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

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

#521

Post by simonw » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:01 AM UTC

llmslave3 wrote: post #448

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…

Why do you care so much to write a blog post? Like if it's such a big advantage, why not stay quiet and exploit it? Why not make Anti-AI blog posts to gain even more of an advantage? One of the big red flags I see around the pro-AI side is this constant desire to promote the technology. At least the anti-ai side is reactionary.

"Like if it's such a big advantage, why not stay quiet and exploit it?"

Maybe he's a generous person.

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

#522

Post by harel » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:02 AM UTC

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…

I don't think UBI will be enough. All existing debt needs to be erased as well. Otherwise, UBI means nothing if it all goes to repay old debt. If UBI is less than my mortgage, bills and other loan repayments, what good is it?

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

#523

Post by williamcotton » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:04 AM 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?

Over the last few days I made this ggplot2-looking plotting DSL as a CLI tool and a Rust library.

https://github.com/williamcotton/gramgraph

The motivation? I needed a declarative plotting language for another DSL I'm working on called Web Pipe:

  GET /weather.svg
    |> fetch: `https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=52.52&longitude=13.41&hourly=temperature_2m`
    |> jq: `
      .data.response.hourly as $h |
      [$h.time, $h.temperature_2m] | transpose | map({time: .[0], temp: .[1]})
    `
    |> gg({ "type": "svg", "width": 800, "height": 400} ): `
      aes(x: time, y: temp) 
        | line()
        | point()
    `

"Web Pipe is an experimental DSL and Rust runtime for building web apps via composable JSON pipelines, featuring native integration of GraphQL, SQL, and jq, an embedded BDD testing framework, and a sophisticated Language Server."

https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe

https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe-lsp

https://williamcotton.com/articles/basic-introduction-to-web...

I've been working at quite a clip for a solo developer who is building a new language with a full featured set of tooling.

I'd like to think that the approach to building the BDD-testing framework directly into the language itself and having the test runner using the production request handlers is at least somewhat novel!

  GET /hello/:world
    |> jq: `{ world: .params.world }`
    |> handlebars: `hello, {{world}}`

  describe "hello, world"
    it "calls the route"
      let world = "world"
      
      when calling GET /hello/{{world}}
      then status is 200
      and selector `p` text equals "hello, {{world}}"

I'm married with two young kids and I have a full-time job. Before these tools there was no way I could build all of these experiments with such limited resources.

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

#524

Post by christophilus » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:05 AM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #220

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 far every new AI product and even model update has required me to relearn how to get decent results out of them. I'm honestly kind of sick of having to adjust my work flow every time. The intuition just doesn't hold. The LLM gets trained and retrained by other LLM users so what works for me suddenly changes when the LLM models refresh. LLMs have only gotten easier to learn and catch up on over the years. In fact,…

Really? Claude Code upgrades for me have been pretty seamless- basically better quality output, given the same prompts, with no discernible downsides.

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

#525

Post by sensanaty » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:08 AM UTC

dkdcio wrote: post #78

Ekaros wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By their promises it should get so good that basically you do not need to learn it. So it is reasonable to wait until that point.

this is a straw man, nobody serious is promising that. it is a skill like any other that requires learning

Nobody serious, like every single AI CEO out there? I mean I agree, nobody should be taking them seriously, yet we're fast on track for a global financial meltdown because of these fraudsters and their "non-serious" words.

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

#526

Post by neilv » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:15 AM UTC

> How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was ingested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that,

That's fine if he feels that way, but he can only speak for himself, not for all the copyright holders of the other code that was "ingested" to power LLMs.

If you want to see how most creators who care about their work and actually own it (unlike most software), look at many book authors and illustrators. Many of whom have a burning hatred for AI bros not only stealing their work, but also then using it to destroy the livelihoods of their field.

A lot of the techbros who do care about their work aren't feeling as wronged or threatened, because we're trying to pivot to get a piece of the pie, from all the exploitation and pillaging of many fields.

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

#527

Post by catlover76 » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:16 AM 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.

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

#528

Post by ATMLOTTOBEER » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:18 AM UTC

Diti wrote: post #462

jstummbillig wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no hard part. The anti-AI position has simply become trite. The idea is that agentic coding does not work. Today, it does work.

It only works for languages and frameworks that are already in the training data (duh). It still is mostly useless when you need to create something from scratch in an unstable language. That, and you can’t also get the amazing results if you’re poor or have bad internet.

Opus 4.5 and update your priors. This was certainly true >6months back and is no longer the case

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

#529

Post by simonw » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:23 AM UTC

neilv wrote: post #526

> How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was ingested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that, That's fine if he feels that way, but he can only speak for himself, not for all the copyright holders of the other code that was "ingested" to power LLMs. If you want to see how most creators who care about their work and actually own it (unlike most software), look at many book authors and illustrators. Many of w…

I expect book authors and artists to have very different opinions on this than programmers, because there isn't really a book/art equivalent of deliberately sharing open source libraries for other people to integrate into their projects.

The closest is probably music sampling, which has had a very robust money-based licensing scheme built around it for many years.

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

#530

Post by danzero » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 1:26 AM UTC

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