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Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
711–720 of 812 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#712Because 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…
This is an example of a perspective that is solely lacking: I was a professional programmer for 40 years. I loved writing code in my youth. But then I started to love something more: making bigger things. I’ve grown out of the infatuation with my own self satisfaction with writing code. Now I’m addicted to architectures. There’s a point when you realize coding gets in the way and needs to be delegated. That’s why AI is appealing to me. I can put aside the wrench turning and focus on the bigger construct. It’s a game changer and it accelerates my ideas. I feel like I just got a second wind even though I’m close to retiring thanks to AI.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#713If you're impressed by something which was done by AI, then you're not qualified enough to judge it.
How's that supposed to work? If I'm impressed by $SOMETHING, then I'm not qualified enough to judge it? This means that only negative judgement is valid?
It means that you are impressed by mediocrity.
cf: https://nitter.net/mitchellh/status/2060088112257372610#m
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#714It'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…
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Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#715Earlier quoted context omitted.
100% this. Disrupting and killing the jobs of others is good. Now that we are killing our own jobs, disruption is not so good anymore.
100%? So everybody who has any negative opinion of or experience with AI is now a "tech bro" who believes killing jobs is good? That's hideous. Why even have an HN account if you harbor this kind of black-and-white hate against people in software? You shouldn't want HN to look like the rest of the internet (flame wars, petty back-and-forth rhetoric, immaturity, etc).
Ive seen HN been filled with plenty of vitrol and hatred. Dang etc does clean it up mostly, but its still often here behind a veneer. Ive also seen really good opinions and ideas. It isnt black and white.
And no I dont think that generally, but it just seems like so many tech people here have been kinda mid/upper class/well off. I think a core issue around AI, around a new technology, is the class/capitalism issue, because that is the system we are stuck in.
But maybe some also havent quite connected the dots, and are starting to wake up to the reality of the situation.
It probably also gets astroturfed.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#716I dont but i hate those people who use it ineffectively
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#717Earlier quoted context omitted.
That does not seem like it should be controversial. I have known for quite a long time that a motivated high school kid could learn to code well enough to be perfectly useful. Especially with popular languages like Python. This is just an object lesson for everyone who thought all that software guys did was write code that there is just a little bit more to the job than that. Actual developers should already have kno…
Hard disagree. That’s like saying just because you can type 200 words per minute you’re a better writer than Shakespeare.
I took that as exactly his point. Learning the syntax of Python or C++ or whatever isn't particularly hard. If reading the manual or being the one guy in the company who knew how the yamls worked was your "moat" then your career was built on sand. The challenge has always been leveraging that use of the tool into actually doing something useful with it.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#718Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I get that results in your mind is a vibecoded full feature photoshop as the goal post, which is fair enough. That's no less arbitrary than say me defining the goal post as can it make me a useful script & thus has already delivered results with receipts. I think vibe coded photoshop is what’s being talked about from Anthropic, OpenAI as the end goal - Dario is on record saying that AI will replace engineers and Sa…
>I want to know where people _genuinely_ think the cutoff is I don't think there is/should be one at all. If you and I stand in front of a crazy fast growing plant the question on how tall it'll be tomorrow is initially interesting, but a couple measurements in when it's clear the answer is exponentially the relevant question stops being how high is it now / will be tomorrow and more holly shit how long can this keep…
> If you and I stand in front of a crazy fast growing plant the question on how tall it'll be tomorrow is initially interesting, but a couple measurements in when it's clear the answer is exponentially the relevant question stops being how high is it now / will be tomorrow and more holly shit how long can this keep going & where does this go.
What’s happening here is you and I are standing in front of a plant, you’re telling me it’s growing crazy fast, I’m asking you how fast, and you’re telling me it doesn’t matter how fast because it’s going to keep growing this fast. If I ask how tall is it today, you say it doesn’t matter because it’s growing so fast and it’ll be taller tomorrow. If I ask you how tall will it be tomorrow you tell me it’s growing so fast you can’t say.
> I don't think their promises and marketing is a good reference point for how a technology is actually developing
So just to be clear, on one hand the companies are evolving so quickly but on the other hand not as quickly as they’re saying but still so quickly that we can’t quantify it.
> They are spending big. Just because they're not committing 100% of their budget right now doesn't mean it hasn't yielded results. It's an evolving situation not a mature technology.
Ok - so we’re back at the beginning again - it’s so good that companies need to keep investing in it but when I ask how good it is it’ll be better next month so I just need to keep investing in it. But you can’t tell me how good it will be next month because it’s going so well.
We can’t say how good it is today, but it’s great. And we can’t say how good it will be next month or year, but it’s improving so quickly. So what _can_ we say?
You see how crazy that is right? we’re going in circles here so I’m going to leave it at this.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#719Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yep, I use it every day. IMO it's a bigger long-term productivity lever for someone who knows good code than it is for someone who doesn't look at the code (at least for systems that are expected to have lots of users). For those sorts of systems, comments like this just remind me of people pitching UML + codegen-or-outsourcing 20 years ago. > Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which f…
> You hit the point where your agent is churning for hours and running more and more tests and inadvertently breaking more things trying to make the change in all those places
I've had this experience with vibe-coded applications written by Claude itself. For some reason, Claude doesn't seem to use any good practices unless I tell it to, and seems to require me to walk it through a decent design up front.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
#720Because 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…
This is an example of a perspective that is solely lacking: I was a professional programmer for 40 years. I loved writing code in my youth. But then I started to love something more: making bigger things. I’ve grown out of the infatuation with my own self satisfaction with writing code. Now I’m addicted to architectures. There’s a point when you realize coding gets in the way and needs to be delegated. That’s why AI…
>Now I’m addicted to architectures
But architecture creation can also be delegated to ai if you give agent enough context about functional/non-functional requirements, certain business side restrictions etc. Your work is to be feedback loop mechanism between people and llm, no? Please, give me encouraging examples of technical tasks that cant be delegated to ai with accurate prompting