Why we don’t use AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#31

Post by majormajor » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 12:24 AM UTC

UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #17

rendang wrote: post #10

One could probably think of dozens of reasonable arguments for avoiding LLM use, but this one is awful. If LLMs actually are able to get more work done with fewer people aka "firing people" that would be wonderful for humankind. If you disagree and like getting less work done with more people, you are welcome to forego tractors, dishwashers, the steam engine, and all the rest.

Yeah. This has been an interesting cultural shift, especially with “the kids”. I’ve had at least a few people passionately tell me that using (non-generative, non-LLM) AI to assist with social network content moderation, is unethical, because it takes away jobs from people. Mind you, these are jobs in which people are exposed to CSAM, gore, etc. A fact that does not dissuade people of this view. There are certainly s…

I can't speak to outside the US, but here companies have gotten much more worker-hostile in the last 30 years and generally the economy has not delivered a bunch of wonderful new jobs to replace the ones that the information age already eliminated (let alone the ones that people are trying to eliminate now). A lot of new job growth is in relatively lower-paying and lower-stability roles.

Forty years ago I would've had a personal secretary for my engineering job, and most likely a private office. Now I get to manage more things myself in addition to being expected to be online 24x7 - so I'm not even convinced that eliminating those jobs improve things for the people who now get to self-serve instead of being more directly assisted.

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#32

Post by terminatornet » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 12:26 AM UTC

dacox wrote: post #16

The reflexive and moralistic anti-AI takes are starting to get more annoying than the actual AI slop

No they aren't.

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#33

Post by johnthedebs » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 12:28 AM UTC

barishnamazov wrote: post #11

I struggle with the "good guys vs bad guys" framing here. Is a small indie dev "dodgy" if they use AI to unblock a tricky C# problem so they can actually finish their game? Yarn Spinner seems to conflate "Enterprise Scale Replacement" (firing 500 support staff) with "assistive tooling" (a solo dev using GenAI for texture variants). By drawing such a hard line, they might be signaling virtue to their base, but they ar…

I think the only people they're calling "dodgy" are the ones offering these AI tools, and not the people using them.

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#34

Post by ta9000 » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 12:34 AM UTC

Here’s a paragraph summary of the story, written by Sonnet 4.5:

The Yarn Spinner team explains they don’t use AI in their game development tool despite having academic and professional backgrounds in machine learning—they’ve written books on it and gave talks about ML in games. Their position shifted around 2020 when they observed AI companies pivoting from interesting technical applications toward generative tools explicitly designed to replace workers or extract more output without additional hiring. They argue that firing people has become AI’s primary value proposition, with any other benefits being incidental. Rather than adopt technology for its own sake (“tool-driven development”), they focus on whether features genuinely help developers make better games. While they acknowledge numerous other AI problems exist and may revisit ML techniques if the industry changes, they currently refuse to use, integrate, or normalize AI tools because doing so would financially and socially support companies whose business model centers on eliminating jobs during a period when unemployment can be life-threatening.

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#35

Post by GaryBluto » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 12:47 AM UTC

barishnamazov wrote: post #11

I struggle with the "good guys vs bad guys" framing here. Is a small indie dev "dodgy" if they use AI to unblock a tricky C# problem so they can actually finish their game? Yarn Spinner seems to conflate "Enterprise Scale Replacement" (firing 500 support staff) with "assistive tooling" (a solo dev using GenAI for texture variants). By drawing such a hard line, they might be signaling virtue to their base, but they ar…

> I struggle with the "good guys vs bad guys" framing here.

It's because generative AI has become part of the "culture wars" and is therefore black and white to lots of people.

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#36

Post by Vaslo » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 12:47 AM UTC

This article is silly. Your employees are using AI to get shit done whether you like it or not. They are just being sneaky about it.

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#37

Post by pico303 » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 12:47 AM UTC

I’d love to work for a company like this, but when you said, “by the time we finished our doctorates,” I knew you were way out of my league.

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#38

Post by sheeh » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 12:50 AM UTC

cmcaleer wrote: post #26

localhoster wrote: post #2

I wish. I have just witnessed a engineer on our (small) team push a 4k line change to prod at the middle of the night. His message was: "lets merge and check it after". AI can help good team become better, but for sure it will make bad teams worse. I sorry friends, I think imma quit to farming :$

I don’t really see how this is an AI issue. We use AI all the time for code generation but if you put this on my desk with specific instructions to be light on review and it’s not a joke, I’m probably checking to see if you’re still on probation because that’s an attitude that’s incompatible with making good software. People with this kind of attitude existed long before AI and will continue to exist.

Making good software isn’t what matters in most workplaces - making software that works (even if you have taped over the cracks) is.

It’s always been this way in toxic workplaces - LLM’s amplify this.

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#39

Post by kklisura » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 12:55 AM UTC

> AI is now a tool for firing people

In essence we have an ownership problem. If I own the AI, I can do my work in couple of hours and then some and then have rest of the day off to enjoy things I like. If the company owns AI - I'm out of work. The difference between a world of plenty and beauty vs the world of misery for many of us - is who owns the AI.

Re: Why we don’t use AI

#40

Post by leetrout » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 12:57 AM UTC

goobert wrote: post #29

It's like saying we won't use compilers because it puts all the people who would manually create punch cards out of a job

There is a difference here, though. Compilers and the languages they enable aren't out-and-out ripping off previous creations.

Lots of folks are mad about how the power of these tools comes from training things they put out in the open but didn't intend to be used to enrich or exclude others like this technology is enabling.

Interesting times ahead... it's so powerful people who ignore it are going to get left behind to some degree. (I say this as someone who actively avoids kubernetes and it does give off the vibe I've been left behind compared to my peers who do resume driven development.)