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

Saying "code is just a means to an end" is like saying a Car is just a Vehicle to get from A to B. Which is true to a certain amount of people, but certainly not to people who need a special car like a truck and certainly not to the people who build cars. Developers are car builders.

No it doesn't, that is the MBA thought process of exponential curves of endless sales that always ends in layoffs when real world physics reality check kicks in.

The amount of customers willing to buy a specific product is limited.

"Business-optimal" is not the same as "optimal".

> AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.

It is strange to me that your question is so narrowly scoped, as though code is the only current use of AI and as though bugs are the reason to be against it and not a clear existential crisis that the world has not demonstrated any capability to meet.

The end goal of AI, literally the goal, is to make it so that workers aren't needed anymore. Ignore for the moment that AI isn't good enough right now to have eliminated all the worker roles yet. That is still fundamentally its goal. You will tell the AI what you want, the AI will give you what you want, ..., profit. No nasty employees to deal with.

I would rejoice at this if I lived in a society that decided it would use the fruits of each new labor efficiency to provide for the populace instead of telling me that people who don't work should die in a gutter. But I do not live in such a society.

I can only speak for myself:

1) I'm incredibly allergic to hype. To me, LLMs are very technologically impressive. I don't doubt that they're useful for many things – adversarial code review (including finding exploits), refactoring, search and math exploration are some shoo-ins in my view. However, these and other applications speak for themselves. They are impressive. They don't need people running around telling everyone how they should use more LLMs. How "the old ways" are obsolete, etc. Awesomeness does not need a fanclub.

2) Usefulness in some areas doesn't necessarily extrapolate as well as the fanclub seems to think.

3) The fanclub happens to be aligned with some pretty unsavory people, and some powers that have very little regard for our shared planet. This is, of course, not the fault of the fanclub, but many in the fanclub certainly could do a better job distancing themselves from certain people and acknowledging certain regulatory necessities.

4) I think this revolution has revealed a dichotomy in the set of people who enjoy programming: those for whom the end goal reigns supreme, and those for whom the journey is the point. You yourself seem to be in the former group. As a member of the latter, I have to say we feel a bit invisible. We're also often accused of wanting to halt progress so that we can keep doing what we want. I think that's an unfair characterization (I won't go into details of why here).

5) A lot of people in a geeky community like this are naturally skeptical of relying on things that we ourselves can't control. It's part of why the FOSS movement succeeded. This is all very much on a collision course with at least SOTA LLMs.

6) A lot of us do intellectual work. We therefore rely on a functioning system of intellectual property. It seems that a large fraction of the pro-AI crowd subscribe to the idea that passing IP through an LLM can strip it of its original ownership. For points 1-5, I believe we should have a nuanced discussion and try to understand each other. On point 6, though, I think these people have lost their minds. I completely fail to understand how they themselves don't think they'll soon encounter face-eating leopards if their worldview holds water. There seems to be very little acknowledgement of this, and it makes me angry.