I am leaving the AI party after one drink • Hacker News Board

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#21

Post by JPKab » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

legitster wrote: post #7

> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. There are a lot of good reasons we should be skeptical of AI and not give up on essential skills. But sometimes I want to shake these people by the shoulders. Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave?…

Excellent point on the automatic car.

I love driving a manual transmission. But I also understood why it was so hard for me to find a new Jeep Wrangler with a manual transmission a few years ago.

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#22

Post by coxmi » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

legitster wrote: post #7

> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. There are a lot of good reasons we should be skeptical of AI and not give up on essential skills. But sometimes I want to shake these people by the shoulders. Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave?…

This is an insane claim:

> The entire point of civilization and society is that we are all "addicted" to technology and progress.

Technology is like much of material reality, in that we can think whatever the hell we like about its various forms, especially so if we’re surrounded by it.

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#23

Post by deadbabe » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

legitster wrote: post #7

> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. There are a lot of good reasons we should be skeptical of AI and not give up on essential skills. But sometimes I want to shake these people by the shoulders. Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave?…

> Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave? Do you buy food from a grocery store? Do you own power tools?

The answer to these questions could easily be no, and life is way better for it.

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#24

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

legitster wrote: post #7

> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. There are a lot of good reasons we should be skeptical of AI and not give up on essential skills. But sometimes I want to shake these people by the shoulders. Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave?…

[deleted]

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#25

Post by tines » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:13 PM UTC

JPKab wrote: post #14

"I'm not going to use this technology that obviously enhances my productivity because ." I think a lot of people have forgotten why we actually get paid to write code. The person who wants an automated billing system doesn't care if you hand-typed it or not, or if the CSS that would have taken 2 hours to write took 8 seconds via an AI plus 60 seconds of you tweaking a border you didn't like. They just want their bill…

Give me Understanding or give me death.

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#26

Post by andai » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:13 PM UTC

Reposting a comment (and one of the replies) since it's relevant:

---

It occurred to me on my walk today that a program is not the only output of programming. The other, arguably far more important output, is the programmer.

The mental model that you, the programmer, build by writing the program.

And -- here's the million dollar question -- can we get away with removing our hands from the equation? You may know that knowledge lives deeper than "thought-level" -- much of it lives in muscle memory. You can't glance at a paragraph of a textbook, say "yeah that makes sense" and expect to do well on the exam. You need to be able to produce it.

(Many of you will remember the experience of having forgotten a phone number, i.e. not being able to speak or write it, but finding that you are able to punch it into the dialpad, because the muscle memory was still there!)

The recent trend is to increase the output called programs, but decrease the output called programmers. That doesn't exactly bode well.

See also: Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

---

Munksgaard 1 day ago:

Peter Naur had that realization back in 1985: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#27

Post by sunir » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

tines wrote: post #16

legitster wrote: post #7

> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. There are a lot of good reasons we should be skeptical of AI and not give up on essential skills. But sometimes I want to shake these people by the shoulders. Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave?…

The problem is that you're likening fundamentally unlike things. AI isn't like a microwave or an automatic car or a power tool. It does not augment you. As I said elsewhere: AI is not a bicycle for the mind, it's an easy chair. You will lose more than you ever gain.

Dubious. Ai psychosis is the opposite. It’s about being empowered to explore ideas much further but with a maladaptive tool designed to be an appeaser by reinforcement learning.

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#28

Post by TaupeRanger » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.”

Getting a feeling of "wanting to keep going" with something does not automatically make it an "addiction".

> I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with.

A tale as old as time, and a valid feeling, though not particularly helpful to dwell on since the technology will never go away and never get worse than it is right now.

> I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore.

Your brain will think about other important things and you don't need to become "lazy" just because a machine is doing something that used to require more effort on your part.

> I enjoy technical discussions with (human) co-workers.

So what? You can still have those discussion.

> I enjoy reading blog posts and tutorials and learning from other developers.

So what? You can still read those blogs, but the subjects might shift away from coding minutiae to other topics.

> I want to learn and grow and become better at what I am doing by trial and error and mistakes I make all by myself.

Going forward, that trial and error process will start to happen more at the product/project level rather than the source code level.

> I don’t want to be part of a trend/hype destroying our planet even faster than we already do without it.

It isn't. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#29

Post by sunir » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

coxmi wrote: post #22

legitster wrote: post #7

> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. There are a lot of good reasons we should be skeptical of AI and not give up on essential skills. But sometimes I want to shake these people by the shoulders. Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave?…

This is an insane claim: > The entire point of civilization and society is that we are all "addicted" to technology and progress. Technology is like much of material reality, in that we can think whatever the hell we like about its various forms, especially so if we’re surrounded by it.

It’s not insane. They are correct that is the point of civilization which carries information from generation to generation outside the oral tradition in a systematic organized reliable way.

Re: I am leaving the AI party after one drink

#30

Post by mr_mitm » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

legitster wrote: post #7

> I don’t want to feel this kind of “addiction.” > I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with. > I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore. There are a lot of good reasons we should be skeptical of AI and not give up on essential skills. But sometimes I want to shake these people by the shoulders. Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave?…

Douglas Adams really put it best:

> “I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies,” writes Douglas Adams in The Salmon of Doubt.

> 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

> 2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

> 3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.