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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?

#331

Post by cwillu »

> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.

Users hate when a bunch of unrelated things break for no reason, and then get fed a pile of slop for months about why the thing that is clearly broken isn't actually broken.

I know two well-know games going through this cycle; one of them had a community manager accidentally leak their usage in the changelogs due to a slug left in a link, the other's owning company has been on the hn frontpage for their mandated llm usage.

Oh, users care about this.

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

#332

Post by Animats »

robotpepi wrote: post #119
dag100 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the status quo now . If LLMs get better and better, managers will simply direct them, well, directly. That's what the parent comment means by the machine learning to do your job. It completely , not mostly , replaces you.

> managers will simply direct them that Made me laugh. what you say won't happen. it's not that AI won't be sufficiently intelligent, it's that managers are not.

I wonder what "management" will look like when many of the players are AIs. Humans may just be too slow to manage or coordinate.

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

#333

Post by strken »

I "hate" AI[0] because I believe that elegant code is a different bulding material to ugly code. Ugly code is harder to change. At some point, it becomes impossible to change.

I notice that a lot of people say they'll be able to write 2.0 faster than I can write 1.0. This means that their 1.0 must have been so bad that they had to rewrite it. Why, then, would their 2.0 be any better? Because they got some feedback? At some point, your users are just going to leave for a competitor.

[0] Meaning I use it, think it's neat, and will continue to use it, but would prefer to use it a lot less than my boss wants

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

#334

Post by Animats »

csbartus wrote: post #124
Animats wrote: post #68

Many 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?"

The question is whether AI / LLMs gets better. I'm not an ML expert, but regarding code _quality_ I see no progress at all in the last couple of years. LLMs still write code by using probabilistic calculations vs. applying rigorous thinking and logic. This is only good while no one has to look under the hood. When trying to understand and fix code written by LLMs you'll realize what a mess they produce. It's a codeba…

We're going to need some mid-level representation of what software is trying to do. Formal specs? UML? Semi-formal specs in natural language? Design rules? People hate updating such representations, but AIs don't have that problem.

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

#335

Post by queenkjuul »

anon7725 wrote: post #214
Lerc wrote: post #11

I don't think it is a large number of people creating this perception, I think it is more their depth of feeling about the issue. I am often struck by the similarity with bigotry about migrants, where they are portrayed as unreliable and undtustworthy entities that are threatening jobs. Simultaneously arguing their inability and ability are problematic. You have a second vein of behaviour that object on more religiou…

It is truly vile to compare concerns about LLMs to anti-immigrant discrimination.

Sadly this isn't even the only comment equating LLM skepticism to racism, even more sadly I'm not even remotely surprised that there's HN commenters that think this way

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

#337

Post by Jtarii »

mm263 wrote: post #205

People started treating HN as a tech subreddit. It’s Reddit crowd

As someone who looks at both regularly, HN is an order of magnitude higher quality than any tech sub on reddit.

If you visit /r/technology about 50% of the comments are calling for the deaths of tech ceos.

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

#338

Post by maccard »

helloplanets wrote: post #311
maccard wrote: post #234

> 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. Show the receipts. Where are the mobile apps, the photoshop replacements, the video and audio editors, the games and game engines that took a decade to make in the past that have shipped since Claude code came along? > By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify t…

Being 10x (or whatever multiplier) faster at programming doesn't mean you're going to be 10x faster in designing a product or any other aspect that goes into making a good product. Even if you hired an actual programmer, it'd take a massive amount of time to build a Photoshop clone. Of course, at the end Photoshop is lines of code and it could be output as is, end to end. One problem is that users aren't generally gi…

> Of course, at the end Photoshop is lines of code and it could be output as is, end to end

And yet it’s not.

> LLMs also take a relatively long time to output acceptable code, often taking tens of minutes before giving you a small diff. The larger the codebase, the longer it usually takes to start producing code, even over an hour.

The problem is that they don’t generate acceptable code, they generate code that needs to be edited to be acceptable. That has always been the slow part of engineering. Waiting an hour for a bugfix even if it cost $75 in tokens would be cheaper than hiring an engineer but only if it worked. And it’s a bit like hiring a snake oil salesman - it passes the sniff test but it’s only when you’re drowning in the fact that your ai now takes 4 hours to fix the same bugs, and it introduces new bugs _and_ you don’t have anyone who can reduce that complexity that you see the reality. For a lot of us, that is immediately clear from first glance at the output of Claude and codex and the likes.

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

#339

Post by maccard »

Havoc wrote: post #282
maccard wrote: post #234

> 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. Show the receipts. Where are the mobile apps, the photoshop replacements, the video and audio editors, the games and game engines that took a decade to make in the past that have shipped since Claude code came along? > By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify t…

It's definitely not at the make me a photoshop stage but I don't think that angle explains adequately explains the tone of the anti-AI hn discussions taking place at all. If it was just a toy with no shot at making something real people would go "oh cool have fun with that" and move on with their life. Instead we see pretty emotionally charged posts.

What stage is it at then? Because every new model is met with people saying they haven’t opened an editor in a year, or how they’re 10x more productive. But I’m not seeing 10x more tickets closed, 10x more bugs fixed, or 10x more feature designs that we can smash through. I see verbosity and noise when used by the people who were behind, and I see the same level of quality and excellence from people who use it like it’s another tool in their toolbelt

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

#340

Post by oliwarner »

Is it really so bizarre that people might be against a technical revolution that threatens their livelihoods? "AI" even in its current regurgative state can do so much stuff that people are paid to do.

Or that we're all talking to an LLM when we think we're talking to other humans (eg in here).

Or that kids are demonstrably taking the easy way out instead of actually learning. Cheating isn't new, but the level of disengagement is biblically awesome. Between that and the stagnant junior jobs market, what hope do they have?

Honestly, what is there to celebrate? Toil is a necessary component of human satisfaction, and we're shifting everything we do to a LLM.

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