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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?

#31
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is an extreme difference between outsourcing physical difficulties to mechanical advantages, and outsourcing your brain to a large corporation that is stealing all of the IP that we have collectively created, as a society, and using it to replace our brains.

It feels clever to make comments like yours right now, but in two years when the order of control flow moves up two more steps and you are no longer needed at all, it'll be frustrating to look back and think "I wish I wouldn't have given money to them."

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

#33
You are not alone.

After falling in love and hacking away with Claude for a few weeks, I'm now in the hangover phase, and barely using any AI at all.

AI works well to build boilerplate code and solve easy problems, while confidently driving full-speed into the wall as soon as complexity increases.

I also noticed that it makes me subtly lazier and dumber. I started thinking like a manager, at a higher-level, believing I could ignore the details. It turns out I cannot, and details came back to bite me quickly.

So, no AI for me right now, but I'm keeping an eye out for the next gens.

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

#34
post #23

Yes, you are using the tools wrong. These tools are _hard_ to use well. Very hard. Deceptively hard. So hard that smart engineers bounce off of them believing them to be all smoke and hype. But if you study the emerging patterns, experiment, and work through the difficulty and rough edges, you will come out the other side with a new skill that will have you moving faster than you believed possible. There are people w…

These AI tools are hyped as "look how easy and fast it is to build an app with no coding experience." But then I see posts like yours saying that the tools are so _hard_ to use that developers with advanced skills struggle to get it to do what they can already do faster and better and with more satisfaction on their own.

Both "it's so easy" and "it's hard, but believe me, worth it someday" are completely unconvincing arguments to me. I'd rather just do my job well than spend all my time chasing someone's overhyped fantasy down a rabbit hole.

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

#35

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the n…

While I love Douglas Adams, and there's a hint of truth there, I don't think it works well here. By that logic, anything invented after 2005 would be abhorrent to me. Yet, there's tons of new tech invented since that I find/found "new and exciting."

My dislike of GenAI stuff is based on practical, ethical, and economic concerns.

Practical: GenAI output is bland and untrustworthy. It also discourages thought and learning, IMO. Lest folks line up to tell me how wonderful it is for their learning, that may be true, but my observation is that is not how the majority uses it. Once upon a time I thought the Internet/Web would be a revolution in learning for people. Fool me once...

Ethical: So many problems here, from the training data sets, to people unleashing scraper bots that have been effectively DDoS'ing sites for going on a year (at least) now. If these are the kind of people who make up the industry building these tools, I want nothing to do with the tools.

Economic: Related to ethics, but somewhat separate. GenAI and other LLM/AI tools could benefit people. I acknowledge, for example, there's real promise in using various related tech to do better medical diagnostics. That would be wonderful. But, the primary motivation of the companies pushing AI right now is to 1) get people hooked on the tools and jack up prices, 2) sell tech that can be used to lower wages or reduce employment, and 3) create another hype technology so they can stuff their pockets, and the coming crash be damned.

Again, what is driving AI/LLM is not well intentioned. Ignore that at your own peril. Probably everybody else's peril, too.

Adams no doubt knew people who were aghast at PCs or mobile phones because they were not around when they were younger. I get it. But, well, I wonder how Adams would feel about GenAI tools that spit out "write blah in the style of Douglas Adams" after being trained on all of his work.

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

#36
post #35

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the n…

While I love Douglas Adams, and there's a hint of truth there, I don't think it works well here. By that logic, anything invented after 2005 would be abhorrent to me. Yet, there's tons of new tech invented since that I find/found "new and exciting." My dislike of GenAI stuff is based on practical, ethical, and economic concerns. Practical: GenAI output is bland and untrustworthy. It also discourages thought and learn…

I think you could make identical arguments about any new technology. Amazingly expensive computers were once not very practical, it’s easy to point at any massive world changing tech and call it unethical, you can find these arguments about oil, railroads, 24 hour news, etc. and the same is true for economic incentives. Rubber barons and railroad tycoons were not well intentioned from this point of view. I don’t think there’s anything about AI that is inherently different from previous tech.

And isn’t that the entire point of the quote?

I’m not trying to be dismissive of your point, just to pose a counterpoint.

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

#37
post #34
post #23

Yes, you are using the tools wrong. These tools are _hard_ to use well. Very hard. Deceptively hard. So hard that smart engineers bounce off of them believing them to be all smoke and hype. But if you study the emerging patterns, experiment, and work through the difficulty and rough edges, you will come out the other side with a new skill that will have you moving faster than you believed possible. There are people w…

These AI tools are hyped as "look how easy and fast it is to build an app with no coding experience." But then I see posts like yours saying that the tools are so _hard_ to use that developers with advanced skills struggle to get it to do what they can already do faster and better and with more satisfaction on their own. Both "it's so easy" and "it's hard, but believe me, worth it someday" are completely unconvincing…

You are conflating two different things.

There are "vibe coding" tools like Lovable that let you build a prototype-level app with no coding experience. They're easy and fun, but I probably wouldn't want a novice (or anyone, really) using them within an enterprise codebase.

Then there are tools like Claude Code which, when used by a skilled practitioner, can be used to accelerate real SWE work in enterprise production codebases.

You are of course free to bury your head in the sand and ignore both categories of tools under the same "overhyped fantasy" umbrella, but I think you're doing so at your own professional peril. Just my opinion though.

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

#38
I am not. Technically that would mean adding a stochastic process driven by an ambiguous language to my deterministic workflow, and change my job from deep thinking about problem solving to reviewing and testing code that changes more often than it should. Ethically it abuses people, the environment, and copyright and the people selling the product are lobbying governments to break the social contract in a bid to extract more wealth.

It's a shit show.

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

#39

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…

I started doing pushups between claude code responses. I started with 10 but now I rip ~50 like nothing. I'm getting a pull up bar and trying to do the same. Pull ups until it completes then prompt and again, squats, pushups, ect. I'm getting stronger and better at code.

You are getting stronger. I very much doubt you are getting better at code.

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

#40

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…

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