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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?

#511

Post by rootusrootus »

swat535 wrote: post #238
p4bl0 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for putting it this way. I have to admit I was really astonished by the question as I feel like HN is very much pro-AI at least in the sense that there is more AI promotion on HN than there is AI acceptance among people in the real world. It's been months if not years since most of the posts are about genAI, and in a largely favorable way. It's actually quite fascinating that for some people it feels like the…

I think generally, extremist views tend to echo further than nuanced ones. This goes for any major topic really: whether it's politics, religion, arts, etc. The AI discussion on HN is exhilarated by the fact that it can have a tangible impact on people's lives on this forum. You add to this the possibility of a minority extracting an unfathomable amount of wealth from the hype train and we lose all hope for a moderat…

I'm using Claude Code at this moment to do some work for me. It's doing a pretty great job, if I'm being honest. It's going faster than I would, overall, but it's not some kind of 10x magic. It does things faster and in some cases better on the first shot, but it misunderstands and needs guidance on plenty of things, tweaks, etc. Even if I don't necessarily tweak the actual code and just ask Claude to go clean up it's shit, that still takes time.

I think the folks who say 20-40% faster is typical are definitely in the right ballpark. And that's best case. There are plenty of times where my biggest blockers are not anything Claude will ever be able to fix.

Maybe the result of this whole experience will be grudging appreciation from management that software developers aren't just coders. Maybe. I'm an optimist, though. And my manager already knew that.

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

#512

Post by vbezhenar »

Because I enjoy writing code. I enjoy being paid for writing code. And I don't enjoy writing prompts for AI.

Code is not just a means to an end. Code is a means to my happiness. Users might not care, but I do care. I love good code. I feel great when I can write good code.

I won't say that I don't care about users. I do. But I care about me, first and foremost. And AI threatens to remove my lifestyle and workstyle. That's why I'm bullish against it. And at the same time I use it, because I feel forced to use it. This is rat race.

At the same time I can say that I don't care about delivering product 10x faster. Actually I'd prefer to deliver product 0.1x faster.

Yes, I understand that contradicts to the business side of view. Well, I don't care. I'm not getting paid percentage of product sales. I'm getting paid flat salary and I care about keeping it and live good life in the process.

I'm being completely honest about it. Maybe it'll help someone to understand that point of view.

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

#513

Post by fasterik »

4k0hz wrote: post #494
massung wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This problem only exists because of the marketing move to call anything even slightly ML related "AI". I see it as a double edged sword. People that want the category of AI to succeed can claim a victory when someone uses it to approximate protien folding and invent new drugs. But that also means the entire field is constantly being dragged down by low quality vibe coded sites, slop videos on social media, whatever h…

>This problem only exists because of the marketing move to call anything even slightly ML related "AI".

We need to remember what "Artificial Intelligence" actually means. It refers to the field of research starting in the 1950's developing algorithms related to combinatorial search, planning, and reasoning. Machine Learning isn't AI in the sci-fi movie sense, but it's among the topics you'll find in a textbook like Russell and Norvig.

A problem like protein folding isn't tangentially related to AI, it's at the heart of the kinds of problems the field has been trying to tackle for decades. Yet when there are legitimate breakthroughs, people deride it as "not real AI."

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

#516

Post by Jblx2 »

YZF wrote: post #150
johnfn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Same experience. But that's simply because you think you're experienced but the OP knows that you're just deluding yourself. Just kidding. More seriously, I think this is a true reflection of a cultural phenomena. All discussions have become more polarized. There is a more of a generational divide in perception and discussion. I would also say there is a loss of nuance. To complicate this even further there is a real…

>I mean we had flame wars on USENET but somehow it feels to me that most discourse even on controversial topics was civil.

I think this is probably a combination of nostalgia and/or USENET prior to 1990 or so?

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

#517

Post by alch- »

culi wrote: post #448

The HN crowd is much less anti-AI than the rest of the country. But that's a low bar A Quinnipiac poll showed 80% of Americans are "very" or "somewhat" concerned about artificial intelligence, with only 35% feeling excited about it https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3955 Gallup found that 71% of Americans oppose the construction of AI data centers in their local communities. https://news.gallup.com/poll/70977…

Ah yes, The Country.

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

#518

Post by rconti »

> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.

This works better in greenfield deployments than in existing ones. We all know AI "hallucinates". This is reasonably easy to work around on new code where you can take any number of paths to get the right answer.

In existing deployments, being flat-out wrong has a greater cost. I've worked with AI in a ton of examples (working in existing codebases, troubleshooting system problems, etc) where it simply wasted my time, and it would have been better to solve the problem myself.

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

#519

Post by eranation »

My honest take? Hackers and builders value not just the result but also the journey. There is a feeling that AI is a cheat code to get to the result without having gone through the journey. I am fully on that side, and like everyone I’m using AI because I can’t afford not to, and because it’s also admittedly, fun and addictive and even within it, you can build skill (no pun intended) and for now at least, talented people with good taste and problem solving skills seem to manage to just use AI as a multiplier.

But because AI made everyone have perfect English, and above average design skills, everything that 4 years ago would be considered elegant, well written, well working anything, now looks like yet another low effort AI slop.

People appreciate not just the result but also the effort.

Also the entire AI will replace you marketing bait from all BigAI CEOs is tiring. And the entire you have to adopt AI to survive is nauseating. It takes mostly pure will to become an expert in AI, just prompt what’s the latest FOMO skills repo and you also can be an AI influencer.

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

#520

Post by ian_j_butler »

Like US politics now, AI talk is just a team sport where there's no room for nuance. If you want to talk about such things then you need to anticipate this and work around it from the jump, making clear the expectations about the scope of the discussion and ground somewhere concrete. For politics it's gotta be economics, data, specific policy. For AI, it's gotta be research, benchmarks, very specific workflows or use-cases.

Even establishing the scope of the discussion is tedious, and most people have no patience for that, so the practical choices are basically having a dumb rah-rah type of discussion, or none at all. I'm breaking my own best advice by even writing this down but the only answer is: Read More, Talk Less. If you're in school and talking with other students or if you're talking to colleagues with known background in the context of known practical problems they would like to solve.. it's different. But the forums? Read-only is not even effective as far as "checking in" on the "collective culture" in engineering to get an accurate picture. Actually engaging is even more effort for even less profit. I regret having opened the thread, so back to burying my head in more research and hands-on projects :)

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