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Ask HN: Am I the only one not using AI?

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Re: Ask HN: Am I the only one not using AI?

#11

Post by softwaredoug »

AI ruins your flow. That's the biggest problem. I sit here and wait for Claude to do something. Then I get distracted by social media.

No these things don't actually work if you study human psychology:

* Switching to another work task (what for like a minute?)

* Playing chess or something (sure its better than social media, but still a distraction)

But I do like AI tools that don't interfere with my flow like Github Copilot, or even chatting with Claude / ChatGPT about a task I'm doing.

Re: Ask HN: Am I the only one not using AI?

#12

Post by arresin »

softwaredoug wrote: post #11

AI ruins your flow. That's the biggest problem. I sit here and wait for Claude to do something. Then I get distracted by social media. No these things don't actually work if you study human psychology: * Switching to another work task (what for like a minute?) * Playing chess or something (sure its better than social media, but still a distraction) But I do like AI tools that don't interfere with my flow like Github…

E-e-e-xactly. It took an embarrassing long time for me to come to this conclusion also. There’s something hypnotising about seeing it work which is also distracting.

I wonder if I’ve actually saved time overall or, if I was in an uninterrupted flow state I would have done not just a better but also quicker job.

Re: Ask HN: Am I the only one not using AI?

#13

Post by sexyman48 »

sph wrote: post #10

I don’t and I won’t. My large clients do not care. The day they start to require any of that nonsense, I’ll drop them as a client. Simple as that. I have decided to be radical about AI and LLM: I don’t like them because they are a waste of time, and I would like them even less if they were this magical world-changing technology people want us to believe. I am at a point of my career where concerns of productivity or…

I’ll drop them as a client

Not unless they drop you first.

Re: Ask HN: Am I the only one not using AI?

#14

Post by propablythrown »

sph wrote: post #10

I don’t and I won’t. My large clients do not care. The day they start to require any of that nonsense, I’ll drop them as a client. Simple as that. I have decided to be radical about AI and LLM: I don’t like them because they are a waste of time, and I would like them even less if they were this magical world-changing technology people want us to believe. I am at a point of my career where concerns of productivity or…

I use llms everyday for coding assistance the same way I used search engines in the past, and to that extent I do not see an issue. Why would you avoid that out of principle?

Re: Ask HN: Am I the only one not using AI?

#15

Post by wara23arish »

incomingpain wrote: post #8

>Am I using the tools wrong or are others finding the same thing? Like any new tool, there is a learning curve. The Curve is rather steep right now with the horizon changing to quickly. The right tool also matters a great deal; right now you can run a model at home on 32gb vram that's objectively better than gpt 3.5 from 2023 or grok 2. >lus, the time I supposedly save building things gets eaten up debugging, correct…

One is passively receiving the answer and the other is actively reading and comparing multiple choices.

If you were the type that would just copy paste whatever came up first, then yeah its just quicker to do it that way.

Re: Ask HN: Am I the only one not using AI?

#16

Post by jf22 »

incomingpain wrote: post #8

>Am I using the tools wrong or are others finding the same thing? Like any new tool, there is a learning curve. The Curve is rather steep right now with the horizon changing to quickly. The right tool also matters a great deal; right now you can run a model at home on 32gb vram that's objectively better than gpt 3.5 from 2023 or grok 2. >lus, the time I supposedly save building things gets eaten up debugging, correct…

You forgot 2023 where you'd generate get half-lucid unit tests

Re: Ask HN: Am I the only one not using AI?

#17

Post by tstrimple »

Just started a Claude Code experiment this week. I'm building a new NAS but instead of using an off the shelf appropriate distro like TrueNAS I just installed NixOS and I'm having Claude Code fully manage the entire operating system. It's going pretty well so far. Initially it would reach for tools like dig that weren't available on the install but after a "# memorize We're on NixOS, you need to try to do things the NixOS way first. Including temporarily installing tools via nix-shell to run individual commands." those issues went away and it's doing NixOS things.

From a clean NixOS command line install, we've got containers and vms handled. Reverse proxy with cloudflare tunnels with all endpoints automatically getting and renewing SSL certs. All the *arr stack tools and other homelab stuff you'd expect. Split horizon DNS with unbound and pihole running internally. All of my configurations backed up in github. I didn't even create the cloudflare tunnels or the github repos. I had claude code handle that via API and cli tools. The last piece I'm waiting on to tie it all together are my actual data drives which should be here tomorrow.

Is this a smart thing to do? Absolutely not. Tons of things could go wrong. But NixOS is fairly resilient and rollbacks are easy. I don't actually have anything running on the NAS in use yet and I've got my synology limping along until I finish building this replacement. It's still an open question whether I'll use Claude Code like this to manage the NAS once I've migrated my data and my family has switched over. But I've had a very good experience so far.

Re: Ask HN: Am I the only one not using AI?

#18

Post by sph »

propablythrown wrote: post #14
sph wrote: post #10

I don’t and I won’t. My large clients do not care. The day they start to require any of that nonsense, I’ll drop them as a client. Simple as that. I have decided to be radical about AI and LLM: I don’t like them because they are a waste of time, and I would like them even less if they were this magical world-changing technology people want us to believe. I am at a point of my career where concerns of productivity or…

I use llms everyday for coding assistance the same way I used search engines in the past, and to that extent I do not see an issue. Why would you avoid that out of principle?

For the same reason Richard Stallman only uses free software. Sometimes, it's good to have a moral imperative and stick to it. This is mine.

I'm far enough in my career to know that avoiding coding assistance or LLM-assisted "search" won't make my life or craft worse in any way. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Re: Ask HN: Am I the only one not using AI?

#19

Post by _jsmh »

arresin wrote: post #12
softwaredoug wrote: post #11

AI ruins your flow. That's the biggest problem. I sit here and wait for Claude to do something. Then I get distracted by social media. No these things don't actually work if you study human psychology: * Switching to another work task (what for like a minute?) * Playing chess or something (sure its better than social media, but still a distraction) But I do like AI tools that don't interfere with my flow like Github…

E-e-e-xactly. It took an embarrassing long time for me to come to this conclusion also. There’s something hypnotising about seeing it work which is also distracting. I wonder if I’ve actually saved time overall or, if I was in an uninterrupted flow state I would have done not just a better but also quicker job.

"allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19%--AI tooling slowed developers down."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

Re: Ask HN: Am I the only one not using AI?

#20

Post by bhag2066 »

sph wrote: post #18
propablythrown wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use llms everyday for coding assistance the same way I used search engines in the past, and to that extent I do not see an issue. Why would you avoid that out of principle?

For the same reason Richard Stallman only uses free software. Sometimes, it's good to have a moral imperative and stick to it. This is mine. I'm far enough in my career to know that avoiding coding assistance or LLM-assisted "search" won't make my life or craft worse in any way. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Shouldn't you refuse to use anything but pencil and paper by that logic. An abacus. No not that that's technology. Only your fingers? The godhead resides equally in the pedal of a flower the gears in an engine, the human typed code on servers as well as the machine generated code on be very same servers.
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