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

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

#421

Post by bossyTeacher » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 10:43 PM UTC

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #311

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…

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.

This.

To me, using an LLMs is more like having a team of ghostwriters writing your novel. Sure, you "built" your novel but it feels entirely different to writing it yourself.

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

#422

Post by lrvick » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 10:43 PM UTC

As a security engineer that regularly architects and helps implement new defense tactics that no LLM has trained on, I choose not to use LLMs at all, like a cave man.

Being differently trained and using different tools than almost everyone else I know in engineering my entire career has allowed me to find solutions and vulnerabilities others have missed time and time again. I exclusively use open source software I can always take apart, fully understand, and modify as I like. This inclination has served me well and is why I have the skillsets I do today.

If everyone is doing things one way, I instinctively want to explore all the other ways to train my own brain to continue to be adversarial and with a stamina to do hard experiments by hand when no tools exist to automate them yet.

Watching all my peers think more and more alike actually scares me, as they are all talking to the same LLMs. None for me, thanks.

"But this magic proprietary tool makes my job so much easier!!" has never been a compelling argument for me.

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

#423

Post by sauercrowd » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 10:44 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…

> and hate how much extra bullshit I didn't ask for they always add to the output.

I can recommend for that problem to make the "jumps" smaller, e.g. "Add a react component for the profile section, just put a placeholder for now" instead of "add a user profile".

With coding LLMs there's a bit of a hidden "zoom" functionality by doing that, which can help calibrating the speed/involvment/thinking you and the LLM does.

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

#424

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 10:45 PM UTC

lins1909 wrote: post #392

threethirtytwo wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is not about whether programming is fun, elegant, creative, or personally fulfilling. It is about business value. Programming exists, at scale, because it produces economic value. That value translates into revenue, leverage, competitive advantage, and ultimately money. For decades, a large portion of that value could only be produced by human labor. Now, increasingly, it cannot be assumed that this will…

Why do you say this subjective thing so confidently? Does believing what you just wrote make you feel better? Have you considered that there are people who actually just enjoy programming by themselves?

[deleted]

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

#425

Post by hollowturtle » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 10:46 PM UTC

remix2000 wrote: post #413

Honestly, coding with a chatbot's "help" just slows me down. Also the progress in chatbot space is minimal (at least it feels like that from an end user perspective), essentially nonexistent since like 2024. I only use them cause all search engines are broken on purpose now. It's truly terrible times we live in, but not because the robots could replace us, rather because nontechnical managers are detached from realit…

The worst blow for me was search engines, you're so right that are broken on purpose now, that's a total bummer. Also wondering how Google is not loosing money from non shown ads in search

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

#426

Post by wild_egg » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 10:47 PM UTC

csmpltn wrote: post #414

simonw wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So where’s all of this cutting edge amazing and flawless stuff you’ve built in a weekend that everybody else couldn’t because they were too dumb or slow or clueless?

This is such a tired response at this point.

People are under zero obligation to release their work to the public. Simon actually publishes and writes about a remarkable amount of the side projects he builds with AI.

The rest of us just build tons of cool stuff for personal use or for $JOB. Releasing stuff to the public is, in general, a massive amount of extra work for very little benefit. There are loads of FOSS maintainers trapped spending as much time managing their communities as they do their actual projects and many of us just don't have time for that.

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

#427

Post by nephihaha » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 10:47 PM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #411

nephihaha wrote: post #408

Universal Basic Income is not the panacea it's claimed to be. UBI gives government more control over individuals' finances, especially those without independent means. Poverty is also the result of unfair taxation, where poor people face onerous taxes while receiving less and less in return, and the wealthy avoid tax at every turn. Or that it is difficult for people to be self-employed due to red tape favouring big b…

Shallow dismissals are against HN Guidelines, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The term "shallow" is entirely subjective here. I have edited the comment accordingly because of your reaction.

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

#428

Post by buu700 » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 10:48 PM UTC

jt2190 wrote: post #285

phicoh wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

LLMs remove the familiarity of “I wrote this and deeply understand this”. In other words, everything is “legacy code” now ;-) For those who are less experienced with the constant surprises that legacy code bases can provide, LLMs are deeply unsettling.

I see where you're coming from, and I agree with the implication that this is more of an issue for inexperienced devs. Having said that, I'd push back a bit on the "legacy" characterization.

For me, if I check in LLM-generated code, it means I've signed off on the final revision and feel comfortable maintaining it to a similar degree as though it were fully hand-written. I may not know every character as intimately as that of code I'd finished writing by hand a day ago, but it shouldn't be any more "legacy" to me than code I wrote by hand a year ago.

It's a bit of a meme that AI code is somehow an incomprehensible black box, but if that is ever the case, it's a failure of the user, not the tool. At the end of the day, a human needs to take responsibility for any code that ends up in a product. You can't just ship something that people will depend on not to harm them without any human ever having had the slightest idea of what it does under the hood.

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

#429

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 10:49 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #341

simonw wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Vi…

It's not Vim vs VSCode though - the analogy might be writing in assembler vs writing in your high level language of choice.

Using AI you're increasing the level of abstraction you can work at, and reducing the amount of detail you have to worry about. You tell the AI what you want to do, not how to do it, other than providing context that does tell it about the things that you actually care about (as much or little as you choose, but generally the more the better to achieve a specific outcome).

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

#430

Post by stareatgoats » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 10:52 PM UTC

Not even antirez can sway the skeptics here. People that have garnered too many upvotes in the countless comments about how worthless AI is compared to real programmers will need much more to leave their fortresses.

But maybe we should cherish these people. Maybe it's among them we find the embryo to the resistance - people who held out when most of us were seduced - seduced into giving the machine all our knowledge, all our skills, all the secrets about us we were not even aware of ourselves - and setting it up to be orders of magnitude more intelligent than any of us, combined. And finally - just as mean, vindictive and selfish as most of the people in the training data on which it was trained.

Maybe it's good to stay skeptical a bit longer.