I Will Never Use AI to Code • Hacker News Board

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#41

Post by grasbergerm » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:18 AM UTC

It's fine if people don't want to use AI for anything, and honestly I don't even believe you need to justify it. The justification given here is interesting and I think shows misunderstanding.

At one point the author writes

> AI is a tool that can only produce software liabilities

which I would argue is completely caused by misuse of AI. Sure, you can have AI write a ton of code that often comes with subtle bugs. But using AI doesn't mean that it has to write any code for you at all. I've been using LLM often for security analysis and the results are quite good. Vulnerabilities that we had collectively missed were shown and we could fix them ourselves.

In this case, instead of creating liabilities, we were able to use LLM to get more information about our code. It's completely possible we could have deduced this information on our own, but we didn't and LLM is capable of doing it much more quickly than humans.

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#42

Post by globular-toast » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:19 AM UTC

ok_dad wrote: post #15

I was a hand tool woodworker, but the first time I had to rip 56 6 foot boards into 7 strips I immediately purchased a table saw. Now I use hand tools rarely because I find the speed and quality of my cuts are better. I still use hand tools for things that require certain standards, but electric tools almost always produce better quality results. It’s about the same for AI coding, I just get better results.

I think we have to be careful with such analogies. One does not have to have sweated for years with hand tools to understand what an accurate rip cut through ply looks like. On the other hand, if you just gave someone some rough cut wood and an electric sander, how would they even understand what that wood could look like having never used a good, sharp hand plane?

With AI coding we're talking about people producing abstract artifacts that most people do not understand and do not know how to test. These aren't just strips of board. They are little machines. So you shouldn't be asking whether you'd trust a table saw to cut your boards, you should be asking whether you'd trust someone who has never cut boards to build your table saw.

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#43

Post by mcbits » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:20 AM UTC

JSR_FDED wrote: post #13

SilverElfin wrote: post #3

This writing is terrible and immediately put me off. The ‘superfluous’ swearing that the author seems to be proud about is instead going to put off a lot of his potential audience. Anyways, the ideas are nothing new that people haven’t read before as far as arguments against AI and the AI industry.

I prefer this writing style 100x over the bland AI assisted garbage that I have to read every day. Give me something with an opinion, personality and evidence of battle scars any day. There’s actually extra signal here that helps me process what I’m reading. When I understand where the author is coming from I can extrapolate, attenuate and compare/contrast the content with my existing mental model far better.

> These are not the same thing. You don't develop skills by reading about them. You have to use them, to process the information, integrate what you've learnt into your existing mental schema,

My mental AI detector would classify that passage as AI-generated with confidence around 85%. It would be 95% if the list had stopped at three items. Regardless of who wrote it, it's the same style.

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#44

Post by Anoian » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:21 AM UTC

This resonates a lot with how I felt about it, too. I came to the conclusion that if you cannot fight it, join it and search for other things that can be fun. I wrote a blog post about it which I will link, but to give you a summary: People don't pay you for having fun, they pay you for solving problems and creating something that sells, and AI often makes me faster in achieving that. So the fight is futile. What remains valuable are the outcomes, so one should start owning the outcomes instead of the tool to achieve them. Find joy in solving real problems for real people, find joy in becoming one of the best at using AI and seeing usage of it itself as a craft one can be proud of, and find joy in producing quality output with AI. If AI is bad at producing quality outputs, wouldn't it be a lot of fun to figure out how to change that?

If you want to read my thoughts on the matter in more detail, here is my blog post: https://fabianletsch.de/blog/ai-made-me-hate-my-job/

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#45

Post by gonzo41 » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:21 AM UTC

kasperni wrote: post #10

I’ll never use a tractor. Real farming is done with a horse and plow.

not the best analogy. It's like industry has an ox pulling a plow and we just check back at the end of the day to see what's happened to the field.

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#46

Post by kasperni » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:23 AM UTC

gonzo41 wrote: post #45

kasperni wrote: post #10

I’ll never use a tractor. Real farming is done with a horse and plow.

not the best analogy. It's like industry has an ox pulling a plow and we just check back at the end of the day to see what's happened to the field.

Not everyone vibecodes

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#47

Post by serendipitice » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:39 AM UTC

mikebenfield wrote: post #4

I'm all in favor of talking about drawbacks of AI coding and potential future problems. No problem. But at this point just the blanket statement that you'll never use it is not reasonable. It's the equivalent of a master car mechanic seeing a robot that can pretty reliably rebuild a transmission in a few minutes saying "I'll never use that; I'll always do it myself." Okay, sure buddy. You keep taking 8 hours to do wh…

almost everything he says is reasonable and correct though. using AI does undermine understanding, and companies hiring less juniors will be the death of them. Also juniors using AI will be the death of deep understanding if they continue. Robots fixing cars is not an apt analogy because it's a rote task. LLMs are being used for far beyond rote tasks and that's where the danger lies. People forget that most frustration and struggle are crucial, not something to remove. And people especially beginners do not have the judgement to know when struggling is appropriate.

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#48

Post by archagon » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:59 AM UTC

ok_dad wrote: post #15

I was a hand tool woodworker, but the first time I had to rip 56 6 foot boards into 7 strips I immediately purchased a table saw. Now I use hand tools rarely because I find the speed and quality of my cuts are better. I still use hand tools for things that require certain standards, but electric tools almost always produce better quality results. It’s about the same for AI coding, I just get better results.

A table saw does not make decisions for you.

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#49

Post by ishanz » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:04 AM UTC

padjo wrote: post #14

AI discourse perfectly illustrates why you should just ignore people with view points on the extreme ends of the spectrum.

I don’t love that take. Extreme positions are often where the interesting ideas are, even if you don’t agree with them.

Re: I Will Never Use AI to Code

#50

Post by ishanz » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:06 AM UTC

altern8 wrote: post #8

We still know how to ride horses but we also drive cars, now. You want to be delivery service that takes 2 days instead of 30 minutes to bring you pizza so that you don't forget how to ride your horse..?

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