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

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...

I call these AI tools "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet". They belong to american companies which can cut off your access if american government doesn't like your country's government. They fed from the free internet that many of us grew up in, store it in humans unreadable form and sell you access to it. If some day claude starts to spit out compiled binaries instead of code nobody will notice, and we'll essentially get proprietary cloud-hosted compiler that most in the world depends on to build software. With built-in telemetry and backdoors and clause in license that allow full overtake of your business if provider wants it ofc. It's a great shift from the internet we all know and love towards the new subscription-based access to world's propriatary knowledge base. It's a perfect "mind control" tool as well - you don't need USAID, "free media" and stuff like that in other countries when all people there including politicians ask chatgpt everything from meaning of life to recipies of pancakes. Once you see these political and philosophical dimensions it's hard to unsee how claudecode running on my PC won't turn into a weapon some day. But in blissful ignorance it's fun to use, and companies love it for the promise of replacing people. Amen

First of all, I expect to be a loser in the socioeconomical effect the AI brings. This isn't really about the technology itself but about the political systems we have now. From the pure job perspective, I will either lose my job, or will keep it but it will be increasingly more stressful and less interesting. There are literally zero benefits for me as a worker. The only hope is that the economic effect will be so huge, the trickle-down crumbs will be enough to live a decent life, but that is unlikely to happen in my country.

But, even if I had generational wealth behind me to be able to leverage the AI to my advantage, I still see a lot of cons in the way cheap content generation worsens the world around me: facilitating fraud, political shilling, disrupting online conversations (now everyone just sends bot summaries to each other). In a way, I feel a similar change that from the "pre-facebook" Internet to the "pre-chatgpt" Internet that happened in the early 10s.

> Over the past six months, there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.

because it's true

> 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.

How can you guarantee that it works though? You can verify, but it would be at the same speed as before the AI, or even slower.

> 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.

By then you have a blackbox of a codebase which is unmaintainable, or in a worst case scenario you end up losing your data or get hacked or both.

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.

The more close you are to the fire the more you understand how dangerous it is.

HN always have had a sizable anti-tech crowd (I don't want to say luddite because it's borderline pejorative). If you see the technology from close and you understand the human impacts of it then there is a reason some would rather stay clear from it. I know some FAANG engineers who doesn’t allow their kids to have smartphones or use social media even though they are themselves working at those companies. Why do you think that is? And you don’t even have to be a FAANG employee to see the social and human impacts of modern technology. AI is the same, in fact not even the same because it’s even worse and it will be only worse.

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

You will need a lot more to make yourself my enemy, but this is the divisor between us... not that you like to use Claude and I don't.

I think it depends a lot on where your interest in (self) development lies.

My main motivator has always been to understand how things work, and myself being able to create as elegant solutions as my technical role models (in the range from colleagues and mentors to the elders of our field), hopefully even pushing it further. Having the LLM just create the product robs me of that, or at least of the most rewarding parts of that. And that's why I don't like to use it.

Different people are driven by different things, I don't think either trumps the other in the objective sense, we're just wired differently.

> 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.

Show the receipts. Where are the mobile apps, the photoshop replacements, the video and audio editors, the games and game engines that took a decade to make in the past that have shipped since Claude code came along?

> 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.

Again where are the receipts?

My experience with coding agents is that they’re perfectly good at generating a v0.1 that just about passes the sniff test. It does the first 90%, but the second 90% always takes longer than the first 90%. That second 90% is what coding agents are terriblle at, and are what make actually good products.

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.

>> 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.

Really depends on what you are shipping, what your users expect and what your personal preference is. I do not want to go 10x on products that need high performance / high reliability, is deployed at large scale where its not easy to undo. But for other stuff, sure why not. The problem is everyone just puts everything in same basket. Either way, AI is useful but not to the same extent people claim it to be.

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.

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).

Because we include people who dislike the hype machine and the initial "it's alive" push triggered a reaction, coupled with a different reaction to what we might call legitimate fears of dis-intermediation: much code is derived from prior code and so LLM are a good fit for reducing the need for coders in some contexts.

I think few of us are blind to how good some systems now are, but we're concerned by reports of worrying trends like swamping free software with machine derived CVE and a decline in critical thinking, not to say outright exam cheating.

Because for many people writing code is exactly their job, it isn't a means to an end.

It is like replacing people at the supermarket with self checkouts and expext they still feel fulfilled on their job, replenishing products from the warehouse.

Additionally only optimistics cannot see their job is in jeopardy.

If you deploy 10x faster, than me as business owner need less of you for the same amount of work.

No, the need for work doesn't grow exponentially every year, there is a physical limit to distribute among all people offering delivery capabilities.

Finally its environment impact destroys all the progress that was made in the last years, and brings computers prices back to the 1980's.

> 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 think there are multiple aspects at play.

People have reasonable concerns about the ethical, political, economic dimensions before we even get to the technical capabilities.

Even within the narrower question of the technical utility, I think there are a lot of factors which differentiate people's different experiences which are largely unacknowledged and lead to people talking past each other and failing to understand how others have such different experiences and opinions.

The sentiment that "users only care if it works" for example implies that all considerations beyond "does the feature work today" are developers self serving their aesthetics, but overlooks many other concerns which _do_ impact users at a later point.

I wrote about just this division of experience and the polarisation which manifests on hacker news just last week as it happens https://www.julianhaeger.com/posts/Disparate-Results-with-AI...

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.

Interesting, my impression is that HN crowd is aggressively pro-AI, and on a level that is simply bizarre. E.g. the 'spec driven agentic engineering' that seems to be all the rage right now is pretty much a return to the 1970's waterfall development model, just with faster implementers. But initial implementation speed wasn't the bottleneck then as it isn't now - maybe people are too young to notice that we're (more or less) just witnessing another rotation of the big wheel of reincarnation ;)

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.

I’m more of an “AI centrist”, as I think the topic is extremely nuanced. As with most tech hype, there tends to be a black and white “AI good” or “AI bad”. I think reality is somewhere in the middle, personally.

> 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.

It’s takes like this that remove the nuance completely and ignore so many facets of the debate. That being said, let’s assume this is true because I think vibecoding a CRUD app does make this realistic on the face of it. When I say vibecoding I mean prompting and dropping, not reading the code.

You do your adversarial reviews with multiple agents, you have your UX agent look over it, your security agent etc. Under the hood there are architectural issues. The code is probably passable, but rough.

You release, customers start using it for their business that they depend on for income. Issues start cropping up, you burn more and more tokens to fix the issues as they come up. Expedience starts sacrificing quality even still, architecture (if there was any) starts being violated and it degrades more and more.

I consider myself a professional, I would never want to end up in a situation like this for mission crititcal products. So, what do I do? I read the output, I make sure I understand it. Why? I care about my customers and secondarily I’m the one with the pager when something breaks down.

Now, for some fun hobby project to track my hobby paints for Warhammer… who cares? I agree. I have used Claude for such projects and not really cared. But your statement does not hold up in the enterprise world with mission critical software.

> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.

This is reductive. You’re assuming people’s concern is “elegance”. It isn’t solely elegance. It’s domain understanding. It’s quality over all. It’s being a professional.

Writing the code was never the slow down for large scale enterprise products.

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.

The current AI tech (LLM and other Gen image stuff) is impressive as heck, but it has flawed origins (facebook torrenting the books, everyone scraping the web and anything they can without attribution) and downright evil boosters advocating for the elimination of humans livelihood (they are talking to CEO). The “hyperscalers” moving fast and breaking things (their local environment mostly) don’t help.

Because AI use correlates with sloppiness, and due to the fundamental attribution fallacy us engineers don't like sloppiness.

I feel like the negativity is mainly due to lack of understanding on how LLMs work under the hood. The more you learn about it, the more you realize that it’s just a glorified autocomplete machine and the reason why it looks so capable is the engineering behind prompt and harness.

Unless there is another breakthrough in model training, I don’t see AI taking over anytime soon. However I do agree that’s it has become another tool, the engineers can use to increase their productivity which is a positive thing

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.

I am against it simply because it corrupts reason.

Humans are trained for easy wins, not thinking about long term consequences and assuming risks will not play out. It's the lethal trifecta of emboldening our worst characteristics.

Not only that the majority of problems that we have with software engineering are self-inflicted and everyone has forgotten that they don't have to be. All this does is allow us to operate the pile of shit we built over the last 25 years with somewhat less efficiency than we did 25 years ago.

The customer does indeed care that the product works. But the engineers should care what they build and with what. And they don't any more. The status quo is using a statistical model to assemble a pile of trash.

Go back 30 years and I single-handedly built a full custom ERP system for a company in 3 months without an LLM in sight, with no internet connection and thus without pulling a single dependency off the internet.

Add the me-too culture over the top "we have to have an AI proposition" and it's a gold rush but the gold is muck.

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!)

Personally, I don't know a place more hyped up about AI than HN. It turned from my daily dose of tech excitement into a daily dose of tech anxiety.

As for your argument, there's no such thing as elegance. Code "elegance" is mainly maintainability (and, to a smaller degree, some other aspects like security, performance, etc.). The importance of maintainability greatly varies between projects, industries and individual subjective viewpoints, resulting in the diversity of attitudes to AI-assisted coding. That, of course, assumes that AI cannot match humans in maintainability. Which seems to be the case to me right now. But it also seems that the gap is closing, not as much through AI writing "better" code, but mainly through it being increasingly capable of maintaining "bad" code.

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 isn't really related to AI because it relates to manually coded things just as much, but on this point specifically this is only true for your very early I-gave-it-to-a-bunch-of-interested-people-to-try customers. It's much less true for your first paying customers, especially if the 'major issues' make their pain worse (e.g. data loss, time wasted, etc). You lose those ones for good, or until there's a critical mass of social proof to tell them the early problems are solved.

'I can dash out an early prototype with AI and then fix it later' is a dangerous mindset. If you're working in a small market with a limited number of customers you might piss off enough people that you won't be able to recover. There still has to be some level of quality. But it is a balance.

LLMs as provided by Antrophic and OpenAI represents an enormous centralization of computing, and are black boxes that end-users are completely at the mercy of.

I think it depends on which side of the regression-to-the-mean machine that you land on (above or below the mean) for any given skill that is being disrupted by AI. From above, AI is frustrating; from below, it's magical.

https://halecraft.org/software-engineering-is-the-new-manufa...

> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.

Having seen bad (human) code behind award winning products, and good (human) code take so long the investors get cold feet, yes.

Some people claim (or seem) to know which corners can be safely cut. But what I've seen suggests those who cut corners got lucky, rather than using skill to know what could be safely ignored.

The other side of this is that I have come to view things like "Clean Code", "SOLID", "VIPER", and use of mocking in unit tests, the same way as self-help books: survivorship bias.

GenAI in code is likely to give us enough feedback fast enough that we can turn the survivorship bias of SWEng self-help guides into actual science; but unless progress stops suddenly (could happen any time if investments stop), humans coders aren't likely to be the beneficiaries of this research.

AI threatens the programmer identity.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

What AI is (a part of) HN against?

The actual uses?

The "it will get sentient next year and take over the world" bullshit?

These two things are simply unrelated, and my experience with coding assistants (that I do use daily, because they are useful) says whatever OpenAI and Anthropic say in their marketing is 95% lies and hyperbole.

Any technology that is marketed as a religion will get the same reaction from me.

> 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. :)

This question goes a lot deeper than AI.

You can infer a developer's position on AI with 100% accuracy if you ask them a related question about the customer and how much overtime they'd be willing to pull to meet a deadline for one of their internal projects. It's the same question, just worded a lot differently.

The general form is probably something like "are you willing to sublimate your ego in order to care for the parties who ultimately justify your compensation/career?"

The reports of AI powered 10x development speed are greatly exaggerated

There is a huge difference that is missing in this question.

Anti-AI does not mean anti-AI-coding-agents. It's the new vibe-mindset being created by vibe coders/vibe thinkers (AI companies are also promoting this), which is that I can make my ideas from scratch on my own and then blame AI for the mess created by the maker.

As a software engineer, I cared about architecture, code and technical responsibilities/duties. To achieve maximum and optimal results I'll take assistance from anything — AI, non-AI and whatnot — to speed up the process either 10x or 100x.

It’s just a big forum so it has lots of people. Personally, I block most reflexively anti-AI people because they’re boringly repetitive. But this has always been the case. Over a decade ago, my friend made a user script to block Snowden news[0].

There are just some topics that a lot of people like to act as radio repeaters on. I just block everyone who seems repetitive to me or who talks in a boring way. In the old world you’d go to a forum and you’d find that many of the threads are occupied by abrasive old timers of one or other type who have driven away all the people who’ve written the information on the forum. This is the standard thing that happens over time. Those for whom the group is the thing prioritize spending their time expressing group membership over being useful to the group.

As forums grow bigger, they attract these participants and then these guys drive out the rest. But you don’t really have to give in to the whole thing. I just remove them and their threads from my comment feed. It’s a pretty good experience.

Other groups that I find undesirable are those with whom I cannot relate. Programmers in crappy companies spend a lot of time talking about how they’re defending their work from useless managers who take credit for everything and so on and so forth. Or they might invent psychoanalysis to express why bosses want people in office rather than remote. There’s just not very much to learn from this kind of person. It’s just a generalized complaint machine which, unlike on sites which have topic-forums like Reddit, leak into general space here.

But you can clean up your own feed. And it’ll get better. It actually doesn’t take very many.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5929494

> 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.

This does not really match my observations. While it does feel to me the sentiment is shifting towards a more negative one, overall HN feels reasonably balanced between those that are pro-AI and those anti-AI (with the middle ground somewhat absent).

Unlike what many other comments here seem to suggest, HN seems much more pro-AI than what I see in real life amongst developers - at least where I live.

And I do think many users would care more than we might think, but unlike art etc. it is often more difficult to tell.

At my workplace, we outsource a great deal. Of all the companies we outsource to, the employees of two are very upfront that they use LLM "assistance". Their output has been getting worse and worse since that started, about a year ago. Firmware produced with LLM assistance results in hardware that does not work reliably. Tools created or maintained with LLM-assistance do not function reliably. In short, LLM-created product doesn't work in my direct experience.

I think it's very useful but the hype promises so much more than it delivers. And a lot of the proponents are all in on the hype it gets annoying.

I use claude to write a design, review the design, turn that into an implementation plan, spend 2-3 turns reviewing that, but still when that is turned into code it misses things or creates helpers that's not actually used or... It creates massive files and unless I explicitly tell it to it never refactors them. It often just silences errors and warnings instead of actually fixing the problem.

It saves a lot of time, and I'm building things I couldn't have on my own. But it makes a lot of mistakes, it's far far from one shots which the hype keep going on and on about. It's tricky to put firm limits on what it does. A lot of the mistakes I catch because I've spent 15 years without an agent and sometimes it's just "hm, this smells weird" and I begin digging. I worry about the next generation.

For me the mental framing of "It's all hallucinations, some of those hallucinations are useful" is helpful to keep frustration in check as I ask it to review the same implementation plan for the 4th time and it turns up different issues because the input was slightly different, or review the output code and see allow(dead_code) despite my claude.md forbidding it.

> there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.

Confirmation bias. There has been pro-AI post every single day too but because you already decided that HN is anti-AI you didn't notice that.

> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.

Yeah, when your code runs on more than one machine, more than once. Then it's worth it to spend some time to make it actually good. RAM usage also matters.

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.

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?"

AI is not supposed to write excellent code, it is supposed to write the “most likely” code which equates to your average engineer. People who are below the curve are going to see a much higher benefit than people who are higher than the curve.

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.

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

When I first started working with LLMs in 2019 AI was in no was synonymous with LLMs. I personally realized pretty quickly that they’d eventually be able to write software that compiles. Not necessarily good software, but software that passes a minimum threshold.

Then again there were all sorts of hallucination-adjacent issues which are still present but rarer as models get bigger. Wondering about the consequences for software engineering as an industry was a little bit of an “overpopulation on Mars” problem since GPT2 could barely string a paragraph together.

Another factor is the industry’s continued insistence on evaluating the ability to write software using leetcode. Well, Claude is probably the best leetcoder in the world now, but since our industry never figured out better evaluation criteria for candidates of course we are backed into a corner.

Saying "code is just a means to an end" is like saying a Car is just a Vehicle to get from A to B. Which is true to a certain amount of people, but certainly not to people who need a special car like a truck and certainly not to the people who build cars. Developers are car builders.

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.

The way I see it, there are three possible outcomes:

1. AI works worse than expected.

Our economies are depending on this not to be the case, so it triggers the Greater Depression. Widespread poverty and misery ensue.

2. AI works as exactly as expected.

This means whoever controls it gains enormous power over everybody else. There's no possibility of resistance: the Second Amendment doesn't matter when your oppressor has fully automated murder drone factories. We enter a dystopia beyond anything Orwell imagined. Note that this is an arms race, which means there's no limit to resources it can consume. Billionaires are fighting over who gets to be king of the world and they don't care how much you're paying for RAM.

3. AI works better than expected.

This means the "recursive self improvement" plans succeeds, and the "intelligence explosion" scenario happens. This, with probability very close to one, results in the sudden extinction of all life. Human values are a highly complex result of our shared evolutionary history. Something that did not share any part of that history will have profoundly alien values, e.g. "minimize training loss". If it's vastly more intelligent than us, it will be able to fulfill those alien values which extreme efficacy. There are very few goals of the "make number go up" kind that don't result in everybody dead when taken to the logical conclusion.

Different people have different opinions (including opinions in favor of AI, and opinions in between, and more nuanced opinions).

I have several objections as well, including the Dijkstra objection (i.e. it is not as precise as using a computer code), as well as concerns about the commercial intentions (and terms of use and other related issues) of whatever companies makes them, and wastes of power and other things like that. There is also expectation of use even if it does not help, and that what I have seen often does not help and is better to do by yourself, or to use different software rather than LLM/generative-AI software. (Many people have different objections, although in some cases I do not consider them significantly important.)

I use AI daily. But not with agents. Those feel like cars before there were safety measures, like seatbelts. I'm no anti AI. I'm just waiting for the seatbelts.

If you're impressed by something which was done by AI, then you're not qualified enough to judge it.

HN has been very pro-AI over the last several years. It's only swung back slightly the other way recently. I suspect this is due to tensions in the gulf causing some institutions to reallocate their investments, which results in reduced bot activity.

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

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.

Because the HN crowd is composed largely of developers — the profession that is first to fall to the Axe of AI.

Given a large majority of the HN audience is likely directly employed by large orgs responsible for creating this garbage, it definitely doesn’t skew negative.

There is now more, and likely only an increasing amount, of AI content.

As someone interested in what other people, not machines, are doing - I don’t want to spend time reading superfluous prose/code that LLM’s generate.

> AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.

It is strange to me that your question is so narrowly scoped, as though code is the only current use of AI and as though bugs are the reason to be against it and not a clear existential crisis that the world has not demonstrated any capability to meet.

The end goal of AI, literally the goal, is to make it so that workers aren't needed anymore. Ignore for the moment that AI isn't good enough right now to have eliminated all the worker roles yet. That is still fundamentally its goal. You will tell the AI what you want, the AI will give you what you want, ..., profit. No nasty employees to deal with.

I would rejoice at this if I lived in a society that decided it would use the fruits of each new labor efficiency to provide for the populace instead of telling me that people who don't work should die in a gutter. But I do not live in such a society.

> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand

That's true, but they care deeply about the consequences of that:

> about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.

So whomever your strawman is, they got a point.

Note that I'm "anti-ai", I use it a fair bit and even received the trendy email asking me to watch out how much I spend in it cause it's expensive. I'm also not delusioned into believing the "it's 10x faster" and "code doesn't matter anymore" marketing. If the thing fails it's my name on the git blame and my number they call at night so I'll review that code thank you very much.

I feel like past the wow effect it's pretty easy to see the seams and the limits, even on "frontier" (god do I hate that term) models, and nothing replaces human skill for now if you're working on something with any significance.

Dang sums it all, I dont perceive hn as being pro or against AI, it's a mix, but if you're polarized, whatever "side you're on" you'll feel the other side is over represented.

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

Mainly because noisy people are most visible. Both pro-AI and anti-AI (so to speak) crowds have them.

Why do workers dislike being charged to rent scab labor from their oppressors?

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.

> 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.

Most people in general have a negative view on AI, the HN crowd isn’t special

I spend quite a bit of time every day on HN, I see the vast majority of posts are about AI and how AI is accomplishing more and more.

> 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

A lot of people here are not users but creators, they do care about these things

> why anti-AI

I suspect because most people that participate on HN have something to do with writing or shipping software. Most discussions around AI feel like children pretending to be adults in the room, except everyone else still just sees children pretending to be something they are not.

That isn’t new and it certainly isn’t limited to AI. For example, it’s come up in the past many times when people pretend to write JavaScript but can’t or when people believe they can replace JavaScript with WASM and yet can’t. What is new that Autism (absentee introspection) or Dunning-Kruger feel of it is both wider and deeper. It’s the feeling of someone professing their expertise without ever actually producing anything before.

because anti-ai crowd is loud and stupid. They don't know how to use ai tools and keep complaining ai does a bad job when prompted "build me a Twitter clone".

I don’t know why people have to pick one side or the other. AI speeds up development at the cost of oversight. Whether this tradeoff makes sense depends on the real world consequences of getting it wrong and the quality of the foregone oversight, which is very much case by case

Claude calls it enterprise and production ready. I now have to spend the next two days dealing with the fallout, page, outage.

Because being critical of AI is the second most boring activity on HN.

And in my experience with AI doing personal projects, 10x as fast probably understates it by at least an order of magnitude.

AI the thing that experts say 20% chance will destroy humanity? Yes, why be anti- that? lol.

> They care that the product works.

And that's the problem.

More like, HN crowd is anti-HYPE

I read a lot of comments talking about pro-AI or anti-AI. The world (and each of us) is much more complex than a binary split.

The genuine answer is that many people who hold a lot of power over me (the executive suite of my industry) intend to do me harm with it (put me out of a job).

> Code is just a means to an end

No, it it's not just that. Don't you realize your opinions are just, well, your opinions?

Why were weavers so anti-mechanical loom? Is it more complicated than that?

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.

> 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.

Fun question, we can speculate a bit of course.

We're talking about vocal minorities expressing their arguments for and against AI. And some people here are just very vocal and dominant. Passive aggressive/obnoxious even. But that doesn't mean they represent the dominant opinion. If you've had the pleasure of attending a lot of meetings with developers, many of them barely open their mouths and some of them can't shut up. You find a lot of those types on HN. And looking in the mirror, that's me.

Most people that come here are hackers. Many of those probably use paid subscriptions for agentic coding tools at this point. At least, I don't know many professional developers that don't. But I know plenty that grumble a lot about AI and how they are still relevant and not that easily replaced by a tool. This stuff is a bit threatening to many people and it's triggering anxiety, uncertainty, anger, etc. And a lot of that leaks through in the discussions here.

And there's an uncomfortable reality that HN has been around for a while and the demographics are maybe a bit skewed towards people in their forties and fifties. People that are a bit set in their ways and maybe a bit conservative and change resistant. I'm in my fifties myself and I have to actively fight that tendency in myself.

So, all of that adds up to a lot of negativity.

People started treating HN as a tech subreddit. It’s Reddit crowd

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?

From my perspective it comes down to two factors.

First is the corporate push for AI. We are constantly getting told to "use AI for X" and not "explore if it makes sense to use AI for X". It's pretty obvious that quality doesn't matter, only cutting staff costs does, and I dread to think how software and service will look in 5 years.

The second part is how people use it to do their work without shame. You can't get a bug report without someone saying "here's what Claude thinks". Great, is it right? I can ask Claude myself, at least verify. Outage reports will be summarised and pushed by AI without anyone verifying. I have to argue with a bot to get my PRs through, and nobody reads anything anymore.

It's not that AI can't be useful it's that it seems like nobody cares how good the quality is, only that it does the work.

Could it be the new car effect. You get say a Mini then see it everywhere. Personally I see diverse views on AI here.

Well it’s a fear of being replaced in the ones hating on AI so bad.

This site is the gathering place of the biggest AI zealots there are. If someone posted that they have stopped talking and started communicating with the world solely through a camera pointed at their face and having claude interpret their facial expression, I would not know if they were joking. That is the caliber of AI fandom here.

AI anecdotes posted here are also clearly exaggerated. When someone tells, it's a story of extraordinary feats, something truly spectacular. But then when someone shows, it's always some below mediocre slop. It looks like shit and the program does not work etc.

This is not a recent development either. Ever since chatgpt came out there have been people here posting that they use it for things it can't do.

And I'm not even of the opinion that LLMs are useless technology. They clearly are good for many things. Recent security vulnerability findings have been impressive for example. Automatic spam and astroturfing is an obvious use case. And it's actually easy to come up with potential use cases. This technology is not bitcoin.

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.

Its complicated, this is how its going to be. People are going to have opinions and take sides or take no side at all.

There is a real divergence of experiences. That is one factor. There are people who are domain experts in some narrow complex domain who do such complex work that LLMs are still not there. I see some of that in my work place with large complex, domain specific languages, etc.

This is also challenging people's view of themselves as craftsman and the "crafting" of software. Something like carpenters who disavow power tools.

There is the worry about slop which is also real. I.e. that AI can and does generate garbage that ends up making things worse.

Worries about job security, the future of the industry, people's economic future and place in a new world where parts of their job get automated away.

I agree with you. Users don't care how the code is generated. This is purely economics there is no big market for "craft code" (like craft beer). There is only market for working software. And yes, LLMs are non-deterministic token generators, but so are humans, and LLMs are mind blowing. We live in the future. They don't replace software engineers quite yet- they are power tools.

If your bar for good software is "released asap", more power to you. Fortunately though, that's not everyone's stance. Not everyone is aiming to shit out the next big crud app.

Because no one has shown profitability, only made claims that are unproven so far. This combined with being one of the largest investments of capital since the rail system, and being backed by known conmen like Musk, make a subset of the population(myself included) sceptical.

If you are blind to or don't care about those caveats then AI looks amazing because it can legitimately produce novel results. Its just that for the subset that I am part of, it looks like they are doing so by burning a dollar to make 50 cents in revenue and that is not sustainable.

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.

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.

I mean others are saying its divided and that's true.

I guess the other side of your argument is... Is it better though? One could easily argue much of software development is promising projects strangled by their own technical debt and short sighted designs. It still has yet to be seen if AI can make well architected systems unsupervised. And this really was one of the few places where technical people shared their labors of love and appreciated the technical skills of a community.

Also, all the externalities whether that be environmental, social, or even technical and hn is really bad at actually talking about these things directly so we have to couch it all as the tool being bad. That's the part you're missing for many its more like its not good enough to justify the costs

There's a reason why this tech is called disruptive.

The same phenomenon can be observed on Reddit. You'll see a lot of knee-jerk reactions to anything that looks AI, as in 'Thanks ChatGPT' or 'AI slop' top comment, and at the same time you'll see entire subs raving about any new AI advance, or massive upvotes for somebody's vibe-coded project - because it's just... good.

Like others have said, we're becoming more polarized, partly because of the nature of social media (anybody can share anything, anybody can comment), and partly because of the effects of said media on the human brain. It'll only get worse/more amplified as we go forward.

I think it's because the extremes are simply not equivalent.

On one hand, you have smart people are doing cool and interesting things like dang referenced: breathing life into old projects and cleaning out old bugs in EOL hardware.

And then you have people who use it to do things like "chatGPT can this trailer pull this car?", "gosh, my electric bill is high I should use an LLM to figure this out" or "please write this email to my subordinates".

So yeah, it's cool that LLMs can work on software(. And now, the profession that intersects between highest earning potential and least amount of schooling is able to be done significantly faster, so wages will be diluted faster than the workers will ask for raises commensurate to their output).

But it's more obviously terrible because a large chunk of people are losing their critical and creative thinking abilities rapidly, obviously, and with seemingly no end in sight.

One problem is that people trust the bot. To give you an example. If you submit articles for scientific publication you will get reviews that are at least co-authored by the bot. People defer their own judgement to what the bot says.

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 don’t think HN crowd is against AI, this crowd is just more pragmatic than others. They challenge things - in a constructive way most of the times - but this does not mean an anti movement.

I run an AI newsletter on top of HN, I have seen the sentiment from the grass level: I think there is an inflation of Show HN vibecoded products that annoy a lot of people here, but other than that, I think it just pragmatism what comes up.

I think ever since @dang posted the updated rules against LLM comments/posts, the tide has turned.

> 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?

I guess you can describe me as anti-AI. I use AI everyday to write code. I can’t deny that it makes me more efficient. And there’s pressure from the people that pay my bills to produce more and more with it. But I still hate it. I hate the code it writes. I hate what is turning my job into. I hate the main companies behind it. I hate all the resources being poured into it. I hate that most of the real profit and benefits from it will just go on to make more delusional tech billionaires the likes of Zuckerberg and Musk instead of actually being distributed somewhat fairly amongst all of us.

But yeah, I can vibe code the same crappy app as millions of other engineers in a weekend. And we will all pay Apple $99 a year to upload the same crappy app to the App Store hoping to catch some of that AI-wave money.

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.

More like anti mindless hype and braindead evangelism.

But the AI hypebeasts are incapable of differentiating that from an anti-AI stance.

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

>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.

I will tell 8 year old me that his interest in coding was simply a misguided abstraction towards providing customers with business value.

Certainly these AI agents will get the time machines ready for that any minute, or, well, any major software/app/website breakthrough that has happened every 2-5 years. They work 10x as fast, so it should be easy, right? It's not like everything's been bottlenecked by product and engineering is the slow burn skill that PUT FOOD ON OUR TABLES this whole time... right?

The following does not answer your question. I am me; I'm not "the HN crowd", if there is even one. And if there is such a crowd I wouldn't be the one knowing what it thinks.

The following is only a perspective on the argument of "the product works" and what "code elegance" means. I don't really care much about LLMs but the following is not necessarily tied to them.

Also, I'm retired from professional programming so feel free to ignore all of it as antiquated and irrelevant.

---

Code is not really "a means to an end". Code is better described as a liability.

People you write code may have different perspectives on code but those with more experience generally end up with this idea engrained in their minds. Code is a cost.

Thus, you'd want to have less of it, and you'd want to have code which:

- you at least have some grade of confidence that you can understand as deeply as possible, because that means you can maintain it better and more efficiently. It means that you can, when if fails, quickly/easily find where it failed, sometimes even why it did.

- you can manage in its entirety, which becomes exponentially more difficult when there's more of it and you didn't write it yourself. Not only that, it becomes more difficult to manage it when it has been incorporated in very large chunks that reach all over the codebase, and it becomes a lot more difficult when it lacks consistency, coherence and a certain uniform style.

What you call "the elegance of code" is not an aesthetical quality but a practical one. A developer obviously wants to have something that works, but that it does so well, reliably well. And they want code that is manageable enough that when shit happens -and it always does-, the fix will be hopefully easier and will hopefully make the resulting code more reliable, not less.

And, sure, in some circumstances development speed does matter. The problem is that the circumstances in which it does are frequently "unwanted" ones, usually external pressures, which we already disliked. Usually, you need to develop faster because someone else is pressuring you into putting that speed above reliability, not because it is intrinsically better to do it faster.

The one acknowledged situation in which development speed is tolerated above these other qualities is when doing a prototype. But then again, experienced developers know that prototypes can very easily turn into traps. When doing a prototype, quality is relegated because it is understood that this will not be the final product. It is understood that a prototype's code is disposable. But too often prototypes then become either the product directly or the basis for it. And again this happens because of external pressures. Most of the time because someone says "hey, it's working" without realising that it is barely so, that it's fragile, that it relies on constant tweaking and manual adjustment. But as it appears to be working, it gives the impression of being good enough to make financial sense to build on it.

And when you "ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace" what you're usually doing is shipping prototype 2.0, an unreliable system that requires more constant tweaking and manual adjustment. A system that entraps the developers into more maintenance on each iteration, when they'd want the opposite.

---

All in all, using LLMs to produce code may have its place. But if you focus on the idea of producing vast quantities of it faster, then that may not be the best use.

People who are in tech have already started observing that newcomers' skills are diminishing dramatically, and the reliance on AI is getting worse. This naturally triggers graybeards.

Because it isn't, the HN crowd is wildly pro-AI.

I don't know how you got that impression, but I have a even harder time believing that you "honed your craft" for 20 years.

That can't possibly be the attitude of someone who ever cared about software development.

There's a huge difference in outcomes depending on the skill of the operator. People who aren't good operators get poor results out of AI and so develop a negative opinion of it. Given operating AI well depends on having excellent written communication and specification skills, and engineers are notoriously reluctant to specify and communicate clearly, there's a significant number of engineers for whom AI produces much worse code than if they wrote it themselves.

Knowing how it works means knowing that it'll always hallucinate and will never be more than the sum of its parts.

That being said, there are positives. It does things today, albeit imperfectly; I use it like a supercharged search engine. It's reinvigorated the AI race and raised such vast quantities of capital that it's more likely new AI techniques will be discovered.

But yeah, the current iteration is just a statistical model that guesses things. With a bunch of tools and probably an expert system bolted on. Definitely not useless, but also underwhelming given the hype.

I don't understand the question. Shouldn't you be afraid and disgusted?

Of course I don't like it. I should dislike it. Anyone saying "it's not that bad" is just describing the fact that it hasn't hit them yet.

You think you're sitting pretty and safe? That's the real fantasy. Not fantasizing about how powerful AI is — fantasizing that you're immune.

Fear and disgust aren't irrational here. They're the normal response to watching the skill you've built your livelihood on lose value. The question isn't why HN is anti-AI — the question is what the people who aren't afraid are using to keep themselves calm.

HN is actually one of the more AI-positive sites around. Some people just generally hate or fear AI because it's called AI and that comes with 100 years of scifi fearmongering baggage and modern fashionable doomerism. A lot of people hate AI because it enables behavior that they don't like: spam, slop, and other low effort content that drains energy and attention but provides no value. Others dislike being pushed to introduce AI into their workflow and tokenmaxxing policies. A few fear job loss or may be unable to find employment in their desired field due to AI tools. I've personally never used AI at all (because it didnt interest me) but have been growing interested due to HN articles and comments extolling it's virtues.

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.

I just simply don't think it's that good.

> 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.

you know how in third grade you have these confusing feelings about a girl and it's upsetting and you pretend you hate her and tease her etc? people here are in love with AI, it's that simple. can't stop talking about it. go ahead and deny it, that will just convince us more.

Technology is not some pure thing detached from emotions, society, feelings, and consequences.

Code isn't just a means to an end for a lot of people.

More people are now realizing that society has no protections around losing your job - what little power they had is going to be stripped away. Or its going to be used to reduce their power - you know have to work more bc you can use ai to do it! Ive already seen this.

Sure ai in a vacuum is a really interesting thing, oh its cool it can produce code or whatever. The underlying issue however is capitalism.

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.

It's not anti AI, as many other comments point out it's simply heterogeneous enough that it's mostly the "theme" of a discussion dictating which subgroup will be more vocal in a discussion.

In any case I think that some in the anti-AI crowd are simply very defensive.

They have staked all of their careers on the technical part and skills of writing code. Now that they see the average developer (which study indicates can barely write a fizz buzz) outputting software at a great velocity they have a mixture of disgust for the (alleged) low quality of the software and fear for their own careers.

When did HN become Reddit ? This is a real demographic shift I am seeing after a long time hiatus. The people who hate AI are largely those that lean far left and see themselves as liberal progressive.

I think the biggest factor is fear. When we first started discussing LLMs a few years ago, it was easy to be amused and reassured when looking closer at all the inaccuracies. The models have improved at an alarming rate. Some of us have spent decades automating the roles of others, and now it turns out our own medicine doesn’t taste very nice. The timing is also terrible because the rise of these tools is coinciding with a dramatic post-COVID tightening of the jobs market.

On the other hand, it’s frustrating to see the trend and tools go towards vibecoding and fully agentic development. Many of us have also been in the business of inheriting (and supporting) code, so it goes against the grain when non-developers produce something without even attempting to understand how it works. Because we’ve been there in the trenches trying to diagnose and debug a serious problem out of hours under pressure, and know how essential it is to have a decent mental model of how it is meant to operate.

As a personal anecdote, I was working in an area with someone business-focussed and not particularly technical. There was some functionality we had been discussing, and one day they wanted to discuss it on a call. They then went on to demo something that seemed to have a working implementation of all the features we had been discussing, and more. I was curious, so asked them to screen share the code… at which point they started to get a bit cagey. I managed to get them to show it to me, and it turned out they had vibed the whole system as a single massive React component. And had no clue how any of the code worked. I told them I couldn’t possibly integrate that massive ball of spaghetti, and we agreed to treat it as a throwaway demo prototype and develop any production system properly. That sort of mess is inevitable when banging Accept All like the LLM is a casino slot machine.

So personally, I have spent the last few years trying to amplify my skills and experience with these tools rather than bury my head in the sand. Three decades as a freelance consultant developer (with several stack pivots) has taught me that new technology trends don’t simply vanish if they are providing at least some business value. Don’t wait for all this to go away, because that day will never come.

I also think this technology makes us all generalists, unless somebody’s specialist knowledge and skills are very deep and highly unusual. It won’t be so easy to be a backend-only guy who doesn’t touch frontend, when your project stakeholder thinks he could have a stab at it with his free Claude account.

On my journey with this tooling I’ve struggled to find the line between how much I write versus how much I generate, and tried to maintain the balance between velocity and quality. I gravitate towards a workflow of insisting that I understand and approve every diff, and use the knowledge ingested by the LLMs to keep learning, and try to be sensitive to when the convenience has become laziness and there’s a danger of de-skilling. I combine my experience and instincts with the new powertools and feel that we are greater than the sum of our parts. I just have to hope that when this all settles down a bit, there’s a solid market for that type of work rather than being replaced by non-technical vibecoders with only velocity to offer (back in the day we used to refer to them as cowboy coders, but same idea).

I can only speak for myself:

1) I'm incredibly allergic to hype. To me, LLMs are very technologically impressive. I don't doubt that they're useful for many things – adversarial code review (including finding exploits), refactoring, search and math exploration are some shoo-ins in my view. However, these and other applications speak for themselves. They are impressive. They don't need people running around telling everyone how they should use more LLMs. How "the old ways" are obsolete, etc. Awesomeness does not need a fanclub.

2) Usefulness in some areas doesn't necessarily extrapolate as well as the fanclub seems to think.

3) The fanclub happens to be aligned with some pretty unsavory people, and some powers that have very little regard for our shared planet. This is, of course, not the fault of the fanclub, but many in the fanclub certainly could do a better job distancing themselves from certain people and acknowledging certain regulatory necessities.

4) I think this revolution has revealed a dichotomy in the set of people who enjoy programming: those for whom the end goal reigns supreme, and those for whom the journey is the point. You yourself seem to be in the former group. As a member of the latter, I have to say we feel a bit invisible. We're also often accused of wanting to halt progress so that we can keep doing what we want. I think that's an unfair characterization (I won't go into details of why here).

5) A lot of people in a geeky community like this are naturally skeptical of relying on things that we ourselves can't control. It's part of why the FOSS movement succeeded. This is all very much on a collision course with at least SOTA LLMs.

6) A lot of us do intellectual work. We therefore rely on a functioning system of intellectual property. It seems that a large fraction of the pro-AI crowd subscribe to the idea that passing IP through an LLM can strip it of its original ownership. For points 1-5, I believe we should have a nuanced discussion and try to understand each other. On point 6, though, I think these people have lost their minds. I completely fail to understand how they themselves don't think they'll soon encounter face-eating leopards if their worldview holds water. There seems to be very little acknowledgement of this, and it makes me angry.

It's not actually, people outside tech are even more anti-AI than here. Tbh I think AI submissions at least get really hyped here by the system at least.

Outside the tech bubble people either don't care or already associate AI with increased prices.

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.

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. 

---

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!

I have realised that my own "anti-AI" position is little to do with AI itself, and a lot to do with the flatly appalling culture around it, and my reluctance is partly to do with what navigating it has meant for me and people I care about.

I am willing to accept that I must learn these tools, so I am learning the tools. (Essentially: open source, open weights, open culture: the true state of the art.)

Now that I am learning these tools at my own pace, I can evaluate them all as the future boring technology they will soon be.

It has helped me see what I am "anti-", with clarity:

- I am "anti-" the way that tech people have brazenly underestimated the complexity, values, culture, traditions, and principles of the creative industries they have gleefully and derisively fucked up (I have a foot in multiple camps here so I can see this easily)

— I am "anti-" the exhausting burden-shifting of it all. Everyone has new stuff to deal with; every creative community has to develop new rules to stop "fix my AI generated thing" crushes, PR slop, "I asked AI and it said..." spam etc.

- I am "anti-" the tethering of this technology to "e/acc", and the "in the near future we will destroy all your jobs, we're deadly serious about this, sorry, I guess you're fucked haha, maybe learn AI" mentality that it has been riddled with since the earliest point

- I am "anti-" the sort of new tech industry imperial default: hey you can just change your business so it is dependent on pouring money into one of two American cloud startups that have demonstrated little commitment to openness or behaving in a predictable manner, that have subsidised pricing that will one day blow up, and is like Uber did, YOLO-ripping through regulations, legal principles and foreign commercial cultures, and at the end of it will get the government to change the rules so it doesn't have to do anything little people have to do like make a profit, and will leave said litle people holding the bag while they yomp on towards the next thing to fuck up.

In short, I am "anti-" the brazen, entitled, trollish trend of devaluing all of human culture and denigrating anyone who is not in the tech industry as expendable, inferior, quaint, classist etc.; it is like what happens to any social group when the spoilt children of the local overgrown rich-kid come to dominate it.

The technology? A bit less world-shaking than people realise, but possibly worth it for code-generation.

(This is just what I think and I'm not going to argue with your dissent, not least because as a middle-aged British man I am always right)

I just don't want to read about it. I came here to read about my craft. I want to hear about cool new database tools. Or someone's project that will inspire me to do something. I don't give a single shit about someone's opinion about AI or some crap someone made with it (I've made plenty of personal tools with it; I never posted them here because they weren't interesting, much like all of these Show HN!) It has raised the floor for engineering, nothing more.

> the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster.

Prove it.

> as someone who has spent more than 20 years honing their craft

Proving it should be exceptionally easy. So.. why haven't you done it? Why is it always prognostication about what AI "could" do and never what it "actually did for me?"

> but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?

They do. They also might realize that your post is just a means to an end. Is it actually a genuine question or something else entirely?

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

Do you realize not everyone shares the values that caused you to say this?

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.

> 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.

That is one part of the problem. Too many people who are not 20 years seasoned senior developers shipping out products that are nothing more than letting Claude or whatever go rambling unsupervised. And frankly, when I see a project that has Claude in its contributors, I do not want to have to waste time to check if the person directing the AI actually has a clue what they are doing.

> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.

Dead internet theory. In the end everything will just be piles of hacked together slop that no human can even begin to grasp and bugfixes or feature requests will get exponentially more expensive and risky.

anti-AI is in many cases a misnomer

I think the technology is an amazing scientific breakthrough. I use it myself; it's an excellent tool for certain tasks, and getting better.

I also think that the social implications of the technology, as it is being developed, monetized and pushed by BigTech, are all very negative, and potentially disastrous. And that's even without getting into a host of other issues, like how BigTech stole everyone's data to create these models in the first place.

I'm not anti the technology, but I am anti the way we're going about developing it.

I'm especially irritated by the starry-eyed AI-bros who remind me of the crypto bros, who are either oblivious to the implications of AI as it is being rolled out, or just don't care (because it's shiny or whatever).

Does that make me "anti-AI"? If so, so be it.

It's not unlike how I think nuclear fission is an amazing scientific discovery as an energy source, but I'm also very concerned that we instead used it to create the capacity to destroy the entire planet, and not only that, but that the power to do resides with a few people who I believe are untrustworthy and dangerous. Considering that nuclear power is such a small fraction of global energy production today, can we say that nuclear fission was worth it? Maybe it's because I grew up in the 70s/80s where I experienced that feeling of that we very close to someone pressing that red button (and, in fact, we were). People today seem to have forgotten that, but the bombs and the red buttons have not gone away. And in fact, I would say that I trust Reagan and Brezhnev to make rational decisions more than I do Trump and Putin, so we might even be worse off now (not to mention the other countries who now have nukes).

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You are training your replacement.

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.

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.