AI is no doubt powerful and i think that's reflected on HN. However, a lot of AI news these days is alloyed with hype and falsehood. Some amount of sceptical counter pressure is warranted.
Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
301–310 of 812 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#302Cause people here see the loopholes and want to solve them to increase efficiency which does'nt means they are pessimistic about AI.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#303> 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. Show the receipts. Where are the mobile apps, the photoshop replacements, the video and audio editors, the games and game engines that took a decade to make in the past that have shipped since Claude code came along? > By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify t…
That’s what I find funny about „end of SaaS”.
If you are a graphic designer you are not going to make your own Photoshop. Even if you could ROI is not there.
Graphics designers of course are bad example because everyone will just generate images directly from LLMs.
But restaurant owner for example could build his own website with menu - heck even with just slapping html without LLM making a decent website was easy but these people didn’t have time for that.
I work in insurtech, wet dream of all big companies dealing with insurance was customer self service so they were building those interactive forms - but no customer wants to do the filling, they don’t care they don’t have time they are busy running their own business and they want to call or meet with someone who knows what needs to be filled in those forms. Chat with AI is not fixing that because business owner will have to spend his time answering all these questions that were in the form but only now it will be chatbot.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#304It isn't. Other forums are much more radically against AI.
Either
- in principal, the "AI racists",
- for legal fears (no GPL code in my business project),
- or the AI slop haters, the other "AI racists", because AI is no slop anymore as in the first years.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#305> 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. Show the receipts. Where are the mobile apps, the photoshop replacements, the video and audio editors, the games and game engines that took a decade to make in the past that have shipped since Claude code came along? > By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify t…
It's definitely not at the make me a photoshop stage but I don't think that angle explains adequately explains the tone of the anti-AI hn discussions taking place at all. If it was just a toy with no shot at making something real people would go "oh cool have fun with that" and move on with their life. Instead we see pretty emotionally charged posts.
If people just wanted to make their own stuff and have fun, that's fine. Knock yourself out.
However, it's launched this enormous tidal wave of mediocrity that emboldens the dumbest people to do the dumbest shit and make it my problem. I just had to yell at one of the IT guys for trying to hook up our Duo to Claude, and I'm still mad about it lol.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an aside, the variety of examples in that other thread is impressive. Here are some that I noticed: Fixing my furnace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417845 New software for a retro keyboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418158 Customizing my camper van: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417379 Porting my astronomy app from an old Nokia phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419242 Fi…
Oh dang, we all know –based on observation of your throughput and availability– that you're AI, you just can't "be nervous". Jokes aside, thanks for your selection. I had read some, but missed others until your comment. If it matters, I think there's some people that hasn't decided yet what tribe (pro-AI/anti-AI) they belong to. There's probably dozens of us!
The argument is dialectical. In other words both sides are right.
There is a really important question that is been lost between the anti and pro AI camps which is really answering what AI is good at and what AI is bad at, and what is the root cause of the weaknesses. Is it intrinsic to the models that LLM's use, or the way thy have been trained. In this knowledge is where the gold mine is for the next start up.
For example AI is very good at answering well defined questions, but suffers from premature closure. It will not know if it has all the information to answer the question. So whilst AI will score better than a doctor or a lawyer on a domain question it will not necessarily gather all the evidence needed to answer the question properly. Knowing this whilst using a LLM is a super power.
There is also a large gap Usability issue in that often the LLM does not really know the humans context, in other words a context collapse. It does not know if you specilised in your domain or just asking for fun.
We should be exploring and debating these gaps.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#307The root cause if of course AI's role in loss of power on compensation (coding as a skill is no longer as valuable), and loss of power in labor vs capital. It's hard to face this, specially for the one oasis in the job market that pays well.
The contrarian bet is that being able to code (by yourself) may be more valuable in the future. It will certainly become rarer.
We shall see. My area of coding for a living is SO specialized and SO far from 'skill at literal coding' that I'm making that bet, because I don't stand to benefit from anything else: if I go for AI it will directly relegate me to sheer vibe-coding as the AI will immediately go for abstractions that are more sophisticated 'code' than I know. It'll do them wrong but I won't know the difference and won't be able to criticize them.
That's so worthless and doomed to failure that there's no point attempting it, so I do the coding my own primitive way and focus on the specialty I do.
I can tell you the risk: any sufficiently motivated AI can go after my userbase by simply lying and claiming it's doing my thing better than I am. There'll be people who can't tell the difference, so if the AI is able to leverage more marketing and resources it may well succeed.
Only defense I have is to continue to do what I do, like some artisanal box-maker able to survive because they're doing exquisite work making something you can get a cardboard version of at Home Depot for a buck seventy-eight. Then when I die, there is ONLY cardboard, assuming there aren't people learning to make artisanal boxes.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#308I work with junior ops "engineers". Even though some of them won't admit it, they want to do everything with AI, and they do not care much about testing. Even their peer review is done by AI, you can tell by the way the comments are written. They want to deploy stateful clusters, manage VM lifecycles, and even deploy our own Kube cluster, probably entirely vibe coded.
One of them tried to use tabs in yaml instead of spaces, didn't know what a virtualenv was, and didn't know why Kube jobs asked for xp in writing operators ; yet he is pushing multi-files features in less than a day that are meant to manage our backups, and is pushing for managing our own kube clusters in front of management (which finds that it is a lovely idea). At this point I am not sure what to do but it won't end very well I feel.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#309> They care that the product works This reminds me of Anthropic's post where they say they ship 8x as much code as they used to. And I stopped to consider how many times I've used an app and thought, "You know what this needs? More code!"
Is this why Claude Code uses React as a game engine to run a TUI?
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Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#310The other day, I had a similar thought about the relative importance of code. I'm working on a game, and I've been fussing over the code quality. And yeah, having code that isn't awful is important for various reasons. But with a game, it got me thinking, the code is literally the only part of the game the player doesn't experience. The time I'm spending on the code, I could be spending on the art, the game design, t…
The code working is everything the player experiences. They don't experience consistent indentation or comment block style, but they experience what it does.