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

Genuine question.

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?

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.

I say this as someone who has spent more than 20 years honing their craft as a software engineer.

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. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.

At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.

Both of them can be true at the same time? Many people on HN are at the forefront of this technology, we're testing it in prod and telling each other what does or doesn't work. It's not anti-AI to use the AI and then document a failure.

We're still waiting for a model that can draw a pelican on a bike, you're not zero-shotting every problem with AI yet. If we want improvement, we gotta start by being honest.

Claude calls it enterprise and production ready. I now have to spend the next two days dealing with the fallout, page, outage.

You are training your replacement.

There are two different crowds using "AI":

- One crowd is using to research algorithms, libraries, write boilerplate code, write test harnesses, introspect and integrate with APIs, do hands-off refactoring, and automating what would otherwise be boring tasks. They still think about architecture, best practices, understanding things in detail and the general shape of the solution is in their hands.

- Another crowd is curating prompts, setting up autonomous agents, creating tooling and guardrails around it, anything else but getting actually involved in how the sausage is made. They are working on meta tasks around the problem, in the hope the solution will write itself.

These two crowds are currently living in very different worlds, and getting very different results. We'll see what survives soon.