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

Generally I've seen no signs that HN is anti-AI. I haven't ran the statistics, but there is as much excitement around AI especially when new opensource models release as there's cautionary tales around it. Even being pro-AI I have to admit that I scream at the black box and throw slurs at it quite often because it's genuinely a fustrating tool to use when it does not understand basic instructions, but also makes you understand that this is not magic.

However, people do need to make peace that AI as a tool is the future of programming at bare minimum and especially at coorperations as it becomes part of performance reviews and you have to compete with AI assited collegues. As I've said before at least for me AI replaced the boring part of writing code, but reignited the joy of designing systems and problem solving.

I think the technology is fantastic but the current trend of larger and larger proprietary models will bring a concentration of power/money like never seen before.

It's like we are 19th century farmers and suddenly there are the latest John Deere equipment available for huge amounts of money raising yields 100x. Most of us can't afford the equipment and will be pushed out.

And look who Anthropic is partnering with: the absolute worst of Wall St. like Apollo.

Your post is talking about only the code itself, the quality, the speed. Other people are already debating you on that, but I suggest that you also look into what's surrounding AI that's making people very averse to it.

Many see AI as the biggest representative of the world and the internet getting worse. It accelerates the decline that was already there, and when people see their favorite websites become littered with garbage, themselves not being able to find a job or the supposedly enlightened tech elite becoming 10x more insane than they already were, the obvious thing to look to is AI. And what about all the companies that are trying to hop onto the hype bandwagon and are enforcing AI usage or laying off half their staff and demanding that the remaining half 'just use AI' to work twice as hard? Also not very good for the image.

The kind of people who only care about code quality and ignore the above issues, in my experience, are people with no horse in the job market race. Old people, rich people, non-techy people who don't have to do this for a living. They're having the time of their lives churning our small personal projects and not caring about anything else. Everyone else is suffering too much from the other causes to take them seriously.

open weight models are released by the same companies who's revenue would be threatened by open weights - they won't continue to undercut themselves by releases free models once that happens.

> 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 believe the same thing and it’s also the main reason I hate AI code.

AI tends to not have much regard to “architecture” or even really considering how code should be organized. Need a function to read a base64 string into a private key? “fn base64_to_key” right there next to the code that needs it. Need to take that key and encrypt a blob? “fn encrypt_blob” right next to it. No thought about maybe pushing that code to a crypto module, or representing the invariants as types, or even just putting the functions where they might logically belong, just spews them out everywhere.

But, I have a problem trying to prove why this is an actual problem in the end product. You can say “it’s harder to refactor later” but the LLM is already pretty good at just changing bulk amounts of code to behave differently. In fact, having utility functions “nearby” the code that needs it might be better for its own context management. Most of the reason humans prefer the “single responsibility principle” and “modular design” are to make the code easier for us to change and reason about, but an LLM with a finite context window may actually do better with code that doesn’t match this premise.

I find myself reviewing code that others on my team generated with an LLM, and I tend to focus on these sorts of architectural “problems” the most because it’s the biggest gap between the way I program and what the LLM executes. But sometimes I worry that I’m fighting a losing battle, and that the focus on good architecture isn’t as important as I think it is. Or at least, I’m having trouble proving that it actually matters tangibly. Will it result in an unmaintainable mess? Maybe. It’s not guaranteed that LLM’s have the same limitations we do when it comes to maintaining code.