Don't fall into the anti-AI hype • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by kibwen » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 4:54 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #173

wasmainiac wrote: post #168

These personal blogs are starting to feel like Linkdin Lunatic posts, kinda similar. to the optimised floor sweeping blog, “I am excited to provide shareholder value, at minimum wage”

What does it tell you that programmers with the credibility of antirez - and who do not have an AI product to sell you - are writing things like this even when they know a lot of people aren't going to like reading them?

What it tells me is that humans are fallible, and that being a competent programmer has no correlation with having strong mental defenses against the brainrot that typifies the modern terminally-online internet user.

I leverage LLMs where it makes sense for me to do so, but let's dispense with this FOMO silliness. People who choose not to aren't missing out on anything, any more than people who choose to use stock Vim rather than VSCode aren't missing out on anything.

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

#342

Post by UncleEntity » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 4:55 PM UTC

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…

>> ...however they are poor utility for non-domain-experts.

IDK, just two days ago I had a bug report/fix accepted by a project which I would have never dreamt of digging into as what it does is way outside my knowledge base. But Claude got right on in there and found the problem after a few rounds of printf debugging which lead to an assertion we would have hit with a debug build which led to the solution. Easy peasy and I still have no idea how the other library does its thing at all as Claude was using it to do this other thing.

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

#343

Post by echelon » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 4:57 PM UTC

I love Antirez.

> However, this technology is far too important to be in the hands of a few companies.

This is the most important assessment and we should all heed this warning with great care. If we think hyperscalers are bad, imagine what happens if they control and dictate the entire future.

Our cellphones are prisons. We have no fundamental control, and we can't freely distribute software amongst ourselves. Everything flows through funnels of control and monitoring. The entire internet and all of technology could soon become the same.

We need to bust this open now or face a future where we are truly serfs.

I'm excited by AI and I love what it can do, but we are in a mortally precarious position.

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

#344

Post by mirror_neuron » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

wpm wrote: post #331

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right of course. For me there’s no flow state possible with LLM “coding”. That makes it feel miserable instead of joyous. Sitting around waiting while it spits out tokens that I then have to carefully look over and tweak feels like very hard work. Compared to entering flow and churning out those tokens myself, which feels effortless once I get going. Probably other people feel differently.

I'm the same way. LLMs are still somewhat useful as a way to start a greenfield project, or as a very hyper-custom google search to have it explain something to me exactly how I'd like it explained, or generate examples hyper-tuned for the problem at hand, but that's hardly as transformative or revolutionary as everyone is making Claude Code out to be. I loathe the tone these things take with me and hate how much ext…

I’m a “LLM believer” in a sense, and not someone who derives joy from actually typing out the tokens in my code, but I also agree with you about the hype surrounding Claude Code and “agentic” systems in general. I have found the three positive use cases you mentioned to be transformative to my workflow on its own. I’m grateful that they exist even if they never get better than they are today.

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

#345

Post by biophysboy » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #160

systemf_omega wrote: post #8

What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an early adopter have for AI tools? The way I see it, I can just start using AI once they get good enough for my type of work. Until then I'm continuing to learn instead of letting my brain atrophy.

This is a pretty common position: "I don't worry about getting left behind - it will only take a few weeks to catch up again". I don't think that's true. I'm really good at getting great results out of coding agents and LLMs. I've also been using LLMs for code on an almost daily basis since ChatGPT's release on November 30th 2022. That's more than three years ago now. Meanwhile I see a constant flow of complaints fro…

What are your tips? Any resources you would recommend? I use Claude code and all the chat bots, but my background isn't programming, so I sometimes feel like I'm just swimming around.

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

#346

Post by BananaaRepublik » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

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...

This sounds like an alien trying and failing to describe why people like creating things. No, the typing of characters in a keyboard has no special meaning, neither does dragging a brush across a canvas or pulling thread through fabric. It's the primitive desire to create something by your own hands. Have people using AI magically lost all understanding of creativity or creation, everything has to be utilitarian and business?

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

#347

Post by biophysboy » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

edg5000 wrote: post #98

> state of the art LLMs are able to complete large subtasks or medium size projects alone, almost unassisted, given a good set of hints about what the end result should be No. I agree with the author, but it's hyperbolic of him to phrase it like this. If you have solid domain knowledge, you'll steer the model with detailed specs. It will carry those out competently and multiply your productivity. However, the quality…

I feel like a lot of the disagreement over this "large project" capability is that "large project" can mean anything. It can mean something that has a trillion github repos to work with, or it can mean something that is basically uncharted territory.

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

#348

Post by ironman1478 » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

I'm not sure what to make of these technologies. I read about people doing all these things with them and it sounds impressive. Then when I use it, it feels like the tool produces junior level code unless I babysit it, then it really can produce what I want.

If I have to do all this babysitting, is it really saving me anything other than typing the code? It hasn't felt like it yet and if anything it's scary because I need to always read the code to make sure it's valid, and reading code is harder than writing it.

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

#349

Post by curt15 » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

phicoh wrote: post #198

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…

The problem I see is not so much in how you generate the code. It is about how to maintain the code. If you check in the AI generated code unchanged then do you start changing that code by hand later? Do you trust that in the future AI can fix bugs in your code. Or do you clean up the AI generated code first?

There is a related issue of ownership. When human programmers make errors that cost revenue or worse, there is (in theory) a clear chain of accountability. Who do you blame if errors generated by LLMs end up in mission critical software?

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

#350

Post by golly_ned » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

As long as I'm not reviewing PRs with thousands of lines net new that weren't even read by their PR submitter, I'm fine with anything. The software design I've seen from AI code agent using peers has been dreadful.

I think for some who are excited about AI programming, they're happy they can build a lot more things. I think for others, they're excited they can build the same amount of things, but with a lot less thinking. The agent and their code reviewers can do the thinking for them.