AI is dogshit. No skill. No taste.
Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
651–660 of 812 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#652Because 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. T…
> Actually I'd prefer to deliver product 0.1x faster
Ideas being expensive was a good thing.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#653Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument that LLMs are "feeding me back free and open internet" seems to skip the most useful aspect of the tool. I could never, as an individual read, let alone synthesize and make decisions with, the amount of information on the internet. The LLM takes that free and open information and feeds me back novel information based on that free information. It gives me ideas, opinions, and hard data based on that infor…
Nothing about the information it feeds you is novel. It's all stolen repetition of someone else's work.
Bizarre to say that. When I have it perform work on a bespoke code base on a niche videogame, in a less commonly used language, is that still "regurgitating stuff"?
No, it is impossible for it to have seen this combination of things.
It routinely produces, suggests, and correctly implements novel things that had not existed.
You can see this yourself by learning how LLMs work, or anecdotally using these tools.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#654Because 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. T…
Imagine if AI actually delivers utopia and you get to code all you want because your every need is taken care of.
Absolutely naive if you think the capitalists will “deliver utopia”.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#655Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I’m in this camp. I’ve been pushing forward some personal projects lately using LLMs. At first, I was delighted at how productive I was, prompting. But over time a lot of cracks have started to show. Claude is good at programming “in the small”. It’s good at getting self contained, well scoped tasks done. But it’s bad at large scale system thinking. Over time, every project I’ve gotten Claude to write has become…
> Claude is good at programming “in the small”. It’s good at getting self contained, well scoped tasks done. But it’s bad at large scale system thinking. Over time, every project I’ve gotten Claude to write has become riddled with poor design choices layered on top of one another until even Claude struggles to make forward progress. What's really fun about these tools is that this is both true and false! If you ask t…
Yeah I hear you with all of this.
Its weird, working with LLMs. There are some things the LLMs are extremely good at doing autonomously. Like, reverse engineering, or reading documentation (and using that knowledge in other areas). There are things that they can do - but you need to explicitly prompt. Like, I've found Opus is quite good at optimising code. I've had a lot of success by asking it to write benchmarks (and do profiling), and use that data to improve the performance of some piece of code. Thats often enough to get quite large performance improvements. You can get even further by showing it similar code others have written which is well optimised. It's very good at copying optimisation ideas from one project to another.
But then there are very simple things it really struggles to do. Some kinds of correctness testing. Invariants. System design.
Is it bad at that stuff, or do I just need to figure out how to prompt the LLM? To return to the topic of this thread, I think we're seeing a lot of different opinions on LLM generated code for 3 reasons:
1. Some people aren't looking at claude's output at all. Some people are looking at the code and it looks fine to them. And some people (with more experience writing software) are looking at the code and judging it poorly.
2. We all prompt our LLMs very differently! It turns out that you get really different results based on how you prompt the machine. We're all figuring this out together. Some people have better instincts than others.
3. We're working on different projects. Claude is comparatively much better at end-user facing software. Its great at making a standalone website. Its much less good at finding and fixing obscure bugs in large, established pieces of software. If you work in consulting, LLMs can already do a lot of your job. If you work on Chrome or Unreal or the windows kernel, maybe not so much.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#656In related posts: Why is the HN crows so pro-AI?
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#657I generally agree with you, except for one thing.
Sure, users don’t care if the code is a mess. At least at first. I mean, they can’t know.
But they DO care when the same bugs exist for years, when new features dry up, when it drains their battery, etc. When technical debt becomes due, users notice in other ways.
Now, whether they care enough or just don’t have a choice is another matter.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#658I 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 disci…
Same boat, although the soul sucking, I find, comes from the fact that AI can iterate on ideas so much faster than I could even begin to pull out a pen and paper that I find myself in an existential crisis when I use it too often. What is the point of my work, especially when I must ship for a paycheck, if I offload all my thinking and understanding to a machine. I can certainly dig deep and understand all the code t…
Funny story to build on this. I spent a couple of days last week building a Powershell script for database refreshes (backups + restores). The process was iterative (typical), and AI helped me solve all the problems we've ran into historically here. It helped me write tests for all the gotchas I had stored in my head from watching various approaches fail over the last couple of years. I ended up with pre and post hooks on every side, and at a high level I'd vastly improved the time to delivery because (as I initially stated) I knew EXACTLY which problems I needed to solve there, and AI helped me get there in a fraction of the time. The end result was a common .psm1 file, 2 ps1 scripts (the orchestrator and executor script), and a total of about 2k lines of Powershell, which I hadn't combed through line-by-line because the tests were solid and I tested it in non-prod prior to releasing to production.
The first run in production ended up causing an unhealthy db in RECOVERING state because there was a tiny logic bug where the restored db wasn't verified as ONLINE before it set it MULTI-USER (which our db state monitors caught within the couple seconds of that being true).
I think AI has enabled us to solve problems much quicker without being intimate with every tiny detail of the code itself. The funny thing about the story is that this isn't a novel problem. Coming in behind a peer who wrote the thing, or even coming in to debug a script I'd written myself a year ago is the same. AI has just pushed up the time to lacking knowledge of precise details of logic, so you can ship something and be unaware of EXACTLY what it does the same day, instead of 6+ months later.
I'm not sure if this is right or wrong, but debugging it was 3 minutes of presenting the issue back to AI instead of 2 days of combing through 2k lines of Powershell that I may or may not have written.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#659I 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…
You probably mean USAGM (US Agency for Global Media) and its affiliated programs (Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, etc) rather than USAID.
USAID was a humanitarian aid agency that focused on programs like famine relief, disaster response, and medical aid in some of the poorest countries on Earth.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#660I 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…
You forgot the push forward towards more destruction of the planet we depend on to live, and the centralization of wealth in addition to the one of power.
Yes, which is nothing compared to the destruction wrought by oil companies, steel manufacturing, meat production, concrete, energy, and transport.
Which have actually destroyed our environment for over a century. With only a slight bend towards slowing.
And I assure you. If you wanna argue "those are useful", not all of those things are useful, as useful as they could be, as efficient as they could be, or could be replaced today if the will was there with better options.
Data centers are a boogeyman and only cared about by Americans and some Europeans. The other 6 billion people in the world really dont think they are bad, nor have such strong feelings towards AI.
And I bet they feel a lot more animosity towards the military industrial complex and the oil empire financing it destroying our planet.