Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

antirez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 1001 posts

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#241

Post by antirez »

oulipo2 wrote: post #190
antirez wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't see this by working with Claude Code for a few weeks, I don't want to go into bigger efforts than writing a blog post to convince you. It's not a mission, mine. I just want to communicate with the part of people that are open enough to challenge their ideas and are willing to touch with their hands what is happening. Also, if you tried and failed, it means that either for your domain AI is not good enoug…

okay, but again: if you say in your blog that those are "facts", then... show us the facts? You can't just hand-wavily say "a bigger percentage of programmers is using AI with success every day" and not give a link to a study that shows it's true as a matter of fact, we know that a lot of companies have fired people by pretending that they are no longer needed in the age of AI... only to re-hire offshored people for…

1. If you can't convince yourself, after downloading Claude Code or Codex and playing with them for 1 week, that programming is completely revolutionized, there is nothing I can do: you have it at your fingertips and you search for facts I should communicate for you.

2. The US alone air conditioning usage is around 4 times the energy / CO2 usage of all the world data centers (not just AI) combined together. AI is 10% of the data centers usage, so just AC is 40 times that.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#242

Post by tuesdaynight »

simonw wrote: post #192
falloutx wrote: post #131

Where is this Anti-AI hype? We are seeing 100x videos of Claude Code & Vibe Coding and then may be we get 1 or 2 people saying "Maybe we should be cautious"

I would count about two-thirds of the comments in this thread as anti-AI hype, and this thread is pretty mild in that regard compared to most other threads here about AI for code. And this is Hacker News, which you might expect to attract people who thrive on exploring the edges of weird new technology!

I don't have decades of experience under my belt, but I feel like the reaction is happening mostly because it is the first time that developers are at the risk of being automated out of work. "Learn a new field" is easy to say when you are not the one that will need to do it. Now a lot of developers are afraid of having to follow the advice that they gave to a lot of workers.

I don't believe that AI will put most of the working force out of jobs. That would be so different from what we had in history that I think the chances are minimal. However, they are not zero, and that is scary as fuck for a lot of people.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#243

Post by simonw »

oulipo2 wrote: post #190
antirez wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't see this by working with Claude Code for a few weeks, I don't want to go into bigger efforts than writing a blog post to convince you. It's not a mission, mine. I just want to communicate with the part of people that are open enough to challenge their ideas and are willing to touch with their hands what is happening. Also, if you tried and failed, it means that either for your domain AI is not good enoug…

okay, but again: if you say in your blog that those are "facts", then... show us the facts? You can't just hand-wavily say "a bigger percentage of programmers is using AI with success every day" and not give a link to a study that shows it's true as a matter of fact, we know that a lot of companies have fired people by pretending that they are no longer needed in the age of AI... only to re-hire offshored people for…

How does widespread access to AI tools increase inequalities?

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#244

Post by fabianholzer »

dom96 wrote: post #2

> As a programmer, I want to write more open source than ever, now. I want to write less, just knowing that LLM models are going to be trained on my code is making me feel more strongly than ever that my open source contributions will simply be stolen. Am I wrong to feel this? Is anyone else concerned about this? We've already seen some pretty strong evidence of this with Tailwind.

> Am I wrong to feel this?

Why would a feeling be invalid? You have one life, you are under no obligation to produce clean training material, much less feel bad about this.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#245

Post by on_the_train »

Another one of these sickening pieces. Framing opposition to an expensive tech that doesn't work as "anti". I tried letting the absolutely newest models write c++ today again. Gpt 5.1 and opus 4.5. single function with two or less input parameters, a nice return value, doing simple geometry with the glm library. Yes the code worked. But I took as long fixing the weird parts as it would have taken me myself. And I still don't trust the result, because reviewing is so much harder than writing.

There's still no point. Resharper and clang-tidy still have more value than all LLMs. It's not just a hype, it's a bloody cult, right besides those nft and church of COVID people.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#246

Post by Trasmatta »

bakugo wrote: post #62

> LLMs are going to help us to write better software No, I really don't think they will. Software has only been getting worse, and LLMs are accelerating the rate at which incompetent developers can pump out low quality code they don't understand and can't possibly improve.

Exactly. Many of us have learned, after decades of experience, that more code and more features is not a net positive. Lots of additional code is a liability that your carefully accept given the value it provides.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#247

Post by teeeew »

omnicognate wrote: post #238
embedding-shape wrote: post #95

> But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. I think there is a section of programmer who actually do…

> do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer and from the first line of the article: > I love writing software, line by line. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't write programs "line by line" and typing isn't programming. I work out code in the abstract away from the keyboard before typing it out, and it's not the typing part that is the bottleneck. Last time I…

That’s because you’re a subset of software engineers who know what they’re doing and cares about rigour and so on.

There’s many who’s thinking is not so deep nor sharp as yours - LLM’s are welcomed by them but come at a tremendous cost to their cognition and the firms future well-being of its code base. Because this cost is implicit and not explicit it doesn’t occur to them.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#248

Post by tarsinge »

frizlab wrote: post #119
embedding-shape wrote: post #95

> But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. I think there is a section of programmer who actually do…

> I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer, and for them, I understand LLMs remove the fun part. Exactly me.

Conversely I have very little interest in the process of programming by itself, all the magic is about the end result and the business value for me (which fortunately has served me quite well professionally). As young as I remember I was fascinated with the GUI DBMS (4th Dimension/FileMaker/MS Access/…) my dad used to improve his small business. I only got into programming only to not be limited by graphical tools. So LLMs for me are just a nice addition in my toolbox, like a power tool is to a manual one. It doesn’t philosophically changes anything.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#249

Post by simonw »

on_the_train wrote: post #245

Another one of these sickening pieces. Framing opposition to an expensive tech that doesn't work as "anti". I tried letting the absolutely newest models write c++ today again. Gpt 5.1 and opus 4.5. single function with two or less input parameters, a nice return value, doing simple geometry with the glm library. Yes the code worked. But I took as long fixing the weird parts as it would have taken me myself. And I sti…

Did you try telling the model to write the unit tests first, watch them fail, then write a function that passes them?

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#250

Post by thunky »

adityaathalye wrote: post #27

Don't fall into the "Look ma, no hands" hype. Antirez + LLM + CFO = Billion Dollar Redis company, quite plausibly. /However/ ... As for the delta provided by an LLM to Antirez, outside of Redis (and outside of any problem space he is already intimately familiar with), an Apples to Apples comparison would be he trying this on an equally complex codebase he has no idea about. I'll bet... what Antirez can do with Redis…

> And pretty much everyone, no matter how good, cannot get there with code-reading alone. With software at least, we need to develop a mental model of the thing by futzing about with the thing in deeply meaningful ways

LLMs help with that part too. As Antirez says:

Writing code is no longer needed for the most part. It is now a lot more interesting to understand what to do, and how to do it (and, about this second part, LLMs are great partners, too).

Post reply on HN