AI is not supposed to write excellent code, it is supposed to write the “most likely” code which equates to your average engineer. People who are below the curve are going to see a much higher benefit than people who are higher than the curve.
Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
251–260 of 812 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#252I think it's because the extremes are simply not equivalent.
On one hand, you have smart people are doing cool and interesting things like dang referenced: breathing life into old projects and cleaning out old bugs in EOL hardware.
And then you have people who use it to do things like "chatGPT can this trailer pull this car?", "gosh, my electric bill is high I should use an LLM to figure this out" or "please write this email to my subordinates".
So yeah, it's cool that LLMs can work on software(. And now, the profession that intersects between highest earning potential and least amount of schooling is able to be done significantly faster, so wages will be diluted faster than the workers will ask for raises commensurate to their output).
But it's more obviously terrible because a large chunk of people are losing their critical and creative thinking abilities rapidly, obviously, and with seemingly no end in sight.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#253Because being critical of AI is the second most boring activity on HN.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#254There 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…
True... I'm in the first crowd personally
For me it is hard to invest too much time into being in first crowd.
This space is moving too fast for me and I have current job to do that is paying my bills.
I can invest time to watch/follow people from the first crowd.
But no one is going to give you a medal and it is not a „better crowd”.
I might need to pay for this expertise some day, but I guess it will be OpenAI or Anthropic that takes my money just like so far all the advances were introduced to frontier models or their own tooling.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#255Interesting, my impression is that HN crowd is aggressively pro-AI, and on a level that is simply bizarre. E.g. the 'spec driven agentic engineering' that seems to be all the rage right now is pretty much a return to the 1970's waterfall development model, just with faster implementers. But initial implementation speed wasn't the bottleneck then as it isn't now - maybe people are too young to notice that we're (more or less) just witnessing another rotation of the big wheel of reincarnation ;)
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#256What AI is (a part of) HN against?
The actual uses?
The "it will get sentient next year and take over the world" bullshit?
These two things are simply unrelated, and my experience with coding assistants (that I do use daily, because they are useful) says whatever OpenAI and Anthropic say in their marketing is 95% lies and hyperbole.
Any technology that is marketed as a religion will get the same reaction from me.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#257It's a gut feeling. We _know_ LLMs can't be _that_ good as they are promoted. I've spent the last 6 months creating a production grade app from scratch with Claude where I wrote no single line of code. I've reviewed code and it was looking good, almost completely following my templates, workflows, skills. Now I've started to make minor manual updates and I'm horrified. Claude has no idea why there were those template…
> No consistency, chaotic application of different conventions, duplicated code, ghost code (does nothing), and perhaps more as I'm digging in.
I didn’t understand this part. You said you reviewed the code and it was looking good, so how did the cruft creep in? Were you reviewing every diff, or taking an occasional sample?
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#258I feel like the negativity is mainly due to lack of understanding on how LLMs work under the hood. The more you learn about it, the more you realize that it’s just a glorified autocomplete machine and the reason why it looks so capable is the engineering behind prompt and harness. Unless there is another breakthrough in model training, I don’t see AI taking over anytime soon. However I do agree that’s it has become a…
> the engineers can use to increase their productivity which is a positive thing
This might be the underlying hidden psychology: being more productive and efficient isn't benefitting the working class. It won't make them more money or make them work less hours, it just means overall more work for equal or less pay or less jobs for programmers outright. It doesn't make things cheaper or better, it just translates into more profit to the owning class. Of course nobody can articulate their anxiety's like that in a hyper capitalist society, but that might be the real reason underneath anti ai sentiment.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#259It's not anti AI, as many other comments point out it's simply heterogeneous enough that it's mostly the "theme" of a discussion dictating which subgroup will be more vocal in a discussion.
In any case I think that some in the anti-AI crowd are simply very defensive.
They have staked all of their careers on the technical part and skills of writing code. Now that they see the average developer (which study indicates can barely write a fizz buzz) outputting software at a great velocity they have a mixture of disgust for the (alleged) low quality of the software and fear for their own careers.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#260because anti-ai crowd is loud and stupid. They don't know how to use ai tools and keep complaining ai does a bad job when prompted "build me a Twitter clone".