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
Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
151–160 of 812 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#152> 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.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#153The 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.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#154I 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.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#155There 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.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#156Knowing 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.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#157There'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.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#158I 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
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#159When 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
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#160The 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 soci…
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.