We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes • Hacker News Board

Re: We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes

#111

Post by protocolture » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 3:24 AM UTC

happytoexplain wrote: post #58

protocolture wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the point of telling everyone you dont use AI aside from virtue signalling?

This genre of comment doesn't belong on HN. Please consider leaving this on other parts of the internet.

Sorry I meant to say

"Hey OP this is amazing work, I have never seen better self promotion. Its fantastic to see people following the well worn path of submitting absolutely threadbare nonsense articles to Hacker News for blog clicks. Its an amazing strategy with a wide community and a great deal of support, including among hackernews moderators. I hope you continue to follow this strategy, and we as your readers will continue to tolerate the burden of extremely lowered signal to noise ratio. All the best."

Re: We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes

#112

Post by sublinear » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 3:45 AM UTC

tony_cannistra wrote: post #65

johnfn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking personally I was not particularly moved by the article because I have seen the same thing, in different shapes, thousands of times on HN and elsewhere. Really, AI can't feel and therefore it is inferior? Never heard that one before. Really, an AI can't feel friction and therefore can't adapt to it? Daring today, aren't we? (And a more interesting question: is that even true..?) I realize I am being unnecessa…

Look, really not trying to get into the weeds here, but since we're there: I respect your take that nothing in this article is novel, though I disagree with it. My point wasn't as much about that as it was the lack of good faith engagement and curiosity. Not interesting? Let the damn thing die on /new.

There has been plenty of good faith ruined by trolls on both sides of the discussion. The vast majority of which are new accounts. HN seems to have been under attack for years now.

More generally, the AI discussions that HN regulars actually want to have are going to be limited to the business plans, press releases about new models, and the (very) occasional higher quality project that couldn't have been done without a big lift from an LLM.

Anyone genuinely wanting to discuss the truth from a philosophical or scientific perspective is never going to penetrate the profound ignorance on much of the business side (mostly startups and aging leadership), so why bother? Business is at least what everyone has in common here.

Re: We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes

#113

Post by sublinear » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 4:04 AM UTC

TacticalCoder wrote: post #34

Where are the voices of reason? My wife got an email from a new hire (now even a new hire yet: she's still on a trial basis), a 23 years old, where she explains that she doesn't want to use AI. That she doesn't like what AI does. On a funny sidenote: the email is obviously 99% llmish, which is hilarious. That's one extremity: crazy people who refuse to learn a new tool. Then on the other extremity you have the even m…

> a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?

I can tell you that while I use AI, it's basically a compressed version of stackoverflow to me. I don't bother with agents because I simply don't have that much code to write. The nature of code didn't change. Less code is better code, and it's a strong smell when people claim that they needed an agent to save time.

When I do have a new project, there's an extremely high chance that I can reuse existing code from another project that already has passing tests, or I am experienced enough to know what exactly needs to be done. I can probably finish my part within the sprint or faster. The agent can only introduce risk to the project timeline or code quality.

This isn't me being arrogant or "anti-AI". The hard part of software development has always been collecting consistent requirements from various stakeholders. I'm pro-AI in the sense that, when used correctly, it helps junior devs learn and otherwise shines a spotlight where the real bottlenecks are (project management and delays).

Re: We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes

#114

Post by gumby » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 4:23 AM UTC

Pretty sure the alif/alif had upward prongs because it was the head of the ox (so the triangle is the snout or head with two prongs above. Phoenician alif has the upward prongs. It may have come from Egyptian which would have been a definite ox head.

The Greek/Latin A is the symbol inverted — those are not legs.

Re: We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes

#115

Post by gumby » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 4:29 AM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #7

Info rmation Clever. Not sure what the is for, though.

I fed your comment into ChatGPT and asked it to answer your question. It told me that starts an html anchor.

Which while absolutely correct does not at all address your question.

Re: We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes

#116

Post by paulhebert » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 4:35 AM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #82

paulhebert wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s bizarre to me to hear that HN has an anti-AI bent. This is the place I see AI discussed the most. Admittedly the opinions here are mixed. A lot of people do have negative feelings but there are also a ton of pro-AI comments. There Are huge 600 comment threads about a new model release, weird rants about “Gastown”, constant “Launch HNs” for model wrappers, and people saying writing code by hand is archaic. This i…

Do you really think threads like [1], [2], [3] are pro-AI? I literally just selected three at random from today's feed. I think the only positive threads about AI here are typically new model releases. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48923079 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48921461 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48926590

Five of the top eleven posts right now are about AI:

1. Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model [https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/introducing-inkling/]

2. High-Bandwidth Flash offers efficient storage for model weights [https://spectrum.ieee.org/high-bandwidth-flash]

3. Grok Build is open source [https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build]

4. Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf] [https://www.siegelendowment.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/f...]

5. An Interactive Map of AI [https://artifipedia.com/map]

I would only say the discussion on #3 is particularly negative and as others mentioned Grok has a lot of its own baggage: Elon Musk, recently uploading home directories without asking, making sexual imagery of minors, etc. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/22/grok-ai-g...)

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So a little less than half of the top 10 stories are about AI and only 1 is negative but that one potentially has other factors at play.

Contrast this to how the general public feels about AI:

"A majority of registered voters, 57%, said they believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefits, compared with 34% who said the opposite. What’s more, a plurality of voters view AI negatively ... Just 26% of voters say they have positive feelings about AI, compared with 46% who hold negative views. In fact, the only topics with a lower net positive rating than AI in the NBC News survey were the Democratic Party and Iran."

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-majority...

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Given all that, I would say HN has a more pro-AI bias than the general population. Do you disagree?

Re: We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes

#117

Post by gumby » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 4:52 AM UTC

tony_cannistra wrote: post #62

ryanthedev wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the eye roll is the need to shout that you don’t use AI. It’s the new web dev, imo. This post wasn’t about sparking conversation. It’s about using AI makes me lose the human touch in what I do, blah blah, heard it all before. Sorry, not sorry.

TFA raises several points I hadn't heard before. Here's one. The artifacts we produce define our culture. If we allow LLMs to produce our work, our culture represents that which they understand. But LLMs can't be trained on the entirety of the human experience. "How dare we abandon so many countless traditions and people and ideas and nuances, simply because they are underrepresented in the training data?" I just fe…

The LLM is the next generation of 20th century culture. Until the early 20th century, all stories (from before homer to Shakespeare, through Dickens and so on), music etc we continual remix and interpretation. But as recording became possible and then film, cultural elements mixed with law adopted expensive production and started to become more locked down. Corporations (which are just machines themselves) made musical acts whose members were just actors playing a role (still happens today with K-pop being the most successful). Disney colonized the public domain and drowned out the origins, with their versions becoming canonical

But consumers were willing participants. Rather than make a costume of your favorite character people now preferentially seek out licensed versions of dolls, costumes, “official” soundtracks etc rather than treating it all as just more raw material for your own imagination.

I’m not saying there isn’t fanfic and remix culture as well but when was the last time you saw a kid with a home-made “character” T-shirt? They even buy sport jerseys with the ads included!

So the mechanical slop infiltrating culture is just the current apotheosis of this process atrophy of the imagination. Truly it is degenerative AI

Re: We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes

#118

Post by what » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 5:05 AM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #108

what wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last one isn’t negative because of AI but because of grok/elon.

Sure and OpenAI articles aren’t negative because of Sam Altman, Anthropic articles aren’t negative because of Dario etc…

They could be. But you’re delusional if you think people don’t shit on grok because of the association to Elon. Or it’s just a shitty model, who knows.

Re: We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes

#119

Post by archagon » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 5:55 AM UTC

tony_cannistra wrote: post #47

I'm the op on this one (not the author). Gotta say, I had higher hopes for the community here. Isn't it worthwhile to examine our patterns of thinking and work? Shouldn't alternative perspectives such as these spark conversation, rather than sly jibes? HN grew from curiosity and good-faith. Y'all are not showing up.

The hacker intelligentsia is long gone from this site. It’s little more than a VC/tech merc mixer.

Re: We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes

#120

Post by mass-driver » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 6:59 AM UTC

combray wrote: post #99

mass-driver wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To answer your first question: almost all good fonts start with sketches on paper. Every tool has a kind of grain, a sort of ‘shape language’ it pushes you towards making, and the bézier curves fonts use internally are surprisingly opinionated. The first few months of any new typeface involve switching between physical and digital drawings frequently, trying to make sure no single tool has too much influence over the…

My point, and maybe it's overly simplistic, is that at some point you are using the computer to make computer fonts. At some point the ideas go into the computer and you are using computer tools to build the font. They start in the shower or from the finger feel of carving stones whatever, but before and after AI computer fonts are built with computer software tools. Carving rocks, sure, human hands. The idea that AI…

It’s not about throwing out the process, it’s about making sure the end product is the result of intentional decisions rather than just going with the flow of whatever tool is being used. The grain isn’t intrinsically bad, but in a performant typeface you’re going to be reading for hours at a time, over-reliance on a single tool will noticeably harm the readability.

By switching between digital and analogue drawing tools, you’re translating the work between different media, and the act of translation is what smooths over the bumps of any single tool.

AI might eventually become good at fiddling with the béziers, but doing that part manually is an essential part of the process. If you don’t fully understand how the béziers naturally behave (and when to lean into or push back against that, for both aesthetic and technical reasons), the end result will be meaningfully worse.