Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI? • Hacker News Board

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

#481

Post by trumpdong » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:36 PM UTC

armchairhacker wrote: post #396

oleg_antonyan wrote: post #148

I call these AI tools "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet". They belong to american companies which can cut off your access if american government doesn't like your country's government. They fed from the free internet that many of us grew up in, store it in humans unreadable form and sell you access to it. If some day claude starts to spit out compiled binaries instead of code nobody will no…

> the internet we all know and love Only accessible via proprietary ISPs that require a subscription, actively monitor and censor (pirate sites). And managed by ICANN which is based in America (and though nonprofit, certainly influenced by money and government). Meanwhile, local models package a large part of the past internet, can be stored in your computer and accessed by the most ignorant (but literate) laymen.

ICANN is incredibly corrupt now. They make money selling gTLDs which all have to play by American rules. Having American rules on .org .com etc is an acceptable accident of history - having them on every generic word outside of .us is not.

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

#482

Post by whoami4041 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:37 PM UTC

I actually hold both extremes inside of me simultaneously. The speed at which you can ship when you have a strong vision of the end product and the architecture is extraordinary (the part of me that loves AI-assistance).

The journey itself, at least for me, has been absolutely grueling though; I'd say ~30% of the time it's just straight up soul-sucking. Some of that could be because of my own incessant need for discipline and clean code. I don't know how people let agents run wild in hours-long workflows, I can't even get Opus to stop running my test suite repeatedly to look for failures even though cargo test fails fast (the model already knows this), CLAUDE.md has the exact steps and commands for running the test suite, every invoked skill explains the same, and the hook rejects repeated attempts with the same explanation. It STILL, 90% of the time, uses whatever command it wants, bypasses the hook's cooldown to try a different grep because its own invented command didn't return any failures, and if it doesn't bypass the command it tries to wait it out so it can try again. Such a simple thing that it can't get right no matter what I've tried.

Anyways.. Love the leverage, hate fighting with the model on the way from A to B. Everything it does should be challenged.

People that "hate" AI are either expecting it to do too much and are disappointed or aren't watching it closely enough and have to suffer through refactors after they thought they'd been making progress. People that are only over the moon may be working in less complex systems and haven't felt the pain of all the failure modes yet, or just aren't yet aware of the bugs hiding in what AI produced.

Anyone who has built something significantly complex enough probably shares the same love/hate relationship.

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

#483

Post by lazzlazzlazz » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:37 PM UTC

Years ago Hacker News became deeply resistant of and resentful toward new technology, not coincidentally around the same time that it became more Reddit-like (consensus-brained, left-leaning politically, defensive, sclerotic). It's all part of the same phenomenon.

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

#484

Post by trumpdong » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:43 PM UTC

cassianoleal wrote: post #329

darksim905 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You probably saw this, but future readers won't: just last week, anyone could steal any Instagram account by telling the AI support chatbox they'd lost access to their email address.

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

#485

Post by trumpdong » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC

massung wrote: post #442

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…

I know LLMs are getting the majority of the attention of late, but there are others of us training and using AI to… …reads MRIs and video to detect cancer …analyze genomics for early target discovery …assisting surgeons …folding proteins And the list goes on in other fields as well. Just hoping the recent AI counterculture doesn’t stigmatize other uses of AI. Am I a fan of Claude code? Not particularly, but I have us…

I thought the point of HN was to help venture capitalists find ~~marks~~ projects to fund

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

#486

Post by rglover » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:46 PM UTC

Because it's a power drill being treated like a genie lamp.

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

#487

Post by dfggdfdfgdfgfg » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:47 PM UTC

maccard wrote: post #361

helloplanets wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yet it’s not. That was my point as well. That it hasn't been output, even though it could be done by a talented solo developer given enough time, and that current LLMs definitely aren't able to do so. > The problem is that they don’t generate acceptable code, they generate code that needs to be edited to be acceptable. You've never had an LLM output a one line bugfix that is correct to the point where you don't…

> You've never had an LLM output a one line bugfix that is correct to the point where you don't have to edit it? I have. I’ve also had IDEs and static analysers do the same thing. I can also take my car out of gear and have it roll down a hill but that doesn’t mean it can run without fuel. Only a sith deals in absolutes, and in the general cases LLMs don’t generate acceptable code.

Try it out, like seriously, learn to use it well. Spent a few weeks with it. You will not say these things if you were an experienced user of these tools. Saying their code is "unacceptable" is a skill issue. Describe what you consider "acceptable code" and watch it produce it in copious amounts. They don't have one mode, one setting, they can generate whatever the F you want in whatever style you deem "acceptable". You're completely in control.

That said, I watched many of my - generally pretty clever - colleagues struggle mightily with this. I can't put my finger on it yet. Regular "programming" - typing BS syntax one character at a time - always felt astronomically boring to me so I'm one of the guys happy with these tools. Not happy with how it will fuck up society though, but that's uh.. yeah.

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

#488

Post by trumpdong » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:47 PM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #452

skeledrew wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also worry about the debasement of value of human work. Looking at history, say of the weavers, it didn't work out to well for them when the powered loom came along. They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option. And the world is better with the power loom. It's scary but we still have to embrace that eventually pretty much all valuable labour will be automated, and by then our societ…

> They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option. Yes, but then whole swathes of the English countryside (and then the Indian countryside) was plunged into destitution for generations and it took rebellions, massacres and revolutions to get something like comfortable living.

It's like climate change: Earth will survive. I and my family won't. Therefore we get wars.

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

#489

Post by numpad0 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #109

dang wrote: post #14

It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant. You can see from the following megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 . Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to brin…

While I agree that it's "divided", I wouldn't say "simply". Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023. It is the only subject where, when I have shared that I built something with it, I have gotten derogatory comments claiming I am inexperienced, unintelligent, and that the thing I built (a hobby project) is unimpressive or embarrassing. This has never happened in the deca…

IMO it's because AI outputs don't pass "is this corpses" test and trigger uncanny valley response. There's something in AI that instantly cause unsuspecting viewers to become alert and hostile.

At the same time, cut raw steaks don't alert people in the same way as corpses do, and that is a double standard, in a way, I guess.

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

#490

Post by thierrydamiba » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

_0ffh wrote: post #465

dang wrote: post #14

It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant. You can see from the following megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 . Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to brin…

Thoughtful comment, and I'd like to add another angle: However meaningful it is to say the community is divided, I also think that individuals are "divided" on the question as well. I can speak from myself as an example (although n=1): I am incredibly open to machine learning and the advances it brings. On the other hand I am extremely conscious of the fact that the current LLMs do often write bad code, which becomes…

There’s also the uncomfortable reality that a lot of people spent a lot of time learning how to do things that anyone can prompt now…

We tend to ignore that reality but it hangs above all these discussions like a dirty cloud