101–110 of 161 posts
No one I know who says this kind of thing would read this article. People love being lazy.
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It's so strange that anti-AI people think the advice and information you can get from a good model (if you know how to operate it well) is less valuable than the advice and information you can get from a book.
> anti-AI people think the advice and information you can get from a good model (if you know how to operate it well) is less valuable than the advice and information you can get from a book Those people exist and they’re wrong. More frequently, however, I find I’m judging the model less than its user. If I get an email that smells of AI, I ignore it. That’s partly because I have the luxury to do so. It’s largely beca…
Because the output is almost always trash, and it takes re-doing the work and then claiming that it came from LLMs for it not to be.
These tools are being sold to me as similar to what a Jr engineer offers me, but that's not at all true because I would fire a Jr that came to me with such bullshit and needing such significant hand-holding so often as what I see coming out of an LLM.
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I do not use books for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I maintain the neural capacity for forming my own original thoughts and ideas no writer has seen before. If anyone gives me an opinion from a book, they disrespect me and themselves to a point they are dead to me in an engineering capacity. Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning…
What is this new breed of interactive books that give you half baked opinions and incorrect facts in response to a prompt?
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In many of the Hacker News comments, a core complaint was not just that AI is sometimes used lazily, but that LLM outputs are fundamentally unreliable—that they generate confidently stated nonsense (hallucinations, bullshit in the Frankfurtian philosophical sense: speech unconcerned with truth).
Here’s a more explicitly framed summary of that sentiment:
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Central Critique: AI as a Bullshit Generator
Many commenters argue that: • LLMs don’t “know” things—they generate plausible language based on patterns, not truth. • Therefore, any use of them without rigorous verification is inherently flawed. • Even when they produce correct answers, users can’t trust them without external confirmation, which defeats many of the supposed productivity gains. • Some assert that AI output should be treated not as knowledge but as an unreliable guess-machine.
Examples of the underlying sentiment: • “LLMs produce bullshit that looks authoritative, and people post it without doing the work to separate truth from hallucination.” • “It costs almost nothing to generate plausible nonsense now, and that cheapness is actively polluting technical discourse.” • “‘I asked ChatGPT’ is not a disclaimer; it’s an admission that you didn’t verify anything.”
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Philosophical framing (which commenters alluded to)
A few participants referenced Harry Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit: • The bullshitter’s goal isn’t to lie (which requires knowledge of the truth), but simply to produce something that sounds right. • Many commenters argue LLMs embody this: they’re indifferent to truth, tailored to maximize coherence, authority, and user satisfaction.
This wasn’t a side issue—it was a core rejection of uncritical AI use.
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So to clarify: the strong anti-AI sentiment isn’t just about laziness.
It’s about: • Epistemic corruption: degrading the reliability of discourse. • False confidence: turning uncertainty into authoritative prose. • Pollution of knowledge spaces: burying truth under fluent fabrication.
Counterpoint: "Chatgpt said this" is an entirely legitimate approach in many contexts and this attitude is toxic. One example: Code reviews are inherently asymmetrical. You may have spent days building up context, experimenting, and refactoring to make a PR. Then the reviewer is expected to have meaningful insight in (generously) an hour? AI code reviews help bring balance; it may notice stuff a human wouldn't, and i…
Certainly citing GPT is better than just assuming it's right and not citing it along with an assertion.
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"This tool uses the WebAssembly build of Perl running actual SLOCCount algorithms from licquia/sloccount." The best form of (AI) plagiarism is to simply wrap the original tool in your own facade and pretend like you built anything of value. Is this intended to be a bad joke?
You're criticizing me for directly crediting the original here. That's the correct and ethical thing to do! Honestly, I've seen the occasional bad faith argument from people with a passionate dislike of AI tooling but this one is pretty extreme even by those standards. I hope you don't ever use open source libraries in your own work.
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"This tool uses the WebAssembly build of Perl running actual SLOCCount algorithms from licquia/sloccount." The best form of (AI) plagiarism is to simply wrap the original tool in your own facade and pretend like you built anything of value. Is this intended to be a bad joke?
You're criticizing me for directly crediting the original here. That's the correct and ethical thing to do! Honestly, I've seen the occasional bad faith argument from people with a passionate dislike of AI tooling but this one is pretty extreme even by those standards. I hope you don't ever use open source libraries in your own work.
https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/473e89edfebc27781b43443...>
At least run a pretty-printer on the code so that it can be reviewed by anything but a robot.
Part of developing a good software system is about exercising taste in vendored-in libraries and, especially, the structure around them.
P.S. I've gone to look at other chunks of Javascript and see that I was unlucky to grab this steaming pile first.
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You're criticizing me for directly crediting the original here. That's the correct and ethical thing to do! Honestly, I've seen the occasional bad faith argument from people with a passionate dislike of AI tooling but this one is pretty extreme even by those standards. I hope you don't ever use open source libraries in your own work.
Actually, my criticism was the result of my own misunderstanding of what you were claiming. My apologies for that, although I'm still unlikely to use these tools based upon the example when my own personal counterexamples have shown me that it's often as much or more work to get there via prompting than it is to simply do the thinking myself. Have a good day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're criticizing me for directly crediting the original here. That's the correct and ethical thing to do! Honestly, I've seen the occasional bad faith argument from people with a passionate dislike of AI tooling but this one is pretty extreme even by those standards. I hope you don't ever use open source libraries in your own work.
For whatever it's worth, this is exactly the kind of awful that I never want in any code base that I'm working on: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/473e89edfebc27781b43443... > At least run a pretty-printer on the code so that it can be reviewed by anything but a robot. Part of developing a good software system is about exercising taste in vendored-in libraries and, especially, the structure around them. P.S. I'v…
Originally I tried to get it working loading code directly but as far as I can tell there's no stable CDN build of that, so I had to vendor it instead.
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Isn't it the modern equivalent of "let me Google that for you"? My experience is that the vast majority of people do 0 research (AI assisted or not) before asking questions online. Questions that could have usually been answered in a few seconds if they had tried. If someone preface a question by saying they've done their research but would like validation, then yes it's in incredibly poor taste.
>Isn't it the modern equivalent of "let me Google that for you"? Which was just as irritating.