Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to bring out one side or other.
As for why the community is divided, there's always a temptation to come up with HN-specific explanations, but society as a whole is divided about AI. Surely that is the only explanation one needs. As I've been saying for years, HN can't be immune from macro trends: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I haven't had the patience or mentality to really absorb "ok but how is this useful" until that thread and your highlighted references. Thank you for the curated highlights, however brief it may be, because it's very hard to find such diamonds without dedicating far too much time wading through the abstract gatekept comments on the topic, in most cases. Real world examples give me much hope!
It’s not even a dichotomy, A vs B, especially when you consider “AI” is incredibly poorly defined. There are many new technologies available, and I have nuanced opinions about all of them.
I’m happy that my friend who works in plastics manufacturing can move his monstrosity of an Excel spreadsheet to something more predictable and maintainable. I’m deeply annoyed by my coworker who’s trying to put a chatbot in our UI.
Well, it looks this post has already been flagged down onto page 7.
And IIRC, the same thing happened to the "oh shit" moment thread you linked to. Did the mods have to intervene to get it back on the front page?
HN might not be anti-AI, but I feel like the way flags are weighted by the ranking allows some users that are extremely anti-AI to create the impression that it is.
I tend to agree with your overall point, but I think you reveal far more about yourself than you accurately reflect anything about HN. Just read back what you wrote:
> AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues
You want to ship major bugs to your users, let them find them, report them and fix them afterwards. You passively assume this is a good way to build software without even really questioning it.
Aside from some people just not liking this in principle, there are a lot of contexts where bugs cause actual harm and cost actual money. In some cases, "people dying" and "go to jail for it" type harm.
If everyone does it and the majority of users are captured in ways that they wont or cant seek out alternatives then shipping bugs to users, letting them find amd report them and then fixing them is business-optimal.
It would potentially be more business-optimal to ship fewer bugs if everyone else is shipping more bugs. Your development cycle would be costlier, but users would prefer to buy your products over others.
The post asks a question and then presents a strong opinion with the confidence of it being a fact. There is a pretence of curiosity veiling a complaint. I think it is this perceived lack of curiosity, casual exaggeration (“10X faster”) and implication of the “one true way” (“Let’s face it”) among AI supporters that grinds my gears at least.
It is more of a reaction to misrepresentation and falsehood, which AI and its rhetoric seems to have generated a lot of.
The elegance of the code is not superfluous at all. It correlates with the developer's understanding of both the code and the domain.
Many kinds of software cannot be yeeted 10x faster with AI. Someone has to sit down and understand what the right thing to do is, first.
It also matters how many users you expect to be able to reach. If you're Facebook you can afford to use the first 10,000 users as unpaid QA. If you're an indie shop that's barely getting downloads you really want to make a positive impression on your initial users or you're toast anyway.
We _know_ LLMs can't be _that_ good as they are promoted.
I've spent the last 6 months creating a production grade app from scratch with Claude where I wrote no single line of code. I've reviewed code and it was looking good, almost completely following my templates, workflows, skills.
Now I've started to make minor manual updates and I'm horrified. Claude has no idea why there were those templates and instructions in place. It followed them blindly without grasping their spirit. The end result is like a very junior dev copy-pasting answers from Stack Overflow into the codebase. No consistency, chaotic application of different conventions, duplicated code, ghost code (does nothing), and perhaps more as I'm digging in.
The pros: The code works, all tests pass (43% code / 57% tests, 1:1.3 ratio), the UI looks good with visible glitches
The cons: I'll have to rewrite most of the code on the long run, make it fit, easy to maintain.
The verdict: I wouldn't started this project alone. Claude get me through to v0.1.0 / MVP where I've focused solely on the product: technologies, architecture, functionality, and usability. Now it's easier to refactor all for v0.2.0 manually without Claude.
So this might be our gut feeling: we know it's something good, but not as good as the stakeholders might promote. We know it helps in some ways but it's a nightmare in other ways.
We are not anti-AI but rather pragmatic: Not that AI enthusiasts we are expected to be.
Suppose one proved that a sizable mass of people don't care whether they eat dog food.
There are people who won't feed them dog food even so.
There are people who will see ways to extract more profits.
> just a means to an end?
Indeed.
Which means?
Which end?
There are as many unthinking raving fans as there are unthinking raging haters. The reality is that the decision-making power-wielding bunch will make dumb, uncaring, probably some form of "evil", people-harming decisions via AI. Because that is what they do. Almost invariably, until forced to do something else.
So, again, which means? Which end?
This weird "my perspective is universal" thing is among the worst features of humanity in general.
- One crowd is using to research algorithms, libraries, write boilerplate code, write test harnesses, introspect and integrate with APIs, do hands-off refactoring, and automating what would otherwise be boring tasks. They still think about architecture, best practices, understanding things in detail and the general shape of the solution is in their hands.
- Another crowd is curating prompts, setting up autonomous agents, creating tooling and guardrails around it, anything else but getting actually involved in how the sausage is made. They are working on meta tasks around the problem, in the hope the solution will write itself.
These two crowds are currently living in very different worlds, and getting very different results. We'll see what survives soon.
Are we including just technical people in these crowds?
Because there's a third crowd: everyone else/the general public that are standing up vibe coded websites and don't give a hoot how things work in the background or know as long as money is coming in. There are people that are using AI and thinking less and less causing their brains over the long term to become more inelastic.
We're in for a very, very painful future that will have mixed results. On one hand, you can boostrap things a lot quicker with less mental effort and it helps get up to speed without having to know some complex things (e.g. deep knowledge in coding). This can help us innovate on basic things faster, probably.
On the other ... people aren't going to learn. If something breaks in that state where they don't know how something works, what, we're just going to ask another AI to fix it? I don't know how I feel or think about that. On a long enough timeline, there are people that won't know how any of this was designed in the first place.
That's the world we actually live in. And that's what will survive despite crowd 1 and 2 that you mentioned above.
I’m working with an ideas guy, no skills and no capital but for the first time can deliver code
He wants my tech expertise, his code is spaghetti, he is making all the mistakes, he is experiencing AI psychosis, his AI makes md files warning him that its all going to burn him which he forwards to me lackadaisically without reading
But can he sale? Yes
Its tempting for me to proselytize that he isnt using feature branches or project tickets or even deploying with committed code
But I bite my tongue and tell him to focus on the MVP since he wants to prompt Claude Code for 48 hour sessions without there being any indication of how other devs could contribute
Because he has clients that wants what he described, and because he has no capital I get a huge cut of that
I’m fine with that, I’ll clean up the project very quickly
They called it AI instead of calling it neural networks and therefore provoked unrealistic expectations for this technology. Criticism will never end because of the fraudulent naming of this technology.
The field has been named "Artificial Intelligence" since the 1950s, It has nothing to do with neural nets per se. It just is about systems that do what was previously thought to be only something people could do. Traditionally the big names in the field like Minsky actually despised neural nets -- Minsky even wrote a book called Perceptrons which trashed the early version of neural nets and discouraged most research on them for a couple of decades.
I have similar thoughts a lot. Actually, bugs and technical debt existed even when humans wrote the code. However, while low‑level layer coders might oppose AI interfering with their 'artwork,' someone like me, who mainly assembles libraries like Lego bricks on top of frameworks, would probably find LLMs useful.
That is the status quo now. If LLMs get better and better, managers will simply direct them, well, directly. That's what the parent comment means by the machine learning to do your job. It completely, not mostly, replaces you.
Because a lot of us are engineers. It's our mindset and our job to question hype and broad strokes and easy solutions, to go a few levels deeper and ask "okay but does it really work?". I don't think most people are anti AI more than they are anti any tool.
HN probably has as much as 5 million monthly users. This is not just a small group of insiders, but more of a broadly representative sample of startup and engineering people.
So there is a wide range of judgement, and more importantly, a diverse set of worldviews. These are beliefs that form the foundations of cognition and perception. In the general population there are a massive number of people who do not understand technology and/or do not really appreciate it at a deep level. This includes a significant percentage of startup and engineering people unfortunately.
HN is not anti-AI. HN reflects a reasonable ratio of pro-AI and anti-AI sentiments (sometimes held by the same person! because AI covers a lot of ground).
I have many diverse friend groups. And HN is lot lot more anti AI then even the worst of the non technical groups I am in. e.g. [1] is so detached from reality and got to front page for multiple days recently. Or [2].
I have never seen a positive story(I am not talking about things like current model, just how positive AI could be like the Sam Altman post) in front page for a long time. Feel free to disprove me.
The other day, I had a similar thought about the relative importance of code.
I'm working on a game, and I've been fussing over the code quality. And yeah, having code that isn't awful is important for various reasons. But with a game, it got me thinking, the code is literally the only part of the game the player doesn't experience.
The time I'm spending on the code, I could be spending on the art, the game design, the music, the story...
But my natural tendency is to hyper-focus on the only part of the game nobody will ever see. I thought that was interesting.
(That being said the codebase is ass and I do need to clean it up!)
Are you really surprised people feel this way? People have pigeonholed themselves into this field and now they find themselves horseshoe makers in this new age. It is scary and concerning. People do have legitimate fear. The whole pitch with AI isn't really that it empowers you to make some CRUD app easily. It is that eventually, sometime very soon, people will wise up to the fact that prompting is not a six figure job. It can be done by desperate low skilled people halfway across the world. Eventually those people will also hit the block.
I think people who aren't scared right now aren't really considering the larger implications of what is actually being pitched. The fact that the AI evangelicals don't realize that they too have no moat is going to be so ironic if only it wasn't so sad what is actually happening.
I mean, we are devaluing humanity. That is what these tools are promising really. It isn't just software. It is art. It is sales. It is poetry. It is C suite. It is filmaking. It is surgery. Every job there is, is at risk. Maybe not tomorrow, but on the horizon. The remaining jobs on earth will become the next target to automate and remove humans out of existence. An ever larger target until there are no targets left but AI controlled companies infighting among eachother for the energy coming from the sun and the nutrients in the 6 inches of topsoil.
Earth will be for the birds and the machines by the end of the century I'm guessing. Keeping us alive will be seen as a liability and a great risk to power structures. If we are allowed to live, and that is a huge if, we will probably devolve back into the hunter gatherer stage, fearful of the machine gods and their robot soldiers and temples of data and compute.
A lot of people on HN are anti-overhyping, which comes across as being opposed to the thing being overhyped. It was similar when cryptocurrency overhyping was popular.
Oh absolutely! This made me wonder and there was an exact post with similar title but instead of AI it said Crypto
Ask HN: Why is Hacker News so anti-crypto? : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302494 (Do note that the post is flagged and there might be some good moderation reasons for that)
This is the reason that most of us at HN might dislike overhype. I have seen a lot of these crypto users move from crypto hype to AI hype.
Every few years, people forget the last shiny thing and move to the next and think why is X crowd not invested in Y? They must be anti-Y!
I use AI tools daily and find them genuinely useful.
However I am increasingly annoyed at how everything has to be framed as a conversation about AI, how every tech-adjacent company has to brand itself as AI-first, and most of all, how overblown predictions are about an LLM being conscious, etc.
In short – it’s a useful technology reshaping tons of industries, but the hype is grating.
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.
I actually felt the opposite. HN is full of AI crowd.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
This precisely why I still have mixed reaction towards AI, even AI can produce functional code but might be filled with foot guns. I personally don't use AI (the full automated ones, e.g., Claude code, Codex, Cursor) but also I don't complain about people using AI.
This also reminds me of Jonathan Blow's Software is in Decline[1] talk. Even when the humans coded everything, we gave up on quality a long ago for speed. So people complaining about low quality AI code is ignored.
Simply put software engineering is not as rigorous as other engineering and most of the time when software ultimately fail there isn't major consequences.
I have loved using AI technology for 45 years (symbolic AI, old fashioned NNs, … to the present). I am also skeptical about the apparently desperation-driven ‘bet the farm’ approach we are taking here in the USA.
Many users may not care which bridges they drive over, but I personally would like to avoid driving over the original Tacoma Narrows bridge[1] or any others of similarly flimsy engineering.
I am not totally anti AI but I don’t use coding harnesses. I see my coworkers using coding harnesses decline in basic engineering mentalities, asking me questions easily answered with a modicum of research or thinking, but claude told them something so they ask me.
I don’t think these are bad guys or bad engineers, it’s concerning to me though. Engineers should be getting sharper in their analysis over time not weaker. When someone tells me they haven’t even looked at a few lines of code they submitted it’s shocking and a sign of sloppy thinking. It’s rude too because is expecting me to pick up their slack.
I’m sure the AI companies are in love with the idea that people are growing dependent on their product for things they could easily do themselves. That’s a great business.
People definitely have preferences of tools. For your construction analogy, I'm anti hammer. I prefer screws in almost every instance where a nail could be used, and hammers aren't the right tool for screws. Hammers suck.
Back to AI, it's a tool, and you can definitely be for or against it. Someone against AI might prefer other tools, like a canvas, camera, word doc, or visual studio (depending on the application they could be using the AI tool for)
I think it's because too many people have released tools that's clearly not ready for production because they don't know what to actually check. So it's now just easier to pattern match away any good tools that might surface.
What surprises me most is some of the virulent reactions that code generation appears to elicit, sometimes citing reasons such as craft, artistry, and originality. As if the entire disciplines of computer science and systems engineering never depended on assemblers, code generation, compilers, JIT. Or really, just writing bytes that can represent machine code, P-code, or bytecode.
A reaction that doesn't appear to make the very direct connection with the systems of exploitation, but chooses to target the tools, or the users of tools is difficult to justify as extremely sophisticated.
The root cause if of course AI's role in loss of power on compensation (coding as a skill is no longer as valuable), and loss of power in labor vs capital.
It's hard to face this, specially for the one oasis in the job market that pays well.
The only product of AI is labor displacement and, by extension, wage suppression (as the duties of the displaced become free labor from those who remain and those who remain aren't asking for raises).
So ahy are so many on HN anti-AI? Because automation has finally come for them. Now it's personal. While it wasn't personal, you could pretend that people who had their livelihood taken away was a result of personal moral failure. You would see that 10 or 20 years ago when people would quite callously say "you should've done computer science" and that was that.
There are a lot of reasons to hate AI, not least of which is the externalities. It's essentially profiting off intellectual property as well as user-generated content for no compensation. Software people can actually identify with that in a way they just didn't when it was music, art or literature.
The data centers themselves nobody wants. They get massive tax and electricity breaks. Everyone pays for the upgrades and gets to live with the water pollution ,noise and higher utility bills. And because the data center is powering labor displacement, unlike, say, an auto plant, it produces negative jobs.
This all comes at a time when society is at the breaking point. Unaffordability is a massive problem (only getting worse) while we rapidly approaching minting our first trillionaire. Wealth inequality is reaching levels that historically have resulted in violent revolution.
AI in particular and automation in general could be a good thing for society. In another version of society it would allow people overall to work less and more menial jobs could be automated away. We don't live in that society. We live in the society that will make 99% of people poor so a handful of people can have $500 billion instead of $400 billion. All while the world seems to be getting ever more violent and cruel and major issues like climate change are going to start biting real hard.
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.
AFAICT hacker news is only slightly less positive on AI than the average tech industry gathering, which is still like two standard deviations more positive than any average gathering of random people in a city. I think the culture of silicon valley reads anything less than gushing hype as negativity right now, which is a weirdly polarized place to be, but the discourse around this technology is bizarre in general, being an absolute gamechanger that nonetheless still somehow feels quite oversold by its most ardent boosters, who are themselves a minority, but one with rather disproportionate voice and reach
I don't think it is a large number of people creating this perception, I think it is more their depth of feeling about the issue.
I am often struck by the similarity with bigotry about migrants, where they are portrayed as unreliable and undtustworthy entities that are threatening jobs. Simultaneously arguing their inability and ability are problematic.
You have a second vein of behaviour that object on more religious grounds. There are people that believe that any real understanding of models would deny biblical truth, much like evolution, it is a spurious claim, but at the same time the Discovery Institute is putting money into AI disinformation.
I am unsure how much the Future of Life Institute has influenced thinking, they reputedly have a war chest of half a billion. I have certainly seen videos on YouTube that have been sponsored by them.
It's because this place is full of people that are the developer equivalent of someone that constantly tells everyone they drive a manual transmission vehicle and it makes them superior.
I suppose you end up hating it either way, if you're a better developer than it you don't like it because it sucks, and if it's a better developer than you then you just feel obsolete
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster.
I just don't understand what you mean by "let's face it". I repeatedly face it at my job, all our code has been AI assisted since March, and not once have I observed such a 10x speedup. The only 10x examples I've seen in the wild have been on tasks like cross-language code rewrites that completely fail your "code is just a means to an end" criterion.
Both of them can be true at the same time? Many people on HN are at the forefront of this technology, we're testing it in prod and telling each other what does or doesn't work. It's not anti-AI to use the AI and then document a failure.
We're still waiting for a model that can draw a pelican on a bike, you're not zero-shotting every problem with AI yet. If we want improvement, we gotta start by being honest.
AI is great for prototyping, but that is far different to AI in production-grade software, including with the hidden cost of maintenance. You have to know what you are doing.
Why even risk using AI directly in mission critical high risk software powering cars, planes and financial transactions or control systems with no human oversight?
If a disaster happened and an investigation was launched and the inquiry found that the software was "vibe coded" and no-one understood the code, would that look great towards the software vendor's reputation?
Generally speaking the local crowd is anti-hype, and so it's easy to get the manifestation of that conflated with with what you're describing.
(I fit your literal description, but primarily from a nomenclature perspective - I'll call them generative models and LLMs - and I appreciate this puts me in the minority. BUT I do believe part of the hype feedback loop was the intentional mislabelling of these technologies from the outset. AND I understand why the marketers did that.)
I suspect the older crowd has lived through the hype playbook enough to recognise it early, and that the pattern this time around is becoming a bit a bit more obvious now, so I expect increasing levelling out of expectations & understanding.
The point is that bad code pretty directly leads to a product that doesn't work. It might work today (though... I wouldn't bet my life on it with how hit and miss LLM code is). But a year or two from now, with people just piling on more and more poorly written code, the system is going to suffer. It'll be slow, it'll be buggy, etc. Yeah, your users won't be able to say "aha, this is because they used AI!", but they will certainly notice the negative effects from you having done so.
Why do you assume the code will be bad in the first place?
Coding as someone without experience in coding? Most probably yes, but from someone with some kind of expertise who can act as a guardrail for bad code piling up? Probably not.
I don't assume the code will be bad, I directly observe on a daily basis that it's bad. Since the widespread adoption of AI, all but the best developers I work with have been writing worse code with a higher number of more severe bugs.
you might be drinking some of that AI koolaid, conflating our suddenly hypertrophied abilities to produce code regardless of our familiarity with the syntax or the APIs with ability to produce and deliver good quality products, but this delusion is getting reality check as we speak.
a realization is propagating through the industry that being able to produce more code than you're able to review, comprehend and internalize is actually not a great thing.
> 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?
The HN crowd isnt as much Anti AI that you imagine. I am unsure where you are from but I recommend looking at general public.
some part of that hate is getting mis-directed into datacenters and others, but most if not all people dislike AI.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
And so can your competitors if they wanted to make something that you make and why wouldn't the people themselves use AI to custom-tailor their own solutions Why pay a middleman like you?
Also because you are deploying things faster, you are also dropping them faster. For some people (& ideas) that is considered a plus but I find it grating or missing the point if I create software that I have not written and then leave it asap.
And this has also made a race to the bottom for the attention of people with 20x the products so you have to compete 20x more for eye-balls.
There are also aspects of job insecurity within the normal public regarding AI.
Prototyping as a use-case is something that I have recommended multiple times but with all of this in mind, I must say that the situation looks murky.
This is why we are anti-AI because imo AI as a tech isn't bad but the way society is handling it is really really bad.
A shoe brand adding AI into their company name shouldn't logically change anything but the market is so down bad that it increased its price 4 times iirc and oh btw the shoe brand had sold its brand and everything to someone else before hand so people just bought an empty thing!
We need better societal discourse on the norms of using AI, when to use AI and when not to use AI and to create a social structure to help people from completely and solely relying on such technology and forms of psychosis.
You have no obligation to agree with them, but after all this time I don't know how someone on either side could be ignorant of what the other side's main arguments are.
It's way more than code. Sure AI can crank out code at prodigious rates. Gary Tan, Y Combinator's CEO says he ships 37,000 lines of AI code per day [0]
And so can I. (oops)
"In the Beginning" (I was there) people wrote accounting packages in BASIC. It worked, the language allowed rapid prototyping, and out the door quickly, but BASIC lent itself to spaghetti code, and for anything really serious, the programs were too lightweight, and were very difficult to document and maintain, so that bugs could be fixed and esoteric features added (for $$$) without the fix breaking something else. Every damn line of code had to be commented so that someone else could pick it up when you left and maintain and upgrade it.
So, AI's got a mind of its own, and from what I hear, every time you get a solution (code) it's different from the previous. At this point, no solid libraries, such as mathematicians, physicists, medical researchers and yes, rocket scientists can rely on as 100% solid and "bet your life on it"
In addition, the hype has extended AI into more general areas, including "bet your life on it" situations where people are using it for therapy, with fatal consequences at times [1] "Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. Adolescents and Young Adults Use AI Chatbots for Mental Health Advice" (RAND) and it's so flawed.
And also, it leads to cognitive surrender. [2] "AI and the Psychology of Cognitive Surrender" (Psychology Today)
Key points:
• AI subtly erodes our cognitive strength by making delegation seem like self-generated thought.
• After repeatedly turning to AI for answers, the first thing that erodes is tolerance for not knowing.
• True judgment is built by wrestling with uncertainty, not outsourcing discomfort to machines.
In a very brief thread about Siri becoming AltSiri [3] my comments regarding the wide use of a tool that is IMO overextended and using the general population as guinea pigs:
---
I view and use computers as tools. They (mostly) do what I command.
That's because I am by nature a problem solver, and so are others. In fact, if knowledge consists of understanding a particular domain, and wisdom consists of applying knowledge across different domains, creativity of a sort, one of them being that unknown called the future then "button pusher" answers kill my ability to deal with future situations which are not recorded in "The Book of Common Knowledge" (a SNL reference).
When "computers" wrestle control of the situation and solve everything, then, as someone said in the early 20th century "Everything that can be invented has already been invented" then there's now no need for computers at all, since "Every problem can be solved by a chatbot" and no need for creative (genius) things like the famous "Wordless Workshop" that ran in Popular Science and Family Handyman magazines.
Just answer machines. No need to learn anything, nor to create.
Creativity and genius move us forward. That's why we have Hacker News as opposed to those "answer forums"
---
And YES, code that you have to reverse engineer in order to maintain must be understandable and well-architected. If that's "Elegant" then So be it.
I rapidly prototyped in-house apps, quickly and well, and they had a limited life span.
But "enterprise" software isn't going away. And whom [4] do you call when some CTO calls you at 1 a.m. when their business takes a header? Claude?
Because unlike crypto and other tech fads, it’s hostile:
- job losses are immediately associated with AI in news
- privacy invasions, AI profiling, AI aggregators, etc.
- annoyance, AI chat bubble, AI useless tech support, AI interviews, etc.
- bandwagon “wrappers”, you know, wrap gpt api in saas and try to sell it in subscriptions, flooding show HN
- slops, slops everywhere. Codes, graphics, you name it.
And a lot more. AI to tech world is what smartphones did to internet, flooding non technical people into technical people’s space and basically ruining the fun part. Additionally, it didn’t bring any substantial breakthrough, in the past 3 years or so, did we have any breakthrough innovation in any sector as a result of AI? Barely, so you end up with a lot of noise flooding the internet, bots now are more than humans.
Software Engineering was inherently romantic before AI.
People took time to understand the inner world of computers. Some people built brilliant solutions that represented the finest examples of human ingenuity. Knowledge was impressive. Side projects were impressive. The right engineer in the right place could make or break a business. Any industry that operates like this, where human skill and intelligence is valued and a key component of the process is beautiful.
With AI, all that has been snuffed out. No one gives a fuck. There is no skill required now. Talking about code with humans is pointless, talk to your AI. The meritocracy is over, this industry will soon be all about who you know, not what you know. Fuck your resume, your list of skills and experiences are quaint. You really think anyone gives a shit about languages you know or how many features and products you shipped? Anyone can do that shit with a few prompts of an LLM. So how else will you get a job? Know someone? Blow someone? Just hope you win the random selection?
A lot of people aren’t against the AI tech itself, they are against how it will change the tech culture. The old world is gone and the new one looks like it sucks, many people just don’t realize it yet, they are slow boiling frogs. They have not yet experienced being unemployed in the AI era.
I despise code written by VI! The only code anyone should ever run is code written with EMACS. With SPACES, not tabs. Because tabs take jobs from space bar pressers, and boil the oceans.
It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant.
You can see from this megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI:
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174.
Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to bring out one side or other.
As for why the community is divided, there's always a temptation to come up with HN-specific explanations, but society as a whole is divided about AI. Surely that is the only explanation one needs. As I've been saying for years, HN can't be immune from macro trends: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
As an aside, the variety of examples in that other thread is impressive. Here are some that I noticed:
Fixing my furnace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417845
New software for a retro keyboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418158
Customizing my camper van: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417379
Porting my astronomy app from an old Nokia phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419242
Fixing my kid’s science fair project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419364
Unborking the family printer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419480
Learning to draw anatomy (!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418716
Lowering my electrical bill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417949
Making classic guitar pedals programmable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418006
Avocado armchair guy victory lap: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417658 (<-- oops, wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418274)
Putting an overlay on enemies in a video game: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420635
It just goes on and on. I was a little nervous when I saw that post originally, but it's amazing what happens when a title is somehow just right.
Oh dang, we all know –based on observation of your throughput and availability– that you're AI, you just can't "be nervous".
Jokes aside, thanks for your selection. I had read some, but missed others until your comment.
If it matters, I think there's some people that hasn't decided yet what tribe (pro-AI/anti-AI) they belong to. There's probably dozens of us!
I haven't had the patience or mentality to really absorb "ok but how is this useful" until that thread and your highlighted references. Thank you for the curated highlights, however brief it may be, because it's very hard to find such diamonds without dedicating far too much time wading through the abstract gatekept comments on the topic, in most cases. Real world examples give me much hope!
It’s not even a dichotomy, A vs B, especially when you consider “AI” is incredibly poorly defined. There are many new technologies available, and I have nuanced opinions about all of them.
I’m happy that my friend who works in plastics manufacturing can move his monstrosity of an Excel spreadsheet to something more predictable and maintainable. I’m deeply annoyed by my coworker who’s trying to put a chatbot in our UI.
Well, it looks this post has already been flagged down onto page 7.
And IIRC, the same thing happened to the "oh shit" moment thread you linked to. Did the mods have to intervene to get it back on the front page?
HN might not be anti-AI, but I feel like the way flags are weighted by the ranking allows some users that are extremely anti-AI to create the impression that it is.
EDIT: And now it's back.
Not flagged. It set off the flamewar detector. We monitor those and eventually reverse the false positives. Mostly.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Ah, thanks for the clarification. :)
I tend to agree with your overall point, but I think you reveal far more about yourself than you accurately reflect anything about HN. Just read back what you wrote:
> AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues
You want to ship major bugs to your users, let them find them, report them and fix them afterwards. You passively assume this is a good way to build software without even really questioning it.
Aside from some people just not liking this in principle, there are a lot of contexts where bugs cause actual harm and cost actual money. In some cases, "people dying" and "go to jail for it" type harm.
If everyone does it and the majority of users are captured in ways that they wont or cant seek out alternatives then shipping bugs to users, letting them find amd report them and then fixing them is business-optimal.
It would potentially be more business-optimal to ship fewer bugs if everyone else is shipping more bugs. Your development cycle would be costlier, but users would prefer to buy your products over others.
What keeps users themselves from vibe-coding their own software?
If you don't own quality, why should I pay? You're just a middleman at that point.
The post asks a question and then presents a strong opinion with the confidence of it being a fact. There is a pretence of curiosity veiling a complaint. I think it is this perceived lack of curiosity, casual exaggeration (“10X faster”) and implication of the “one true way” (“Let’s face it”) among AI supporters that grinds my gears at least.
It is more of a reaction to misrepresentation and falsehood, which AI and its rhetoric seems to have generated a lot of.
The elegance of the code is not superfluous at all. It correlates with the developer's understanding of both the code and the domain.
Many kinds of software cannot be yeeted 10x faster with AI. Someone has to sit down and understand what the right thing to do is, first.
It also matters how many users you expect to be able to reach. If you're Facebook you can afford to use the first 10,000 users as unpaid QA. If you're an indie shop that's barely getting downloads you really want to make a positive impression on your initial users or you're toast anyway.
There was an article created by I think creator of HTMX with the headline: "Code is Cheap(er), Understanding is Expensive(er)
https://htmx.org/essays/code-is-cheap/#understanding-is-expe...
It's a gut feeling.
We _know_ LLMs can't be _that_ good as they are promoted.
I've spent the last 6 months creating a production grade app from scratch with Claude where I wrote no single line of code. I've reviewed code and it was looking good, almost completely following my templates, workflows, skills.
Now I've started to make minor manual updates and I'm horrified. Claude has no idea why there were those templates and instructions in place. It followed them blindly without grasping their spirit. The end result is like a very junior dev copy-pasting answers from Stack Overflow into the codebase. No consistency, chaotic application of different conventions, duplicated code, ghost code (does nothing), and perhaps more as I'm digging in.
The pros: The code works, all tests pass (43% code / 57% tests, 1:1.3 ratio), the UI looks good with visible glitches
The cons: I'll have to rewrite most of the code on the long run, make it fit, easy to maintain.
The verdict: I wouldn't started this project alone. Claude get me through to v0.1.0 / MVP where I've focused solely on the product: technologies, architecture, functionality, and usability. Now it's easier to refactor all for v0.2.0 manually without Claude.
So this might be our gut feeling: we know it's something good, but not as good as the stakeholders might promote. We know it helps in some ways but it's a nightmare in other ways.
We are not anti-AI but rather pragmatic: Not that AI enthusiasts we are expected to be.
> Users don’t care
Suppose one proved that a sizable mass of people don't care whether they eat dog food.
There are people who won't feed them dog food even so.
There are people who will see ways to extract more profits.
> just a means to an end?
Indeed.
Which means?
Which end?
There are as many unthinking raving fans as there are unthinking raging haters. The reality is that the decision-making power-wielding bunch will make dumb, uncaring, probably some form of "evil", people-harming decisions via AI. Because that is what they do. Almost invariably, until forced to do something else.
So, again, which means? Which end?
This weird "my perspective is universal" thing is among the worst features of humanity in general.
There are two different crowds using "AI":
- One crowd is using to research algorithms, libraries, write boilerplate code, write test harnesses, introspect and integrate with APIs, do hands-off refactoring, and automating what would otherwise be boring tasks. They still think about architecture, best practices, understanding things in detail and the general shape of the solution is in their hands.
- Another crowd is curating prompts, setting up autonomous agents, creating tooling and guardrails around it, anything else but getting actually involved in how the sausage is made. They are working on meta tasks around the problem, in the hope the solution will write itself.
These two crowds are currently living in very different worlds, and getting very different results. We'll see what survives soon.
Are we including just technical people in these crowds?
Because there's a third crowd: everyone else/the general public that are standing up vibe coded websites and don't give a hoot how things work in the background or know as long as money is coming in. There are people that are using AI and thinking less and less causing their brains over the long term to become more inelastic.
We're in for a very, very painful future that will have mixed results. On one hand, you can boostrap things a lot quicker with less mental effort and it helps get up to speed without having to know some complex things (e.g. deep knowledge in coding). This can help us innovate on basic things faster, probably.
On the other ... people aren't going to learn. If something breaks in that state where they don't know how something works, what, we're just going to ask another AI to fix it? I don't know how I feel or think about that. On a long enough timeline, there are people that won't know how any of this was designed in the first place.
That's the world we actually live in. And that's what will survive despite crowd 1 and 2 that you mentioned above.
I’m working with an ideas guy, no skills and no capital but for the first time can deliver code
He wants my tech expertise, his code is spaghetti, he is making all the mistakes, he is experiencing AI psychosis, his AI makes md files warning him that its all going to burn him which he forwards to me lackadaisically without reading
But can he sale? Yes
Its tempting for me to proselytize that he isnt using feature branches or project tickets or even deploying with committed code
But I bite my tongue and tell him to focus on the MVP since he wants to prompt Claude Code for 48 hour sessions without there being any indication of how other devs could contribute
Because he has clients that wants what he described, and because he has no capital I get a huge cut of that
I’m fine with that, I’ll clean up the project very quickly
True... I'm in the first crowd personally
They called it AI instead of calling it neural networks and therefore provoked unrealistic expectations for this technology. Criticism will never end because of the fraudulent naming of this technology.
The field has been named "Artificial Intelligence" since the 1950s, It has nothing to do with neural nets per se. It just is about systems that do what was previously thought to be only something people could do. Traditionally the big names in the field like Minsky actually despised neural nets -- Minsky even wrote a book called Perceptrons which trashed the early version of neural nets and discouraged most research on them for a couple of decades.
If you're impressed by something which was done by AI, then you're not qualified enough to judge it.
I have similar thoughts a lot. Actually, bugs and technical debt existed even when humans wrote the code. However, while low‑level layer coders might oppose AI interfering with their 'artwork,' someone like me, who mainly assembles libraries like Lego bricks on top of frameworks, would probably find LLMs useful.
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?"
You are going to be asked to do your job, faster, and you are going to have a massive headache managing a bunch of machines mostly doing your job.
That is the status quo now. If LLMs get better and better, managers will simply direct them, well, directly. That's what the parent comment means by the machine learning to do your job. It completely, not mostly, replaces you.
Because a lot of us are engineers. It's our mindset and our job to question hype and broad strokes and easy solutions, to go a few levels deeper and ask "okay but does it really work?". I don't think most people are anti AI more than they are anti any tool.
> They care that the product works
This reminds me of Anthropic's post where they say they ship 8x as much code as they used to.
And I stopped to consider how many times I've used an app and thought, "You know what this needs? More code!"
I joined a team where the previous boss measured productivity by LOC on a weekly basis in public.
This team eschewed libraries and shared code. Copy/paste everywhere.
Every defect had to fixed in 100+ mini-applications. It was a telecom MMI product.
HN probably has as much as 5 million monthly users. This is not just a small group of insiders, but more of a broadly representative sample of startup and engineering people.
So there is a wide range of judgement, and more importantly, a diverse set of worldviews. These are beliefs that form the foundations of cognition and perception. In the general population there are a massive number of people who do not understand technology and/or do not really appreciate it at a deep level. This includes a significant percentage of startup and engineering people unfortunately.
Is 5 million a guess or a stat? I've always wondered how "big" HN is.
HN is not anti-AI. HN reflects a reasonable ratio of pro-AI and anti-AI sentiments (sometimes held by the same person! because AI covers a lot of ground).
Alternative wording: HN is not twitter
I have many diverse friend groups. And HN is lot lot more anti AI then even the worst of the non technical groups I am in. e.g. [1] is so detached from reality and got to front page for multiple days recently. Or [2].
I have never seen a positive story(I am not talking about things like current model, just how positive AI could be like the Sam Altman post) in front page for a long time. Feel free to disprove me.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48323101
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48259784
The other day, I had a similar thought about the relative importance of code.
I'm working on a game, and I've been fussing over the code quality. And yeah, having code that isn't awful is important for various reasons. But with a game, it got me thinking, the code is literally the only part of the game the player doesn't experience.
The time I'm spending on the code, I could be spending on the art, the game design, the music, the story...
But my natural tendency is to hyper-focus on the only part of the game nobody will ever see. I thought that was interesting.
(That being said the codebase is ass and I do need to clean it up!)
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used.
But users also include users of the code. There's no value in self-flagellation via terrible code or pointlessly complicated frameworks.
Are you really surprised people feel this way? People have pigeonholed themselves into this field and now they find themselves horseshoe makers in this new age. It is scary and concerning. People do have legitimate fear. The whole pitch with AI isn't really that it empowers you to make some CRUD app easily. It is that eventually, sometime very soon, people will wise up to the fact that prompting is not a six figure job. It can be done by desperate low skilled people halfway across the world. Eventually those people will also hit the block.
I think people who aren't scared right now aren't really considering the larger implications of what is actually being pitched. The fact that the AI evangelicals don't realize that they too have no moat is going to be so ironic if only it wasn't so sad what is actually happening.
I mean, we are devaluing humanity. That is what these tools are promising really. It isn't just software. It is art. It is sales. It is poetry. It is C suite. It is filmaking. It is surgery. Every job there is, is at risk. Maybe not tomorrow, but on the horizon. The remaining jobs on earth will become the next target to automate and remove humans out of existence. An ever larger target until there are no targets left but AI controlled companies infighting among eachother for the energy coming from the sun and the nutrients in the 6 inches of topsoil.
Earth will be for the birds and the machines by the end of the century I'm guessing. Keeping us alive will be seen as a liability and a great risk to power structures. If we are allowed to live, and that is a huge if, we will probably devolve back into the hunter gatherer stage, fearful of the machine gods and their robot soldiers and temples of data and compute.
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand
This is very much not settled, and very much depending on your market. Selling games to gen-z? Yeah, they are going to care a lot.
Personally I'm not anti-AI, I'm anti-Stupid.
I also don't consider LLM's to be AI. I put it in the same category as PageRank.
But if you thought of an LLM that way (like pagerank), you should be getting very bad results from it.
A lot of people on HN are anti-overhyping, which comes across as being opposed to the thing being overhyped. It was similar when cryptocurrency overhyping was popular.
Oh absolutely! This made me wonder and there was an exact post with similar title but instead of AI it said Crypto
Ask HN: Why is Hacker News so anti-crypto? : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302494 (Do note that the post is flagged and there might be some good moderation reasons for that)
This is the reason that most of us at HN might dislike overhype. I have seen a lot of these crypto users move from crypto hype to AI hype.
Every few years, people forget the last shiny thing and move to the next and think why is X crowd not invested in Y? They must be anti-Y!
Oh speaking of crypto, bitcoin has tanked so bad, its almost at an all time low at 60k$ sinking to levels of october 2024: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/bitcoin-dismal-week-price-be...
also, not instead of.
I use AI tools daily and find them genuinely useful.
However I am increasingly annoyed at how everything has to be framed as a conversation about AI, how every tech-adjacent company has to brand itself as AI-first, and most of all, how overblown predictions are about an LLM being conscious, etc.
In short – it’s a useful technology reshaping tons of industries, but the hype is grating.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Also: at some point the elegance of the code starts to matter more than execution speed. :)
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.
I actually felt the opposite. HN is full of AI crowd.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
This precisely why I still have mixed reaction towards AI, even AI can produce functional code but might be filled with foot guns. I personally don't use AI (the full automated ones, e.g., Claude code, Codex, Cursor) but also I don't complain about people using AI.
This also reminds me of Jonathan Blow's Software is in Decline[1] talk. Even when the humans coded everything, we gave up on quality a long ago for speed. So people complaining about low quality AI code is ignored.
Simply put software engineering is not as rigorous as other engineering and most of the time when software ultimately fail there isn't major consequences.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeAMiBKi_EM
I have loved using AI technology for 45 years (symbolic AI, old fashioned NNs, … to the present). I am also skeptical about the apparently desperation-driven ‘bet the farm’ approach we are taking here in the USA.
Slow is Fast.
Because AI use correlates with sloppiness, and due to the fundamental attribution fallacy us engineers don't like sloppiness.
This is a lot of it for me. "All users care about is that they can drive a car across the bridge. They don't care if an AI built it."
I want a solid, proud, well-engineered bridge, goddammit!
Many users may not care which bridges they drive over, but I personally would like to avoid driving over the original Tacoma Narrows bridge[1] or any others of similarly flimsy engineering.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)
I am not totally anti AI but I don’t use coding harnesses. I see my coworkers using coding harnesses decline in basic engineering mentalities, asking me questions easily answered with a modicum of research or thinking, but claude told them something so they ask me.
I don’t think these are bad guys or bad engineers, it’s concerning to me though. Engineers should be getting sharper in their analysis over time not weaker. When someone tells me they haven’t even looked at a few lines of code they submitted it’s shocking and a sign of sloppy thinking. It’s rude too because is expecting me to pick up their slack.
I’m sure the AI companies are in love with the idea that people are growing dependent on their product for things they could easily do themselves. That’s a great business.
It seems weird to be "pro-AI" or "anti-AI" in general. It's a tool. It's like saying construction workers are pro-hammer
People definitely have preferences of tools. For your construction analogy, I'm anti hammer. I prefer screws in almost every instance where a nail could be used, and hammers aren't the right tool for screws. Hammers suck.
Back to AI, it's a tool, and you can definitely be for or against it. Someone against AI might prefer other tools, like a canvas, camera, word doc, or visual studio (depending on the application they could be using the AI tool for)
Weirdly common I would say. US dockworkers / longshoremen are anti-automation big time.
https://ilaunion.org/the-ilas-fight-against-automation-prese...
The lack of productivity-growth in construction is also telling that this industry as a whole may be a bit too pro-hammer and anti-innovation
https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/why-has-produ...
People would be more pro-automation if it didn't entail losing their livelihoods and ability to access food and shelter.
The reports of AI powered 10x development speed are greatly exaggerated
Could it be the new car effect. You get say a Mini then see it everywhere. Personally I see diverse views on AI here.
And in my experience with AI doing personal projects, 10x as fast probably understates it by at least an order of magnitude.
I think it's because too many people have released tools that's clearly not ready for production because they don't know what to actually check. So it's now just easier to pattern match away any good tools that might surface.
What surprises me most is some of the virulent reactions that code generation appears to elicit, sometimes citing reasons such as craft, artistry, and originality. As if the entire disciplines of computer science and systems engineering never depended on assemblers, code generation, compilers, JIT. Or really, just writing bytes that can represent machine code, P-code, or bytecode.
A reaction that doesn't appear to make the very direct connection with the systems of exploitation, but chooses to target the tools, or the users of tools is difficult to justify as extremely sophisticated.
There are coders and creators. The first identify as their tools, the second don't care about the tools (too much).
This explains to me 90% of the reactions I get when I talk to people.
The root cause if of course AI's role in loss of power on compensation (coding as a skill is no longer as valuable), and loss of power in labor vs capital.
It's hard to face this, specially for the one oasis in the job market that pays well.
The only product of AI is labor displacement and, by extension, wage suppression (as the duties of the displaced become free labor from those who remain and those who remain aren't asking for raises).
So ahy are so many on HN anti-AI? Because automation has finally come for them. Now it's personal. While it wasn't personal, you could pretend that people who had their livelihood taken away was a result of personal moral failure. You would see that 10 or 20 years ago when people would quite callously say "you should've done computer science" and that was that.
There are a lot of reasons to hate AI, not least of which is the externalities. It's essentially profiting off intellectual property as well as user-generated content for no compensation. Software people can actually identify with that in a way they just didn't when it was music, art or literature.
The data centers themselves nobody wants. They get massive tax and electricity breaks. Everyone pays for the upgrades and gets to live with the water pollution ,noise and higher utility bills. And because the data center is powering labor displacement, unlike, say, an auto plant, it produces negative jobs.
This all comes at a time when society is at the breaking point. Unaffordability is a massive problem (only getting worse) while we rapidly approaching minting our first trillionaire. Wealth inequality is reaching levels that historically have resulted in violent revolution.
AI in particular and automation in general could be a good thing for society. In another version of society it would allow people overall to work less and more menial jobs could be automated away. We don't live in that society. We live in the society that will make 99% of people poor so a handful of people can have $500 billion instead of $400 billion. All while the world seems to be getting ever more violent and cruel and major issues like climate change are going to start biting real hard.
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.
AFAICT hacker news is only slightly less positive on AI than the average tech industry gathering, which is still like two standard deviations more positive than any average gathering of random people in a city. I think the culture of silicon valley reads anything less than gushing hype as negativity right now, which is a weirdly polarized place to be, but the discourse around this technology is bizarre in general, being an absolute gamechanger that nonetheless still somehow feels quite oversold by its most ardent boosters, who are themselves a minority, but one with rather disproportionate voice and reach
Why do workers dislike being charged to rent scab labor from their oppressors?
Mainly because noisy people are most visible. Both pro-AI and anti-AI (so to speak) crowds have them.
I don't think it is a large number of people creating this perception, I think it is more their depth of feeling about the issue.
I am often struck by the similarity with bigotry about migrants, where they are portrayed as unreliable and undtustworthy entities that are threatening jobs. Simultaneously arguing their inability and ability are problematic.
You have a second vein of behaviour that object on more religious grounds. There are people that believe that any real understanding of models would deny biblical truth, much like evolution, it is a spurious claim, but at the same time the Discovery Institute is putting money into AI disinformation.
I am unsure how much the Future of Life Institute has influenced thinking, they reputedly have a war chest of half a billion. I have certainly seen videos on YouTube that have been sponsored by them.
It's because this place is full of people that are the developer equivalent of someone that constantly tells everyone they drive a manual transmission vehicle and it makes them superior.
Its complicated, this is how its going to be. People are going to have opinions and take sides or take no side at all.
Because the HN crowd is composed largely of developers — the profession that is first to fall to the Axe of AI.
I suppose you end up hating it either way, if you're a better developer than it you don't like it because it sucks, and if it's a better developer than you then you just feel obsolete
More like, HN crowd is anti-HYPE
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster.
I just don't understand what you mean by "let's face it". I repeatedly face it at my job, all our code has been AI assisted since March, and not once have I observed such a 10x speedup. The only 10x examples I've seen in the wild have been on tasks like cross-language code rewrites that completely fail your "code is just a means to an end" criterion.
Both of them can be true at the same time? Many people on HN are at the forefront of this technology, we're testing it in prod and telling each other what does or doesn't work. It's not anti-AI to use the AI and then document a failure.
We're still waiting for a model that can draw a pelican on a bike, you're not zero-shotting every problem with AI yet. If we want improvement, we gotta start by being honest.
AI is great for prototyping, but that is far different to AI in production-grade software, including with the hidden cost of maintenance. You have to know what you are doing.
Why even risk using AI directly in mission critical high risk software powering cars, planes and financial transactions or control systems with no human oversight?
If a disaster happened and an investigation was launched and the inquiry found that the software was "vibe coded" and no-one understood the code, would that look great towards the software vendor's reputation?
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.
If I wanted to care about what users want, I would have been a founder or salesman, not an engineer.
Most people in general have a negative view on AI, the HN crowd isn’t special
Generally speaking the local crowd is anti-hype, and so it's easy to get the manifestation of that conflated with with what you're describing.
(I fit your literal description, but primarily from a nomenclature perspective - I'll call them generative models and LLMs - and I appreciate this puts me in the minority. BUT I do believe part of the hype feedback loop was the intentional mislabelling of these technologies from the outset. AND I understand why the marketers did that.)
I suspect the older crowd has lived through the hype playbook enough to recognise it early, and that the pattern this time around is becoming a bit a bit more obvious now, so I expect increasing levelling out of expectations & understanding.
More like anti mindless hype and braindead evangelism.
But the AI hypebeasts are incapable of differentiating that from an anti-AI stance.
> They care that the product works.
And that's the problem.
how so? When you buy a phone, do you care about how it's built?
Yeah absolutely. How it's built has a direct impact on the end result. Like with everything else.
The point is that bad code pretty directly leads to a product that doesn't work. It might work today (though... I wouldn't bet my life on it with how hit and miss LLM code is). But a year or two from now, with people just piling on more and more poorly written code, the system is going to suffer. It'll be slow, it'll be buggy, etc. Yeah, your users won't be able to say "aha, this is because they used AI!", but they will certainly notice the negative effects from you having done so.
Why do you assume the code will be bad in the first place?
Coding as someone without experience in coding? Most probably yes, but from someone with some kind of expertise who can act as a guardrail for bad code piling up? Probably not.
I don't assume the code will be bad, I directly observe on a daily basis that it's bad. Since the widespread adoption of AI, all but the best developers I work with have been writing worse code with a higher number of more severe bugs.
Claude calls it enterprise and production ready. I now have to spend the next two days dealing with the fallout, page, outage.
lazy so copying from a different thread:
you might be drinking some of that AI koolaid, conflating our suddenly hypertrophied abilities to produce code regardless of our familiarity with the syntax or the APIs with ability to produce and deliver good quality products, but this delusion is getting reality check as we speak.
a realization is propagating through the industry that being able to produce more code than you're able to review, comprehend and internalize is actually not a great thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48381598
that said im not anti ai, i just think it is being applied in the most moronic ways during this hype cycle (gary tan anybody?)
> 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?
The HN crowd isnt as much Anti AI that you imagine. I am unsure where you are from but I recommend looking at general public.
some part of that hate is getting mis-directed into datacenters and others, but most if not all people dislike AI.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
And so can your competitors if they wanted to make something that you make and why wouldn't the people themselves use AI to custom-tailor their own solutions Why pay a middleman like you?
Also because you are deploying things faster, you are also dropping them faster. For some people (& ideas) that is considered a plus but I find it grating or missing the point if I create software that I have not written and then leave it asap.
And this has also made a race to the bottom for the attention of people with 20x the products so you have to compete 20x more for eye-balls.
There are also aspects of job insecurity within the normal public regarding AI.
Prototyping as a use-case is something that I have recommended multiple times but with all of this in mind, I must say that the situation looks murky.
This is why we are anti-AI because imo AI as a tech isn't bad but the way society is handling it is really really bad.
A shoe brand adding AI into their company name shouldn't logically change anything but the market is so down bad that it increased its price 4 times iirc and oh btw the shoe brand had sold its brand and everything to someone else before hand so people just bought an empty thing!
We need better societal discourse on the norms of using AI, when to use AI and when not to use AI and to create a social structure to help people from completely and solely relying on such technology and forms of psychosis.
You have no obligation to agree with them, but after all this time I don't know how someone on either side could be ignorant of what the other side's main arguments are.
wth are you talking about
Isn't the mere fact that every HN frontpage is filled with AI-related articles not indicative enough of how much it holds interest here?
> post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
Many people here are engineers and are interested in solving problems. First step to solving problems is to identify them.
It's way more than code. Sure AI can crank out code at prodigious rates. Gary Tan, Y Combinator's CEO says he ships 37,000 lines of AI code per day [0]
And so can I. (oops)
"In the Beginning" (I was there) people wrote accounting packages in BASIC. It worked, the language allowed rapid prototyping, and out the door quickly, but BASIC lent itself to spaghetti code, and for anything really serious, the programs were too lightweight, and were very difficult to document and maintain, so that bugs could be fixed and esoteric features added (for $$$) without the fix breaking something else. Every damn line of code had to be commented so that someone else could pick it up when you left and maintain and upgrade it.
So, AI's got a mind of its own, and from what I hear, every time you get a solution (code) it's different from the previous. At this point, no solid libraries, such as mathematicians, physicists, medical researchers and yes, rocket scientists can rely on as 100% solid and "bet your life on it"
In addition, the hype has extended AI into more general areas, including "bet your life on it" situations where people are using it for therapy, with fatal consequences at times [1] "Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. Adolescents and Young Adults Use AI Chatbots for Mental Health Advice" (RAND) and it's so flawed.
And also, it leads to cognitive surrender. [2] "AI and the Psychology of Cognitive Surrender" (Psychology Today)
Key points:
In a very brief thread about Siri becoming AltSiri [3] my comments regarding the wide use of a tool that is IMO overextended and using the general population as guinea pigs:---
I view and use computers as tools. They (mostly) do what I command.
That's because I am by nature a problem solver, and so are others. In fact, if knowledge consists of understanding a particular domain, and wisdom consists of applying knowledge across different domains, creativity of a sort, one of them being that unknown called the future then "button pusher" answers kill my ability to deal with future situations which are not recorded in "The Book of Common Knowledge" (a SNL reference).
When "computers" wrestle control of the situation and solve everything, then, as someone said in the early 20th century "Everything that can be invented has already been invented" then there's now no need for computers at all, since "Every problem can be solved by a chatbot" and no need for creative (genius) things like the famous "Wordless Workshop" that ran in Popular Science and Family Handyman magazines.
Just answer machines. No need to learn anything, nor to create.
Creativity and genius move us forward. That's why we have Hacker News as opposed to those "answer forums"
---
And YES, code that you have to reverse engineer in order to maintain must be understandable and well-architected. If that's "Elegant" then So be it.
I rapidly prototyped in-house apps, quickly and well, and they had a limited life span.
But "enterprise" software isn't going away. And whom [4] do you call when some CTO calls you at 1 a.m. when their business takes a header? Claude?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414607
[1] https://www.rand.org/news/press/2026/06/nearly-1-in-5-us-ado...
[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48413555
[4] I was born in Boston. Cheers!
Because unlike crypto and other tech fads, it’s hostile:
- job losses are immediately associated with AI in news
- privacy invasions, AI profiling, AI aggregators, etc.
- annoyance, AI chat bubble, AI useless tech support, AI interviews, etc.
- bandwagon “wrappers”, you know, wrap gpt api in saas and try to sell it in subscriptions, flooding show HN
- slops, slops everywhere. Codes, graphics, you name it.
And a lot more. AI to tech world is what smartphones did to internet, flooding non technical people into technical people’s space and basically ruining the fun part. Additionally, it didn’t bring any substantial breakthrough, in the past 3 years or so, did we have any breakthrough innovation in any sector as a result of AI? Barely, so you end up with a lot of noise flooding the internet, bots now are more than humans.
Software Engineering was inherently romantic before AI.
People took time to understand the inner world of computers. Some people built brilliant solutions that represented the finest examples of human ingenuity. Knowledge was impressive. Side projects were impressive. The right engineer in the right place could make or break a business. Any industry that operates like this, where human skill and intelligence is valued and a key component of the process is beautiful.
With AI, all that has been snuffed out. No one gives a fuck. There is no skill required now. Talking about code with humans is pointless, talk to your AI. The meritocracy is over, this industry will soon be all about who you know, not what you know. Fuck your resume, your list of skills and experiences are quaint. You really think anyone gives a shit about languages you know or how many features and products you shipped? Anyone can do that shit with a few prompts of an LLM. So how else will you get a job? Know someone? Blow someone? Just hope you win the random selection?
A lot of people aren’t against the AI tech itself, they are against how it will change the tech culture. The old world is gone and the new one looks like it sucks, many people just don’t realize it yet, they are slow boiling frogs. They have not yet experienced being unemployed in the AI era.
You are training your replacement.
Yes, this has been true since human beings started pro-creating.
I despise code written by VI! The only code anyone should ever run is code written with EMACS. With SPACES, not tabs. Because tabs take jobs from space bar pressers, and boil the oceans.
1. because they know better. You don't have to understand it, for them to be right.
This comes from their years of experience. When you also get those years of experience, you may come to similar understanding.