I despise code written by VI! The only code anyone should ever run is code written with EMACS. With SPACES, not tabs. Because tabs take jobs from space bar pressers, and boil the oceans.
Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
41–50 of 812 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
how so? When you buy a phone, do you care about how it's built?
The point is that bad code pretty directly leads to a product that doesn't work. It might work today (though... I wouldn't bet my life on it with how hit and miss LLM code is). But a year or two from now, with people just piling on more and more poorly written code, the system is going to suffer. It'll be slow, it'll be buggy, etc. Yeah, your users won't be able to say "aha, this is because they used AI!", but they w…
Why do you assume the code will be bad in the first place?
Coding as someone without experience in coding? Most probably yes, but from someone with some kind of expertise who can act as a guardrail for bad code piling up? Probably not.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#43Because the HN crowd is composed largely of developers — the profession that is first to fall to the Axe of AI.
I suppose you end up hating it either way, if you're a better developer than it you don't like it because it sucks, and if it's a better developer than you then you just feel obsolete
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#44> 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.
I just don't understand what you mean by "let's face it". I repeatedly face it at my job, all our code has been AI assisted since March, and not once have I observed such a 10x speedup. The only 10x examples I've seen in the wild have been on tasks like cross-language code rewrites that completely fail your "code is just a means to an end" criterion.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#45Generally speaking the local crowd is anti-hype, and so it's easy to get the manifestation of that conflated with with what you're describing.
(I fit your literal description, but primarily from a nomenclature perspective - I'll call them generative models and LLMs - and I appreciate this puts me in the minority. BUT I do believe part of the hype feedback loop was the intentional mislabelling of these technologies from the outset. AND I understand why the marketers did that.)
I suspect the older crowd has lived through the hype playbook enough to recognise it early, and that the pattern this time around is becoming a bit a bit more obvious now, so I expect increasing levelling out of expectations & understanding.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that bad code pretty directly leads to a product that doesn't work. It might work today (though... I wouldn't bet my life on it with how hit and miss LLM code is). But a year or two from now, with people just piling on more and more poorly written code, the system is going to suffer. It'll be slow, it'll be buggy, etc. Yeah, your users won't be able to say "aha, this is because they used AI!", but they w…
Why do you assume the code will be bad in the first place? Coding as someone without experience in coding? Most probably yes, but from someone with some kind of expertise who can act as a guardrail for bad code piling up? Probably not.
I don't assume the code will be bad, I directly observe on a daily basis that it's bad. Since the widespread adoption of AI, all but the best developers I work with have been writing worse code with a higher number of more severe bugs.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#47It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant. You can see from the following megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 . Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to brin…
Well, it looks this post has already been flagged down onto page 7.
And IIRC, the same thing happened to the "oh shit" moment thread you linked to. Did the mods have to intervene to get it back on the front page?
HN might not be anti-AI, but I feel like the way flags are weighted by the ranking allows some users that are extremely anti-AI to create the impression that it is.
EDIT: And now it's back.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#48Because AI use correlates with sloppiness, and due to the fundamental attribution fallacy us engineers don't like sloppiness.
I am not totally anti AI but I don’t use coding harnesses. I see my coworkers using coding harnesses decline in basic engineering mentalities, asking me questions easily answered with a modicum of research or thinking, but claude told them something so they ask me.
I don’t think these are bad guys or bad engineers, it’s concerning to me though. Engineers should be getting sharper in their analysis over time not weaker. When someone tells me they haven’t even looked at a few lines of code they submitted it’s shocking and a sign of sloppy thinking. It’s rude too because is expecting me to pick up their slack.
I’m sure the AI companies are in love with the idea that people are growing dependent on their product for things they could easily do themselves. That’s a great business.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#49Why do workers dislike being charged to rent scab labor from their oppressors?
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#501. because they know better. You don't have to understand it, for them to be right.
This comes from their years of experience. When you also get those years of experience, you may come to similar understanding.