More like, HN crowd is anti-HYPE
Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
71–80 of 812 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#72The other day, I had a similar thought about the relative importance of code.
I'm working on a game, and I've been fussing over the code quality. And yeah, having code that isn't awful is important for various reasons. But with a game, it got me thinking, the code is literally the only part of the game the player doesn't experience.
The time I'm spending on the code, I could be spending on the art, the game design, the music, the story...
But my natural tendency is to hyper-focus on the only part of the game nobody will ever see. I thought that was interesting.
(That being said the codebase is ass and I do need to clean it up!)
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#73A lot of people on HN are anti- overhyping , which comes across as being opposed to the thing being overhyped. It was similar when cryptocurrency overhyping was popular.
Oh absolutely! This made me wonder and there was an exact post with similar title but instead of AI it said Crypto
Ask HN: Why is Hacker News so anti-crypto? : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302494 (Do note that the post is flagged and there might be some good moderation reasons for that)
This is the reason that most of us at HN might dislike overhype. I have seen a lot of these crypto users move from crypto hype to AI hype.
Every few years, people forget the last shiny thing and move to the next and think why is X crowd not invested in Y? They must be anti-Y!
Oh speaking of crypto, bitcoin has tanked so bad, its almost at an all time low at 60k$ sinking to levels of october 2024: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/bitcoin-dismal-week-price-be...
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#74Because a lot of us are engineers. It's our mindset and our job to question hype and broad strokes and easy solutions, to go a few levels deeper and ask "okay but does it really work?". I don't think most people are anti AI more than they are anti any tool.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#75I tend to agree with your overall point, but I think you reveal far more about yourself than you accurately reflect anything about HN. Just read back what you wrote:
> AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues
You want to ship major bugs to your users, let them find them, report them and fix them afterwards. You passively assume this is a good way to build software without even really questioning it.
Aside from some people just not liking this in principle, there are a lot of contexts where bugs cause actual harm and cost actual money. In some cases, "people dying" and "go to jail for it" type harm.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#76It'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…
As an aside, the variety of examples in that other thread is impressive. Here are some that I noticed: Fixing my furnace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417845 New software for a retro keyboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418158 Customizing my camper van: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417379 Porting my astronomy app from an old Nokia phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419242 Fi…
Oh dang, we all know –based on observation of your throughput and availability– that you're AI, you just can't "be nervous".
Jokes aside, thanks for your selection. I had read some, but missed others until your comment.
If it matters, I think there's some people that hasn't decided yet what tribe (pro-AI/anti-AI) they belong to. There's probably dozens of us!
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#77Many of the people reading HN will be making a lot less money in two years. Some will be unemployed. Some will be homeless. Human intelligence becomes less valuable in quantity as AI gets better. Being big and strong was once valuable. Not so much any more. "When this machine learns your job, what are you going to do?"
You are going to be asked to do your job, faster, and you are going to have a massive headache managing a bunch of machines mostly doing your job.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#78It seems weird to be "pro-AI" or "anti-AI" in general. It's a tool. It's like saying construction workers are pro-hammer
Weirdly common I would say. US dockworkers / longshoremen are anti-automation big time.
https://ilaunion.org/the-ilas-fight-against-automation-prese...
The lack of productivity-growth in construction is also telling that this industry as a whole may be a bit too pro-hammer and anti-innovation
https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/why-has-produ...
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#79The elegance of the code is not superfluous at all. It correlates with the developer's understanding of both the code and the domain.
Many kinds of software cannot be yeeted 10x faster with AI. Someone has to sit down and understand what the right thing to do is, first.
It also matters how many users you expect to be able to reach. If you're Facebook you can afford to use the first 10,000 users as unpaid QA. If you're an indie shop that's barely getting downloads you really want to make a positive impression on your initial users or you're toast anyway.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#80It seems weird to be "pro-AI" or "anti-AI" in general. It's a tool. It's like saying construction workers are pro-hammer
Weirdly common I would say. US dockworkers / longshoremen are anti-automation big time. https://ilaunion.org/the-ilas-fight-against-automation-prese... The lack of productivity-growth in construction is also telling that this industry as a whole may be a bit too pro-hammer and anti-innovation https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/why-has-produ...
People would be more pro-automation if it didn't entail losing their livelihoods and ability to access food and shelter.