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

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

#321

Post by ZpJuUuNaQ5 »

>AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.

Which is undeniably true. I am not "anti-AI", in fact, it helps me immensely in my current job, but in my experience, using these tools still requires quite a lot of involvement. Otherwise, updating existing or adding new functionality becomes increasingly difficult as the system grows. The funniest thing is that when you start to lose touch with the internals of the system you are building, you cannot even give the AI proper context to pinpoint the problem or guide it to make specific changes, which results it a lot of wasted tokens, wrong assumptions and mountains of sloppy code.

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

#324

Post by cindyllm »

trumpdong wrote: post #313
gacgacgac wrote: post #93

> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand This is very much not settled, and very much depending on your market. Selling games to gen-z? Yeah, they are going to care a lot.

They only care if you tell them, so don't.

[dead]

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

#325

Post by cassianoleal »

ZpJuUuNaQ5 wrote: post #321

>AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines. Which is undeniably true. I am not "anti-AI", in fact, it helps me immensely in my current job, but in my experience, using these tools still requires quite a lot of involvement. Otherwise, updating existing or adding new functionality becomes increasingly difficult as the system grows. The funniest thing is that when…

Exactly this. I've been using a lot of AI, both at work and on personal projects. It's a great help, but it needs a tight leash.

I see arguments saying "what does it matter, since you're not going to be touching that code anyway?"

Well, what you said about not being able to give it context is one aspect. Another one is that what the LLM is writing is still software. The more brittle and complex that software gets, the harder it is for the LLM to maintain it, since you get either spaghetti code or a house of cards where you can't move one bit of the system without breaking stuff on unrelated parts of it.

Oh, but the LLM can fix it, as long as you have some formal verification of the functionality! Sure, but it compounds.

All of this is absolutely fine for some projects, but for most enterprise and commercial software you need more rigour or you'll see yourself with a long, expensive and risky migration in the near future.

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

#326

Post by trumpdong »

haunter wrote: post #159
zuzululu wrote: post #132

When did HN become Reddit ? This is a real demographic shift I am seeing after a long time hiatus. The people who hate AI are largely those that lean far left and see themselves as liberal progressive.

I also see that and I'd say around Covid / past-Covid. More people became terminally online in those 6-12 months, like another eternal September. Funnily you will always see some people waving the HN guidelines [1] flag: nooooo, don’t compare this site to Reddit. Yet there is another „rule” in the guidelines about politics being off-topic… which is the biggest symptom of HN turning into Reddit: General, especially US…

Reddit has a high rate of global bans btw, you can't just find another subreddit if any of the power mods disagrees with you because you are supercookie-shadowbanned then. You'll think you're not banned but nobody will see your posts.

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

#327

Post by Gathering6678 »

Is it? As mentioned by another comment, it's probably more divided than 'anti-AI'.

Also, '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 ...' probably means the opposite is simply not news worthy anymore - no one wants to read another article that says AI could write fairly reasonable code.

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

#328

Post by queenkjuul »

hn_throw2025 wrote: post #268
charles_f wrote: post #114

> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand That's true, but they care deeply about the consequences of that: > about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines. So whomever your strawman is, they got a point. Note that I'm "anti-ai", I use it a fair bit and even received the trendy email asking me to watch out how much I spend in it caus…

> Dang sums it all, I dont perceive hn as being pro or against AI, it's a mix, but if you're polarized, whatever "side you're on" you'll feel the other side is over represented. It doesn’t feel that way to me. I remember reading the recent thread about Bun being rewritten in Rust with LLMs. Definitely not a 50/50 split of positive and negative comments. It was a pile-on. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48132488

I actually see surprisingly little "anti AI" in that thread at all, and mostly just concerns about merging 1,000,000 lines of code with minimal review, which i think is a reasonable thing to be concerned about even if you use LLMs yourself and aren't "anti AI"

Seems to me you're proving dang right

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

#329

Post by cassianoleal »

darksim905 wrote: post #31
manoDev wrote: post #9

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…

Are we including just technical people in these crowds? Because there's a third crowd: everyone else/the general public that are standing up vibe coded websites and don't give a hoot how things work in the background or know as long as money is coming in. There are people that are using AI and thinking less and less causing their brains over the long term to become more inelastic. We're in for a very, very painful fu…

There's likely a much larger problem in between.

These vibed systems will not have security built in. They will increasingly handle user information, PII, credentials, etc.

We're heading straight onto a very profitable era for scammers and other cyber criminals.

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

#330

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

rakel_rakel wrote: post #152

> I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, do people realize that code is just a means to an end? You will need a lot more to make yourself my enemy, but this is the divisor between us... not that you like to use Claude and I don't. I think it depends a lot on where your interest in (self) development lies. My main motivator has always been to understand how things work, and myself being able to create as…

> My main motivator has always been to understand how things work

Which things, specifically? I got started programming in order to control scientific instruments and analyze the data I collected. I care about the systems I'm studying. I don't really care much about the software I'm programming. As OP said it's a means to an end.

I think you're right that people on HN are generally more curious but it doesn't have to be curiosity about every single element of software. We don't write assembly code anymore either, half of software is about making software easier and faster to write.

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