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

Are we including just technical people in these crowds?

Because there's a third crowd: everyone else/the general public that are standing up vibe coded websites and don't give a hoot how things work in the background or know as long as money is coming in. There are people that are using AI and thinking less and less causing their brains over the long term to become more inelastic.

We're in for a very, very painful future that will have mixed results. On one hand, you can boostrap things a lot quicker with less mental effort and it helps get up to speed without having to know some complex things (e.g. deep knowledge in coding). This can help us innovate on basic things faster, probably.

On the other ... people aren't going to learn. If something breaks in that state where they don't know how something works, what, we're just going to ask another AI to fix it? I don't know how I feel or think about that. On a long enough timeline, there are people that won't know how any of this was designed in the first place.

That's the world we actually live in. And that's what will survive despite crowd 1 and 2 that you mentioned above.

What surprises me most is some of the virulent reactions that code generation appears to elicit, sometimes citing reasons such as craft, artistry, and originality. As if the entire disciplines of computer science and systems engineering never depended on assemblers, code generation, compilers, JIT. Or really, just writing bytes that can represent machine code, P-code, or bytecode.

A reaction that doesn't appear to make the very direct connection with the systems of exploitation, but chooses to target the tools, or the users of tools is difficult to justify as extremely sophisticated.

I use AI tools daily and find them genuinely useful.

However I am increasingly annoyed at how everything has to be framed as a conversation about AI, how every tech-adjacent company has to brand itself as AI-first, and most of all, how overblown predictions are about an LLM being conscious, etc.

In short – it’s a useful technology reshaping tons of industries, but the hype is grating.

HN probably has as much as 5 million monthly users. This is not just a small group of insiders, but more of a broadly representative sample of startup and engineering people.

So there is a wide range of judgement, and more importantly, a diverse set of worldviews. These are beliefs that form the foundations of cognition and perception. In the general population there are a massive number of people who do not understand technology and/or do not really appreciate it at a deep level. This includes a significant percentage of startup and engineering people unfortunately.

I haven't had the patience or mentality to really absorb "ok but how is this useful" until that thread and your highlighted references. Thank you for the curated highlights, however brief it may be, because it's very hard to find such diamonds without dedicating far too much time wading through the abstract gatekept comments on the topic, in most cases. Real world examples give me much hope!