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

Are you really surprised people feel this way? People have pigeonholed themselves into this field and now they find themselves horseshoe makers in this new age. It is scary and concerning. People do have legitimate fear. The whole pitch with AI isn't really that it empowers you to make some CRUD app easily. It is that eventually, sometime very soon, people will wise up to the fact that prompting is not a six figure job. It can be done by desperate low skilled people halfway across the world. Eventually those people will also hit the block.

I think people who aren't scared right now aren't really considering the larger implications of what is actually being pitched. The fact that the AI evangelicals don't realize that they too have no moat is going to be so ironic if only it wasn't so sad what is actually happening.

I mean, we are devaluing humanity. That is what these tools are promising really. It isn't just software. It is art. It is sales. It is poetry. It is C suite. It is filmaking. It is surgery. Every job there is, is at risk. Maybe not tomorrow, but on the horizon. The remaining jobs on earth will become the next target to automate and remove humans out of existence. An ever larger target until there are no targets left but AI controlled companies infighting among eachother for the energy coming from the sun and the nutrients in the 6 inches of topsoil.

Earth will be for the birds and the machines by the end of the century I'm guessing. Keeping us alive will be seen as a liability and a great risk to power structures. If we are allowed to live, and that is a huge if, we will probably devolve back into the hunter gatherer stage, fearful of the machine gods and their robot soldiers and temples of data and compute.

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 they could be using the AI tool for)

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 branches or project tickets or even deploying with committed code

But I bite my tongue and tell him to focus on the MVP since he wants to prompt Claude Code for 48 hour sessions without there being any indication of how other devs could contribute

Because he has clients that wants what he described, and because he has no capital I get a huge cut of that

I’m fine with that, I’ll clean up the project very quickly

What keeps users themselves from vibe-coding their own software?

If you don't own quality, why should I pay? You're just a middleman at that point.

> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used.

But users also include users of the code. There's no value in self-flagellation via terrible code or pointlessly complicated frameworks.