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?

#811

Post by csbartus » Sun, Jun 14, 2026, 5:20 AM UTC

hn_throw2025 wrote: post #257

csbartus wrote: post #99

It's a gut feeling. We _know_ LLMs can't be _that_ good as they are promoted. I've spent the last 6 months creating a production grade app from scratch with Claude where I wrote no single line of code. I've reviewed code and it was looking good, almost completely following my templates, workflows, skills. Now I've started to make minor manual updates and I'm horrified. Claude has no idea why there were those template…

> No consistency, chaotic application of different conventions, duplicated code, ghost code (does nothing), and perhaps more as I'm digging in. I didn’t understand this part. You said you reviewed the code and it was looking good, so how did the cruft creep in? Were you reviewing every diff, or taking an occasional sample?

Good point! Reviewing code, in the AI era, in my practice, means skimming code and looking for patterns.

I use templates / conventions and make the AI generate code using them. When reviewing code I'm scanning if a file uses a specific template and follows specific conventions.

This can't catch subtle errors like a function is re-created vs is re-used (duplicate code), unnecessary code (bloat), inconsistent naming (a Button component has a cssRow() styling function associated vs cssButton()).

When you start editing, using code these little things add up, consume your attention, drain you up, giving no flow and resulting in minimal productivity.

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

#812

Post by mvfc » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 11:00 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #623

_0ffh wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thoughtful comment, and I'd like to add another angle: However meaningful it is to say the community is divided, I also think that individuals are "divided" on the question as well. I can speak from myself as an example (although n=1): I am incredibly open to machine learning and the advances it brings. On the other hand I am extremely conscious of the fact that the current LLMs do often write bad code, which becomes…

Yep, I use it every day. IMO it's a bigger long-term productivity lever for someone who knows good code than it is for someone who doesn't look at the code (at least for systems that are expected to have lots of users). For those sorts of systems, comments like this just remind me of people pitching UML + codegen-or-outsourcing 20 years ago. > Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which f…

The problem is that most people who vibe code or use these claims of “anyone can code now” ignore that software isn’t just a pile of code, but also documentation, tests, design documents, and several other artifacts that the “AI” (LLMs are not intelligent) needs to do anything remotely useful. And most of them will never reach the point where the use of LLMs becomes more problematic than helpful, because by then either they have a product and hired someone to deal with it or it’s abandoned and not used.

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