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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?
#802Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fu…
I’m working with an ideas guy, no skills and no capital but for the first time can deliver code He wants my tech expertise, his code is spaghetti, he is making all the mistakes, he is experiencing AI psychosis, his AI makes md files warning him that its all going to burn him which he forwards to me lackadaisically without reading But can he sale? Yes Its tempting for me to proselytize that he isnt using feature branc…
This is fascinating to me, as I'm generally an ideas guy. The perks of INTP-type personality.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#803It seems weird to be "pro-AI" or "anti-AI" in general. It's a tool. It's like saying construction workers are pro-hammer
People definitely have preferences of tools. For your construction analogy, I'm anti hammer. I prefer screws in almost every instance where a nail could be used, and hammers aren't the right tool for screws. Hammers suck. Back to AI, it's a tool, and you can definitely be for or against it. Someone against AI might prefer other tools, like a canvas, camera, word doc, or visual studio (depending on the application the…
> have preferences
Yes, but that's different than saying "I hate hammers, so I don't want OTHER people to use hammers"
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#804> 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.
> I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
That’s literally the point. Those are all defects relative go the end served by code.
> 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.
Code with bugs does not work. As you note, that is quite relevant to user’s concerns.
> 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.
We’re actually pretty much past the point where whether or not to use AI assistance at all is the issue usually being considered, the exact manner in which AI assistance is used is more likely to be the issue of concern, and the manners in which AI fails is quite relevant to that.
The anti-AI crowd doesn't care if AI creates bugs, they hate AI for being AI.
It’s the people trying to find the best way to use AI that care that—and under what circumstances—AI is prone to create bugs.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
At most one of the categories of issues you complained about relate to elegance of code, and that only is one possible sense of that category.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#805[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#806Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You've never had an LLM output a one line bugfix that is correct to the point where you don't have to edit it? I have. I’ve also had IDEs and static analysers do the same thing. I can also take my car out of gear and have it roll down a hill but that doesn’t mean it can run without fuel. Only a sith deals in absolutes, and in the general cases LLMs don’t generate acceptable code.
Try it out, like seriously, learn to use it well. Spent a few weeks with it. You will not say these things if you were an experienced user of these tools. Saying their code is "unacceptable" is a skill issue. Describe what you consider "acceptable code" and watch it produce it in copious amounts. They don't have one mode, one setting, they can generate whatever the F you want in whatever style you deem "acceptable".…
As always in these discussions, I think people compare apples and oranges. LLMs are great with in-distribution solutions for solved problems with a lot of relevant prior material and in established technologies. Frontend stuff works great, for instance.
But for novel solutions, complex business logic, things deeply integrated with external systems... the code generation quickly turns terrible and useless. Especially if it's in anything but Python, Java, or JS.
Most of these differences in results end up being about differences in application. LLMs suck at out-of-distribution material, inherently.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#807[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#808pro-AI crowd is too busy enjoying/benefiting from it.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#809It's not fundamentaly an anti-AI stance (though I think agentic stuff is the worst usage of LLMs for code, I won't even try to debate about it with people completely sold to it). The issue is what HN is all about now. Brute-forcing is the opposite of hacking spirit in the first place, and I've never read HN to read about that all over the place. Hackers never aimed to deliver things fast, that's not even the point.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#810Luddism