requests will get exponentially more expensive and risky.
Firstly, your question is not genuine and it's clear by how you've constructed your post. There's no need to put on a facade of curiosity to make a statement. It would somehow be less antagonistic without the question and just the statement.
I feel you could be confusing negativity towards the application of AI with negativity towards the technology itself.
I use AI frequently and am neutral to positive regarding the technology. However, we have seen a rise in "I built a tool" submissions on here which advertise AI envisioned, AI named, AI marketed, AI designed and AI programmed projects. The submissions contain AI generated descriptions. The authors reply with AI generated responses. Often, other authors reply with AI generated comments.
I am entirely comfortable expressing negative sentiment towards the people promoting projects made using AI in the most lazy, passive fashion possible. It's not a moral stance, it's just a matter of quality control.
Further, CEO's and thought leaders with strong pro-AI stances have repeatedly expressed sociopathic or misanthropic views. Again, I'm comfortable holding negative sentiments towards them.
Lastly, your framing is entirely from the point of view of a product person who is desperate to ship something. This is not necessarily the priority of all people present on here. I'm very happy to express negative sentiment towards the SaaS bros who create little value for their users, the tools they use or the wide community in which they participate.
anti-AI is in many cases a misnomer
I think the technology is an amazing scientific breakthrough. I use it myself; it's an excellent tool for certain tasks, and getting better.
I also think that the social implications of the technology, as it is being developed, monetized and pushed by BigTech, are all very negative, and potentially disastrous. And that's even without getting into a host of other issues, like how BigTech stole everyone's data to create these models in the first place.
I'm not anti the technology, but I am anti the way we're going about developing it.
I'm especially irritated by the starry-eyed AI-bros who remind me of the crypto bros, who are either oblivious to the implications of AI as it is being rolled out, or just don't care (because it's shiny or whatever).
Does that make me "anti-AI"? If so, so be it.
It's not unlike how I think nuclear fission is an amazing scientific discovery as an energy source, but I'm also very concerned that we instead used it to create the capacity to destroy the entire planet, and not only that, but that the power to do resides with a few people who I believe are untrustworthy and dangerous. Considering that nuclear power is such a small fraction of global energy production today, can we say that nuclear fission was worth it? Maybe it's because I grew up in the 70s/80s where I experienced that feeling of that we very close to someone pressing that red button (and, in fact, we were). People today seem to have forgotten that, but the bombs and the red buttons have not gone away. And in fact, I would say that I trust Reagan and Brezhnev to make rational decisions more than I do Trump and Putin, so we might even be worse off now (not to mention the other countries who now have nukes).
You are training your replacement.
Yes, this has been true since human beings started pro-creating.
I despise code written by VI! The only code anyone should ever run is code written with EMACS. With SPACES, not tabs. Because tabs take jobs from space bar pressers, and boil the oceans.
I thought it was the spacebar that caused the cpu to overheat
When did HN become Reddit ? This is a real demographic shift I am seeing after a long time hiatus. The people who hate AI are largely those that lean far left and see themselves as liberal progressive.
I also see that and I'd say around Covid / past-Covid. More people became terminally online in those 6-12 months, like another eternal September.
Funnily you will always see some people waving the HN guidelines [1] flag: nooooo, don’t compare this site to Reddit. Yet there is another „rule” in the guidelines about politics being off-topic… which is the biggest symptom of HN turning into Reddit: General, especially US domestic, politics became excessively acceptable to be posted here. That wasn’t the case 10 years ago or more. Of course if you point that out then the „everything is politics” crowd will show up and the „should we close our eyes and ears to all the tragedies happening in the world”. Rinse and repeat.
That’s the problem with ambigous rules and to some extent why I still prefer Reddit. If you don’t like it you make a new sub, find another one etc. At least the bias is clearly known
1, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Reddit has a high rate of global bans btw, you can't just find another subreddit if any of the power mods disagrees with you because you are supercookie-shadowbanned then. You'll think you're not banned but nobody will see your posts.
I don't understand the question. Shouldn't you be afraid and disgusted?
Of course I don't like it. I should dislike it. Anyone saying "it's not that bad" is just describing the fact that it hasn't hit them yet.
You think you're sitting pretty and safe? That's the real fantasy. Not fantasizing about how powerful AI is — fantasizing that you're immune.
Fear and disgust aren't irrational here. They're the normal response to watching the skill you've built your livelihood on lose value. The question isn't why HN is anti-AI — the question is what the people who aren't afraid are using to keep themselves calm.
It's because this place is full of people that are the developer equivalent of someone that constantly tells everyone they drive a manual transmission vehicle and it makes them superior.
Is it really so bizarre that people might be against a technical revolution that threatens their livelihoods? "AI" even in its current regurgative state can do so much stuff that people are paid to do.
Or that we're all talking to an LLM when we think we're talking to other humans (eg in here).
Or that kids are demonstrably taking the easy way out instead of actually learning. Cheating isn't new, but the level of disengagement is biblically awesome. Between that and the stagnant junior jobs market, what hope do they have?
Honestly, what is there to celebrate? Toil is a necessary component of human satisfaction, and we're shifting everything we do to a LLM.