Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

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.

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.

>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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

  • 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. 

---

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.