Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI? • Hacker News Board

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

#521

Post by tensor » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 8:22 PM UTC

Being honest about the limitations of AI is not being anti-AI. What a strange opinion.

To address your claim, that shipping speed is more important than code quality, that could be true so long as the code is correct. The problem is that AI can do a prototype reasonably well, but still starts falling down when the system becomes complex enough. When that happens, code quality absolutely matters as a human will need to go through it.

Perhaps in the future AI will have fewer limitations, but today, if you are building a product you want to have a long lifespan, code quality still matters, and so you need to use AI appropriately. The code quality debate isn't even unique to AI, people have debated this for decades with regard to human coders and how value senior vs junior developers are.

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

#522

Post by elorant » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 8:24 PM UTC

I can only speak for myself. I mostly write C# and the code they generate isn’t of my liking. Too many var statements, async everywhere even for the most trivial things, and then a lot of times when I ask something difficult they fail spectacularly. I asked Claude the other day to propose an algorithm for Named Entity Recognition for brand names and all it did was to build a heuristics based on the type of business entities. And then in order to do that it went and created four classes. They overcomplicate things all the time for no apparent reason.

I built an Asterisk dialplan using Gemini a few months ago and it has so many hacks and quirks in it that I don’t dare touch it. I just leave it there hopping that it will keep working. I excluded Asterisk from future OS updates to avoid something fucking up that travesty of a dialplan.

Couple of weeks ago I wanted to explore an enhanced version of a PPMI algorithm that tries to flatten rare pairs. I went back and forth with all three major LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) and they couldn’t agree on anything. They kept changing each other’s algorithms all the time. The “reasoning” part seems laughable, it’s just a probabilistic infinite loop.

And that’s just for the programming part. Whenever I’ve asked them about SEO their answers are highly inaccurate. All in all I just don’t fucking trust anything they say.

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

#523

Post by dominotw » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 8:25 PM UTC

>but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?

yes but then why do you need programmers to sit in between users and ai when ai can generate code on the fly and give users what they want

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

#524

Post by zugi » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 8:26 PM UTC

mpliax wrote: post #320

pj_mukh wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To OP's point, I am curious why a tech forward crowd would consider AI-training/inference anywhere close to a significant contributor of greenhouse gasses? Datacenters are like a tiny blip on emissions plots [1] I think AI is a convenient foil to get people whipped up and out to vote, but I know HN is not the forum for that. The technical data clearly says that closed-loop water coolers don't use that much water and…

> Datacenters are like a tiny blip on emissions plots Maybe in 2023, but what about now?

A late 2024 international report https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from... predicts that by 2035, datacenter electricity usage will increase from 2024's 1.5% to 2-4.4% of global usage. Currently about 1/3 of datacenter electricity usage is for AI (0.5% of that 1.5%), though that will presumably increase.

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

#525

Post by spacechild1 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 8:27 PM UTC

The very premise of your question is very questionable.

> 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.

At the same time, there hasn't been a single day without several AI hype posts. The notion that HN has turned into an outlet for anti-AI sentiments does not match my experience at all. In fact, many users are already tired of the constant influx of vibe coded "Show HN" posts, AI model discussions and prompting recipes.

Also, AI is not only about the ability to generate lots of code very quickly. The potential (and actual) negative effects in certain fields and in society as a whole are very real and it's reasonable that people want to discuss them.

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

#526

Post by block_dagger » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 8:29 PM UTC

I think it's the subconscious telling the conscious parts of our brains what's coming. We're in the foothills now, and we're starting to feel the difference in how thin the air is. It's getting a bit colder and not as many trees grow here. Looking up, we see the snow capped summit of the mountain looming above us, and we know we can't survive up there.

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

#527

Post by tactlesscamel » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 8:30 PM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #109

dang wrote: post #14

It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant. You can see from the following megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 . Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to brin…

While I agree that it's "divided", I wouldn't say "simply". Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023. It is the only subject where, when I have shared that I built something with it, I have gotten derogatory comments claiming I am inexperienced, unintelligent, and that the thing I built (a hobby project) is unimpressive or embarrassing. This has never happened in the deca…

Did You build it? Or did you manage the build of it? Could you have done it without AI? If not, you didn't do it.

A drill is just a tool. You can screw a screw without one. AI is just a tool, you can do things without it, too.

But AI applied in a manner you could not otherwise complete on your own is not a tool. It's a slave. None of the ideas or creations presented in that instance are your own. You just cheated someone out of a paycheck they may have otherwise earned.

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

#528

Post by johnea » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 8:30 PM UTC

What are you even talking about?

There are more articles in the HN feed on AI than any other topic, by far.

A certain amount of the push back is just because of how much it displaces all other subjects.

Another amount is just trying to overcome explicit fan-boi-ism. A year and a half ago, I was a total skeptic. The tech has evolved considerably since then. Now I find it has very strong results in some applications. But there are still certain demographics who want to believe its great at everything, which is just not true.

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

#529

Post by sscaryterry » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 8:31 PM UTC

I think that anti-AI sentiment is caused by the business bunnies, over-selling what AI/LLMs can do. Mass retrenchments, re-hiring engineers again a year later to clean up the shit storm caused by over use of AI.

Put even simpler: We, engineers/tech people/tech heavy industries, we are the ones who's lives get the most disturbed, uprooted, messed up by the use of superlatives, the "promises" of AI.

Don't get me wrong, I use it all the time, got the AI psychosis myself, but it is still daft, thick as bricks. It is no replacement for a human.

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

#530

Post by davidcann » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 8:31 PM UTC

maccard wrote: post #234

> 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…

Photoshop alternatives already exist and are cheap or free, like Affinity.

Why create a Final Cut Pro alternative when it’s so cheap from Apple?

Many existing apps can be mostly cloned by a small team over 6 months or a year, but the challenge is finding customers willing to switch. You still need to add something new and useful, then reach customers somehow.