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

But do we let ourselves loose awful people unto the world simply because they spread their genes as well as any well-behaved children? No we don’t. Society has rules and a lot of good people produce children which benefit society rather than are detrimental to it.

For a lot of people, the quality of their code is a reflection of their own quality as a programmer.

If you were alive in the 1980s and you were around to see how insanely fast a computer from 1988 could do things, and you compare that to how slow things are today, you would not be saying that code is a means to an end. Software is so horrible these days because too many people believe that it’s just “a means to an end”.

For some of us, the crafting of the code is the reward that we seek.

Code generators that do not have understanding or intent are limited in their ability to express them precisely.

And im also anti viewing it as the apocalypse

I think there's definitely a bit of both. Some things are easier to prompt "adequately." Some domains or types of requests are tougher.

The billion dollar question (well, trillion dollar, looking at the valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic) is will that change enough to actually replace the highly-paid people who currently are needed to make sure shit doesn't go sideways? They're betting that they can solve the "turn a bad prompt into a good-enough series of prompts" problem generically for everyone.

And where exactly that lands could have a lot of knock-on effects. The easy targets are things like SaaS that is only valuable because of economies of scale but the problems are "simple" if you don't have that scale.

But even there, there's a lot of echoes of the past, where things like ad-hoc Access apps or spreadsheets powered (or still power!) a bunch of business processes in lieu of SaaS products. How much appetite is there long-term for large businesses to really go back to owning all that in-house?

Also a fun irony in that the trillion-dollar-valuation world is basically "the biggest SaaS of them all" and those companies have a huge target on them and at that point practically everyone else in the world would be gunning for them. If they do find that "good enough" point, they also have to hope that nobody can replicate it for less anytime soon... (but they'll also have given those folks aiming at doing just that a great tool for helping build those systems).

You can stand on a beach and shout at a tsunami, and maybe if you have a stick and time it right, get a hit in when it arrives. But I don't see how that helps anything. The only thing I see is to do as much as possible to prepare for when it hits, to help as many as possible to survive the onslaught.

Like a tsunami, preventing the arrival of AI is essentially impossible, unless you nuke all the data centers in the US and China and kill all the scientists and engineers with even a modicum of interest in working on it. Unlike a tsunami, AI is actually pretty useful: there are many already getting value from it in it's infancy, and its value will only keep on increasing with every release. But it's going to turn the world upside-down in the process and there are many too afraid of change. That's just how people are.