Ask HN: Do you feel comfortable admitting that you use AI?

#1

Post by var0xyz » Tue, Aug 18, 2026, 3:16 PM UTC

AI took the industry by storm, and naturally this generates a lot of resistance. The way I see this resistance expressing itself is in the form of certain feeling of superiority by those who refuse to use it, and a feeling of shame when admitting to using AI assistance for writing code.

However, I would argue (even though I have no data back this claim up) that most developers either choose to use it or are required by their employers. I can't predict the future, so I don't know if this is an ASM vs. C kind of moment, or if those giving in to the convenience will regret it years down the line when their skills atrophy.

Me personally, I use it and I feel more productive than ever. That said I can't help but feeling a bit of shame when admitting that. Hearing so many people say that AI-generated code is unusable and fixing it takes longer than writing it by hand, makes me wonder if they are working on a very specific field or I just have skill issues. Or maybe both.

How much AI are you using? If you do, do you feel comfortable admitting it?

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel comfortable admitting that you use AI?

#2

Post by baigy » Tue, Aug 18, 2026, 3:20 PM UTC

IMO, it's like asking: do you feel comfortable admitting you used a calculator instead of doing mental math?

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel comfortable admitting that you use AI?

#3

Post by choutos » Tue, Aug 18, 2026, 3:23 PM UTC

Pretty much all the code I produce nowadays is generated with AI help, to some extent. No problem admitting it.

The value is not writing the code anymore, but deciding what to create and keeping the code maintainable and understandable.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel comfortable admitting that you use AI?

#4

Post by hydraterms » Tue, Aug 18, 2026, 3:32 PM UTC

What is your best practices in terms of ensuring code quality?

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel comfortable admitting that you use AI?

#5

Post by andsoitis » Tue, Aug 18, 2026, 3:36 PM UTC

Optimizing for comfort would be the wrong fitness function.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel comfortable admitting that you use AI?

#6

Post by Jeremy1026 » Tue, Aug 18, 2026, 3:57 PM UTC

For work tasks? No. My team is super anti-AI. But I tell them about all the stuff I've built with it for personal stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel comfortable admitting that you use AI?

#7

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 18, 2026, 4:05 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel comfortable admitting that you use AI?

#8

Post by mikewarot » Tue, Aug 18, 2026, 4:13 PM UTC

I'm old and retired, so I don't have to use it at all. I've got a github and ChatGPT subscription, and I've used both from time to time.

I think it's important to disclaim AI generated content, as a matter of courtesy.

The Github CoPilot proved interesting, but when I tried to use it to create a simulator for my BitGrid project, it just created a massive pile of slop that kept growing and getting worse. On its own, it does nothing to curate code, it is strongly biased towards adding more patches.

ChatGPT is interesting for exploring ideas, but you can't trust its math, you have to check it. It easily gets itself off by 3 or more orders of magnitude when things get interesting.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel comfortable admitting that you use AI?

#9

Post by mikewarot » Tue, Aug 18, 2026, 4:17 PM UTC

baigy wrote: post #2

IMO, it's like asking: do you feel comfortable admitting you used a calculator instead of doing mental math?

No, it's not like that at all.

A calculator uses known deterministic algorithms to compute an answer. As long as you stay within the precision bounds, you'll get reliable and correct answers 100% of the time.

An AI is the result of randomness put through a simulated evolution, each one is different. We tend to expect them all to be the same, but that would be like redoing the big-bang until present, and expecting the dominant beings to be human, live in the same countries, speak the same languages, and believe all same cultural norms.

Nobody really groks how alien AI truly is.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel comfortable admitting that you use AI?

#10

Post by kbrannigan » Tue, Aug 18, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

After 2+ years of using LLM agents to write code for me , I had to reclaim my engineering skills. It was so easy to create 50+ project with a sleek ui, but i could not explain any of them. It was easier to start a new project from scratch than was to dive in the code to understand what is going on.

The worst part is whenever my tokens ran out , my productivity was zero. I was even an engineer anymore just a glorified prompter.

Lately i have changed how i work, i still use it but like a fancy autocomplete, a debugger,

I make it draft stuff for me , then i interrogate it, i make it justify every line of code that it writes, until i understand the code myself that i can write it if i wanted to.

Guys listen to me oneshot an entire feature may seem like you're 10x productivity but once the code it generate becomes complex even the agent can't deal with the complexity it itself created.

Big LLM companies market the product as coding is over, just become a prompter and buy our subsbscription fees.

We used to get paid to write code, now we pay to write code.