Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

antirez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 1001 posts

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#171

Post by 63stack »

dom96 wrote: post #2

> As a programmer, I want to write more open source than ever, now. I want to write less, just knowing that LLM models are going to be trained on my code is making me feel more strongly than ever that my open source contributions will simply be stolen. Am I wrong to feel this? Is anyone else concerned about this? We've already seen some pretty strong evidence of this with Tailwind.

Also why would I use your open source project, when I can just prompt the AI to generate one for me, gracefully stripping the license as a bonus?

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#172

Post by oulipo2 »

> Writing code is no longer needed for the most part.

Said by someone who spent his career writing code, it lacks a bit of details... a more correct way to phrase it is: "if you're already an expert in good coding, now you can use these tools to skip most of code writing"

LLMs today are mostly some kind of "fill-in-the-blanks automation". As a coder, you try to create constraints (define types for typechecking constraints, define tests for testing constraints, define the general ideas you want the LLM to code because you already know about the domain and how coding works), then you let the model "fill-in the blanks" and you regularly check that all tests pass, etc

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#173

Post by simonw »

wasmainiac wrote: post #168

These personal blogs are starting to feel like Linkdin Lunatic posts, kinda similar. to the optimised floor sweeping blog, “I am excited to provide shareholder value, at minimum wage”

What does it tell you that programmers with the credibility of antirez - and who do not have an AI product to sell you - are writing things like this even when they know a lot of people aren't going to like reading them?

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#174

Post by falloutx »

edg5000 wrote: post #98

> state of the art LLMs are able to complete large subtasks or medium size projects alone, almost unassisted, given a good set of hints about what the end result should be No. I agree with the author, but it's hyperbolic of him to phrase it like this. If you have solid domain knowledge, you'll steer the model with detailed specs. It will carry those out competently and multiply your productivity. However, the quality…

If this only works for people with like 10+ years of domain experience, doesnt that make this an Anti-AI article? Whole vibe coding sells on the promise that it works and it works for every tom and their mom.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#175

Post by simonw »

criddell wrote: post #138
bluGill wrote: post #10

I'm trying not to fall for it, but when I try ai to write code it fails more often than not - at least for me. some people claim it does everything but I keep finding major problems. Even when it writes something that works often I can't explain that in 2026 we should be using smart pointers (C++) or what ever the modern thing

Same here. I’ve had limited success getting AIs to do very simple stuff. Every one I’ve tried invents APIs that don’t exist and eventually get stuck in a circle where it tells me to try A. When that doesn’t work, try B. No luck? Try C. Hmmm my apologies, try A. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Are you using a coding agent running in auto-approve mode?

If so then none of this matters, because it will run through that lather-rinse-repeat loop itself in less than a minute.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#176

Post by embedding-shape »

smokel wrote: post #163
dist-epoch wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a reiteration of the age-old conflict in arts: - making art as you thing it should be, but at the risk of it being non-commercial - getting paid for doing commercial/trendy art choose one

I've given this quite some thought and came to the conclusion that there is actually no choice, and all parties fall into the first category. It's just that some people intrinsically like working on commercial themes, or happen to be trendy. Of course there are some artists who sit comfortably in the grey area between the two oppositions, and for these a little nudging towards either might influence things. But for m…

> and all parties fall into the first category [...] Of course there are some artists who sit comfortably in the grey area between the two oppositions

I'm not sure what your background is, but there are definitly artists out there drawing, painting and creating art they have absolutely zero care for, or even actively is against or don't like, but they do it anyways because it's easier to actually get paid doing those things, than others.

Take a look in the current internet art community and ask how many artists are actively liking the situation of most of their art commissions being "furry lewd art", vs how many commissions they get for that specific niche, as just one example.

History has lots of other examples, where artists typically have a day-job of "Art I do but do not care for" and then like the programmer, hack on what they actually care about outside of "work".

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#177

Post by zahlman »

svara wrote: post #150
martin-t wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> programmer who actually do like the actual typing It's not about the typing, it's about the understanding. LLM coding is like reading a math textbook without trying to solve any of the problems. You get an overview, you get a sense of what it's about and most importantly you get a false sense of understanding. But if you try to actually solve the problems, you engage completely different parts of your brain. It's a…

We've been hearing this a lot, but I don't really get it. A lot of code, most probably, isn't even close to being as challenging as a maths textbook. It obviously depends a lot on what exactly you're building, but in many projects programming entails a lot of low intellectual effort, repetitive work. It's the same things over and over with slight variations and little intellectual challenge once you've learnt the bas…

> It obviously depends a lot on what exactly you're building, but in many projects programming entails a lot of low intellectual effort, repetitive work.

I think I can reasonably describe myself as one of the people telling you the thing you don't really get.

And from my perspective: we hate those projects and only do them if/because they pay well.

> the other day I had Claude make a TUI for a data processing library I made. It's a bunch of rather tedious boilerplate. I really have no intellectual interest in TUI coding...

From my perspective, the core concepts in a TUI event loop are cool, and making one only involves boilerplate insofar as the support libraries you use expect it. And when I encounter that, I naturally add "design a better API for this" to my project list.

Historically, a large part of avoiding the tedium has been making a clearer separation between the expressive code-like things and the repetitive data-like things, to the point where the data-like things can be purely automated or outsourced. AI feels weird because it blurs the line of what can or cannot be automated, at the expense of determinism.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#178

Post by martin-t »

svara wrote: post #150
martin-t wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> programmer who actually do like the actual typing It's not about the typing, it's about the understanding. LLM coding is like reading a math textbook without trying to solve any of the problems. You get an overview, you get a sense of what it's about and most importantly you get a false sense of understanding. But if you try to actually solve the problems, you engage completely different parts of your brain. It's a…

We've been hearing this a lot, but I don't really get it. A lot of code, most probably, isn't even close to being as challenging as a maths textbook. It obviously depends a lot on what exactly you're building, but in many projects programming entails a lot of low intellectual effort, repetitive work. It's the same things over and over with slight variations and little intellectual challenge once you've learnt the bas…

I've also been hearing variations of your comment a lot too and correct me if I am wrong but I think they always implicitly assume that LLMs are more useful for the low-intellectual stuff than solving the high-intellectual core of the problem.

The thing is:

1) A lot of the low-intellectual stuff is not necessarily repetitive, it involved some business logic which is a culmination of knowing the process behind what the uses needs. When you write a prompt, the model makes assumptions which are not necessarily correct for the particular situation. Writing the code yourself forced you to notice the decision points and make more informed choices.

I understand your TUI example and it's better than having none now, but as a result anybody who wants to write "a much better TUI" now faces a higher barrier to entry since a) it's harder to justify an incremental improvement which takes a lot of work b) users will already have processes around the current system c) anybody who wrote a similar library with a better TUI is now competing with you and quality is a much smaller factor than hype/awareness/advertisement.

We'll basically have more but lower quality SW and I am not sure that's an improvement long term.

2) A lot of the high-intellectual stuff ironically can be solved by LLMs because a similar problem is already in the training data, maybe in another language, maybe with slight differences which can be pattern matched by the LLM. It's laundering other people's work and you don't even get to focus on the interesting parts.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#179

Post by FergusArgyll »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #69
phtrivier wrote: post #22

How would we measure the effects of AI coding tool taking over manual coding ? Would we see an increase in the number of GitHub projects ? In the number of stars (given the ai is so good) ? In the number of start up ipos (surely if all your engineers are 1000x engineers thanks to Claude code, we'll have plenty of googles and Amazons to invest in) ? In the price of software (if I can just vibe code everything, than a…

Plot twist: the bottleneck when you have a development force multiplier is __MARKETING__. If you develop at 10X the rate, you still have to grind/growth marketing. Unmarketed products might as well not exist, even if they're fantastic. Github stars? That's 100% marketing. Shit that clears a low quality bar can rack up stars like crazy just by being well marketed. Number of startups? That's 100% marketing. Investors p…

I get annoyed that no one mentions software for just the user. Part of the joy of programming is making stuff you want not just to sell or to get famous. I vibe coded so many chrome extensions I lost count. Most apply just to one site, they save me one click or something. It's fun!

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#180

Post by zkmon »

So, by "AI", you mean programming AI. Generalizing it as "AI" and "anti-AI" is adding great confusion to the already dizzying level of hype.

At it's core, AI has capability to extract structure/meaning from unstructured content and vice-versa. Computing systems and other machines required inputs with limited context. So far, it was a human's job to prepare that structure and context and provide it to the machines. That structure can be called as "program" or "form data" or "a sequence of steps or lever operations or button presses".

Now the machines got this AI wrapper or adapter that enables them to extract the context and structure from the natural human-formatted or messy content.

But all that works only if the input has the required amount of information and inherent structure to it. Try giving a prompt with jumbled up sequence of words. So it's still the human jobs to provide that input to the machine.

Post reply on HN