Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

Many reasons. Each person is an individual and you will learn most by seeking to engage with all the individual stories to empathise and understand. Ultimately it’s a very human thing to care, this is a big change and everyone deals with change differently. It’s a great start to see you caring and wanting to know more.

If I was an end user of a working product (AI or not), I wouldn't care.

At work generating and fixing loads of slop is less rewarding work than doing old coding, troubleshooting, article writing, whatever. The internet is full of fake blogs full of fake information. Youtube is full of fake videos and people reading LLM scripts. It feels impossible to share or appreciate small projects because it's so much harder to tell if any effort or thought went into something at all now. My parents can't tell what's real on social media. I'm less sure in my career path because I might spend my time learning skills that become useless in 5 years. I have conversations on the internet or Jira where people respond with LLM output (half the time saying "Claude says..." half the time not.) Kids are cheating their way through school. I'm probably getting dumber by using it.

There's plenty of reasons to be "anti-AI". It's not just a tool that's making programming more convenient.

also, not instead of.

Many of the people reading HN will be making a lot less money in two years. Some will be unemployed. Some will be homeless.

Human intelligence becomes less valuable in quantity as AI gets better. Being big and strong was once valuable. Not so much any more.

"When this machine learns your job, what are you going to do?"

> I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, but do people realize that code is just a means to an end

The means to an end I care about is that writing code was a means for me to make a living

People can pontificate all they want about how software engineering was never really about writing lines of code and at some abstract level they are correct

Your average software engineer still spends (spent?) a lot of their day writing code, it is the activity that delivered the actual value of our skills!

How do I deliver value to keep earning that paycheck now? It has been massively undercut away from me by AI systems. I do not see a good future for myself anymore

Am I not supposed to feel so negatively about it?

Edit:

Do you think the dinosaurs felt negatively about the meteor that wiped them out?

Do you think bombing victims think negatively about the planes dropping the bombs or the people flying them?

My question is this: Powerful people are trying to replace all valuable labor with AI. Why aren't you negative about it?