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

It could be okay if it wasn't for the fact that they have a high esteem of themselves and don't learn shit.

The first POC they vibecoded and managed to sell was a pile of trash that we couldn't realistically deploy as it.

So we spent two weeks to make it something decent enough to have the minimum confidence of the thing being reliable and safe enough to reach staging. Two weeks during they told us daily how we were slowing everything down.

After that we spent an hour explaining them how making something works on their computer, without tests, without thinking about edge cases... was not the same thing as deploying it and releasing it to actual users.

We agreed on, next time, asking us for an estimate on how much it would take to move the POC to something that could be released, before signing on any engagement with a customer.

Well, last week they came with a new deal they just signed on a completely new POC. Customer was expecting it for yesterday. To make it work, we have to setup a VPN between our infra and customer infra. Their internal process make it impossible to have this under a month.

Now, my guy and the customer, are mad at me because I can't deliver.

And the first POC? Customer wants new features. My guy don't want to deal with it because it's not their job.

You might have seen some comments by me receiving votes lately that some might classify as anti-AI. I'm not for banning it, I use it at work and at home, I learn about it.

Here a few positions I hold, for example:

- There is a fundamental deviation between what we should be seeing if we were surrounded by 100x enabled engineers and reality. We're not seeing previously untackable, complete open source projects pop up everywhere like someone coding an open-source, iphone-compatible OS in a year, or companies providing 10x more. Just POCs and small apps. LLMs have been around enough that this is pointing towards inflated claims of success, even if they are actually useful, which I'm not denying.

- LLMs provide users with a strong psychological reward (making mental workload disappear). They do so only sometimes, in a chance-based outcome. Anyone with a passing interest in psychology should realize how similar that is to the mechanics of gambling, and thus how risky it is that a user misjudges when it is reasonable to use them. Mind that I'm not saying that the tool isn't worth it, just pointing at a source of major deviation between perceived and actual outcomes that few people consider.

- There are a lot of signals that humans rely on that are broken by LLMs. "Well formatted text -> text written with careful consideration" no longer works. "Large document -> significant effort" does not hold. "Good grammar -> educated speaker" is broken as well. "decent code practices -> the PR is safeish to approve" no longer true. Some of these barriers being broken can be enablers for people, but on the whole this is going to disrupt society in fundamental and unpredictable ways.

- I think the industry is drawing unreasonable and dangerous conclusions from the advent of AI. As some commenters pointed out, if code generation is now cheap we should be seeing engineers freed to deal with non coding tasks like automated QA, user research, architecture or design, and being more able to handle bug resolution for example. We are instead seeing a push for _creating code faster_, and proposing ignoring tasks like review and quality control in pursue of speed, which is fundamentally inconsistent with speed being less of a problem. To use a flawed analogy, if your car is now 10x as fast you should be putting way more attention to how you steer, rather than asking everyone to go pedal to the metal.

- LLMs products have the potential to be extremely user hostile if enshittified. We could have probabilistic insertion of promoted material. We could have subtle political steering of people. We could have a model's performance reduced without much SLA recourse. We are not tackling those issues before they appear when it is obvious that they will appeare, and society will pay the price.

If you read with attention you'll see that no point of mine is arguing against AI usage. I don't want to bury my head in the sand and pretend LLM's don't exist or are useless. I don't want to ban them. I'm just not willing to fully allign with marketing speech and turn my brain off.