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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?

#681

Post by ethagnawl »

cassianoleal wrote: post #325
ZpJuUuNaQ5 wrote: post #321

>AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines. Which is undeniably true. I am not "anti-AI", in fact, it helps me immensely in my current job, but in my experience, using these tools still requires quite a lot of involvement. Otherwise, updating existing or adding new functionality becomes increasingly difficult as the system grows. The funniest thing is that when…

Exactly this. I've been using a lot of AI, both at work and on personal projects. It's a great help, but it needs a tight leash. I see arguments saying "what does it matter, since you're not going to be touching that code anyway?" Well, what you said about not being able to give it context is one aspect. Another one is that what the LLM is writing is still software. The more brittle and complex that software gets, th…

> what does it matter, since you're not going to be touching that code anyway?

This line of reasoning is baffling to me. What do these companies plan to do when they discover a show stopping bug and Claude (fill in the blank) is down, they're out of credits, their account gets suspended, etc.?

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

#682

Post by IggleSniggle »

rootusrootus wrote: post #511
swat535 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

For me, one of the big improvements is the ability to legitimately work via text message. That probably sounds dystopian in a bunch of ways to some people. But there are times that I want to work, but couldn't, previously.

Now I can work from wherever, whenever, by speaking into my headphones, and have it persist. Sure, I want to be in front of a screen to do final syntax review, but I don't mind planning out architecture and guiding an LLM towards a cohesive result while going for a walk or jog. That's just not a workflow that would have been viable 3 years ago.

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

#683

Post by BirAdam »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #472
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 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…

It’s the solution to the second information problem. Hypertext arose from Bush’s Memex, and the information problem it offered to solve. Now, there is simply so much information available on the modern Memex that it is impossible to make any sense of it all. So, we now have LLMs. There are still some issues with them, but they’re good at what they do.

I have mixed emotions about LLMs and AI more generally. I fear the dystopia, hope for some marginal improvement in human life, and I genuinely enjoy playing around with local models. But, I think there may be near term harms that outweigh the gains. We shall see.

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

#684

Post by tpdly »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #472
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 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…

I think you undervalue the contribution of internet-scale data to foundation modeling, and because LLMs can obsolete the content they required, I think its fair to characterize it as theft. Obviously RL contributes a lot to capabilities, but the judgement that an LLM uses to 'synthesize information' is born from the training data. The scale of the data really is beyond intuition. books3, for example, would 230 yrs of continuous reading

I actually think the "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet" does a lot to characterize the capabilities and effects to a lot of people. Obviously coders are more in tune with how well agents can work, but that's also due more to the RL breakthroughs than foundation modeling.

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

#685

Post by CM30 »

I think there are a few reasons for this.

First, a decent percentage of people enjoy programming for the process itself, and not the end result. For them, the idea of having a computer handle everything and playing QA tester every now and again feels like it goes against everything they enjoy about software engineering. If you're the kind of person who dislikes Dropbox because they can do everything themselves, AI is hardly going to rank any better there.

Secondly, a lot of people here do care a lot more about things like performance, technical debt, code quality, etc. AI probably appeals more to those that don't like to think about said things very much, and that's only a percentage of the Hacker News userbase.

Thirdly, a lot of projects discussed here are on the more complex or at least esoteric side. This is where AI tends to fall short, and hence those people may be a lot more skeptical about its usefulness.

There are also a lot of groups here that have... reasons to dislike AI in its current form. Maybe they're open source supporters that dislike how the biggest companies and most up to date models in this space seem to be against everything relating to software freedom (self-hosting, open source, no controls on content or usage, etc). Maybe they're worried their job is at risk, or are struggling to find a new one in this market. Maybe they like building computers or working on hardware and are finding everything's gotten significantly more expensive now that AI companies are using so many resources.

There are a lot of communities and subgroups here who have clear reasons to dislike the current AI boom, and who probably want the bubble to burst sooner rather than later.

Oh, and there are also plenty of people who hate how much of the site seems to revolve around AI now, and wish there were more posts and discussions about anything else.

Does that mean everyone here dislikes AI? No, of course not. Plenty of people here use it, or see it as a useful tool with a lot of potential.

But there are a lot of people here who have clear reasons to dislike it, either because the way it works is antithetical to what they enjoy about programming, or because their situation could get far worse due to its rise in popularity.

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

#686

Post by Jeaye »

There are three aspects of this which concern me the most: personal, open source, and business.

On the personal side, code is art, not a means to an end. Many of us love coding. For me, it's my favorite thing in the world to do and it has been that way for 20 years. That's why we enjoy going back over old game code, to see the clever tricks that people came up with. That's why we preserve code in archives, to last thousands of years. Sure, we can generate classic art, too, and it can be fun. But generating Rambrandt paintings is nothing like actually seeing the originals. And it's nothing like creating your own.

Code being art is exactly why coders are so opinionated about their tools. Just like artists are. "I only use vim and functional programming and Linux" says the coder. "I only use these paint brushes, and this type of paint, on this particular type of canvas" says the painter. People don't consider this enough, for coding, so they just say "Use the best tool for the job." But any paint brush will do, for most jobs. Any language will do, for most jobs. Why it all matters is because we care. We care because art is a form of personal expression.

On the open source side, maintainers now just get huge PRs full of slop changes. The submitters tend to feel like they're helping, but they're just wasting everyone's time. The trust landscape of contributing has been eroded. The security concerns of large changes are now more pressing than ever. The gross disregard for licensing spits in the face of both the nature of open source and the actual legal ground on which LLMs try to stand. And then so many projects trying to grow end up getting vibe-coded weekend projects as competitors and people actually think they're comparable. For the non-trivial cases, they're not, because of the business side.

On the business side, let's take a programming language for example, like Zig. A business will be hesitant to adopt a particular technology if it's just one guy working on it. But if the technology has a community, a foundation, and a handful of devs working on it full-time, it is a safer investment. A big reason here is that the bus factor will be higher than one. However, LLM-generated code is a black box. It has a bus factor of zero. Nobody understands all of the code. Probably, nobody ever will. If there is a critical bug at a critical time, there is nobody to call. We would have to rely on LLMs to find and fix the bug, but how much faith can we actually put into this? That covers third party technology, but the same applies to first party technology.

If a small business decides to use Claude to create their mobile app, rather than hire an experienced dev, they now suffer the same black box and bus factor problem. Even if they hire a dev, but they expect the dev to finish at vibe-coding speeds, we end up with the same problem.

---

In short, vibe coding removes everything I love about my favorite thing to do. It also creates heaps of blackbox code with no ownership, beholden to proprietary tech which is only getting more expensive. Why would I like that?

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

#687

Post by pixl97 »

theappsecguy wrote: post #584
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #472

Earlier 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.

Thank god I bought the alphabet before learning it unlike one of those stealing heathens.

In your hate of AI please don't build the world in The Right to Read.

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

#688

Post by TylerE »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #679
TylerE wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemme give another. I was formerly quite anti-AI but bought a cheap Claude plan just to play around with it a bit. First thing I built with it was this - https://github.com/tylereaves/onscreen-piano , in about an hour and maybe 10 prompt cycles. It replaced, for my specific use case, the 10% of the functionality of an increasingly-unreliable commercial app. That's including building the website, setting up actions fo…

I always thought of myself as merely ADD, but your comment is so incredibly relatable across all dimensions that I find myself wondering how far along the autism spectrum I am. Although, in my personal opinion, neither term is especially helpful: it's not a sensory/executive processing disorder if it's clearly benefiting both yourself and the people around you. It might make being sociable difficult, but that's the t…

I’d be really careful with language like. For me the sensory and executive components are clearly disordered and border line disabling all on their own., and while it is what “me” is, it certainly isn’t making me or anyone around me happier, or their lives easier. Like - I carry a shoulder bag with industrial earmuffs and extremely dark sunglasses at all times because I cannot function in sensory overload. It is not a super power, and framing it that way is dismissive of those of us not on the very mildest end me of the spectrum.

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

#689

Post by Lerc »

queenkjuul wrote: post #335
anon7725 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is truly vile to compare concerns about LLMs to anti-immigrant discrimination.

Sadly this isn't even the only comment equating LLM skepticism to racism, even more sadly I'm not even remotely surprised that there's HN commenters that think this way

It depends on what you mean by skeptisism. Skeptisism about homeopathy is a different class of beast to climate change skepticism.

I am absolutely not saying that all arguments on the limitations of LLMs are bigotry. I just noticed that some of the participants adopt the attitudes, and behaviours that mirror bigotry.

I haven't felt the need to construct a lexicon of derisive terminology to discuss this topic. That does not seem to be the case for others.

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

#690

Post by sowbug »

theappsecguy wrote: post #584
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #472

Earlier 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.

I'm certain I've read this comment before.
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