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

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

#221

Post by knivets »

> 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.

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

#222

Post by austin-cheney »

> 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.

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

#223

Post by mschuster91 »

> 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.

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

#224

Post by altern8 »

truncate wrote: post #219

>> 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…

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.

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

#225

Post by Herbstluft »

Levitating wrote: post #167
oleg_antonyan wrote: post #148

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 no…

That would be a world where there is very little value in local models. I don't thinkt that will be the case.

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.

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

#226

Post by vinnymac »

truncate wrote: post #219

>> 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…

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.

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

#227

Post by onjectic »

tehjoker wrote: post #48
datadrivenangel wrote: post #8

Because AI use correlates with sloppiness, and due to the fundamental attribution fallacy us engineers don't like sloppiness.

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 weake…

> 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…

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

#228

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

simianwords wrote: post #166
mkl wrote: post #24

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.

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.

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

#229

Post by alexgotoi »

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.

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

#230

Post by shahzaibmushtaq »

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.

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