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...

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.

- 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.

A Quinnipiac poll showed 80% of Americans are "very" or "somewhat" concerned about artificial intelligence, with only 35% feeling excited about it

https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3955

Gallup found that 71% of Americans oppose the construction of AI data centers in their local communities.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-ce...

A Fox News Poll indicated that 80% of voters believe protecting the public's interests and enacting regulations should be prioritized over unchecked technological innovation.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-voters-see-ai...

And Pew Research found that the majority of Americans are "more concerned than excited" about AI, with that number increasing over the years

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Which is undeniably true. I am not "anti-AI", in fact, it helps me immensely in my current job, but in my experience, using these tools still requires quite a lot of involvement. Otherwise, updating existing or adding new functionality becomes increasingly difficult as the system grows. The funniest thing is that when you start to lose touch with the internals of the system you are building, you cannot even give the AI proper context to pinpoint the problem or guide it to make specific changes, which results it a lot of wasted tokens, wrong assumptions and mountains of sloppy code.

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!"

- the cloud was invented and we were told CTOs would be able to just point and click and make infrastructure and apps! What did we actually get? Another layer of abstraction to debug through. Does it have is perks? Yes. Does it have it's own problems? Yes. Is it more expensive than setting up bare metal and having a solid team? Well that depends on what you're doing and the economics of it and the team.

- then document storages came along like and got wildly popular like mongo and people were calling it the end of SQL! And no more complexity or relational nonsense. Everything is JSON and life is great. What actually happened? These companies realized over time their data was getting trashed, adding things and fixing bugs became complex in pure docstore systems. So the initial v1 was easy and looked beautiful but only 4 years in you have a production db with orphan data that's twice as big as it should be. New features take forever to see a clear path in adding it to the model because it's no longer as intuitive to get performance for a feature.

Anyway. I see AI taking both of these roads at the same time. In 5 years I believe the code will be a giant pile of unfixable mess for most vibe coded things. I also don't see it getting rid of programmers but just adding another layer of abstraction to the mix that yes is helpful, but only if you already know what you're doing, much like what came of the clouds.

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.

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.

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.

>> 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 answer is that, yes, most people do understand that. Some people like writing code regardless of whether they realise the extent to which that code is useful to others or not. Some people write code just as a means to an end and couldn't are less how that code is produced. There is, from what I've seen, a general expectation that the people who care about code are better at writing it but my experience is also that they just aren't. Some people who are "passionate about prorgramming" are horrible coders, some who are lukewarm or don't care at all are great coders.

I honestly don't know how AI comes into all that. HN is certainly not anti-AI. Just the other day a post made the first page with a title like "HN front page without the AI" but I can't find it now. There's as much AI stories submitted as anyting you could consider anti-AI.

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.

For anything something else will use, this is a real problem you can’t simply wave away.

> AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt”

Bad code is hard to maintain, for the AI as well. While all code eventually becomes technical debt, the throw-away nature of AI code, and the sheer volume it creates, tends to turn it to technical debt more quickly. If code is “cheap”/“easy”, and the AI is bad at maintenance, why not do a full re-write for every update?

Bugs are bad for users and harder to find when you don’t have a deep understanding of the code. Logic bugs are the worst of these, because the AI and linter won’t necessarily find them. Some logic bugs can cause a lot of real world issues before they are reported and found. If doing a full re-write for updates, because the AI doesn’t care, each run is an opportunity for new bugs to get injected into the code.

If I’m expected to understand and answer for the code when there are issues, I need to be able to read and understand it, not just deploy quickly.

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.

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.

I have decided to leave what has been my workplace for over 15 years - mainly to do other types of work. Why? I stopped thinking in my current job as a system architect and dev. AI output is better or on par with my thinking, and I lost all feeling of achievement in my daily work.

I still want to use my brain, so I will find a job where I can continue to do that.

> 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.

It is more of a reaction to misrepresentation and falsehood, which AI and its rhetoric seems to have generated a lot of.

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

Good or bad, I believe the genie is out of the bottle, and we should do the best we can using and mitigating AI. But I don’t blame or disagree with anyone who’s critical.

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...

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.

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!)

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.

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.

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.

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.

I also don't consider LLM's to be AI. I put it in the same category as PageRank.

For most software engineers LLMs represent future financial uncertainty, pushing them into a tailspin. For a substantial subgroup the challenge runs deeper IMO. They are experiencing an identity crisis, as a central component of their self-concept is being violently stripped away on top of the financial uncertainty.

1. Many criticisms of AI’s usefulness focus on the present/past. They may well be right about the current state, but the trajectory things are improving at (unless we’ve hit a brick wall) means they’ll probably be wrong in a few years.

2. Some of the most vocal anti AI statements I’ve heard have come from people the most impacted by its disruption. Does the concept it cheapens your prior work, or perhaps threatens to replace you, not lead to a huge amount of bias?

Like any technology, AI has good and bad aspects. There should be criticisms of it, we need those. But focusing on where it’s headed, and being aware of bias, is going to produce the most important discussions.

> 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.

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.

You know, it starts with hype about this new thing that is, perhaps, smarter than humans—or at least may soon be. And then the backlash comes and AI's reputation follows in descension.

And from such backlash and hate, some people start to say, "Hey, it's not so bad. It works for me." And maybe AI's reputation begins to swings toward the positive…

I suppose this is to be expected and perhaps ultimately healthy. I know for myself the swings in attitudes regarding AI have caused me to give pause and consider both sides with more regard than I might have. It has blunted some of my criticism and praise, sharpened others.

You can ship a 1.0 10x faster and leave bug hunting to your users and tank your reputation before you have one or you could do like what we've been doing for 30 years and ship quality. There was no problem to fix there that AI fixed.

Also, '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 ...' probably means the opposite is simply not news worthy anymore - no one wants to read another article that says AI could write fairly reasonable code.

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.

Slow is Fast.

Also: at some point the elegance of the code starts to matter more than execution speed. :)

This post is absurd, childish binary thinking.

For as long as LLM use the probabilistic predictive next-token for an algorithm, there shall be glaring errors when encountering a complex-logic (or even compound-logic).

In short, use AND, OR, NOR, XOR sparingly when doing AI prompt. Elevate your err-dar when doing so.

One of them tried to use tabs in yaml instead of spaces, didn't know what a virtualenv was, and didn't know why Kube jobs asked for xp in writing operators ; yet he is pushing multi-files features in less than a day that are meant to manage our backups, and is pushing for managing our own kube clusters in front of management (which finds that it is a lovely idea). At this point I am not sure what to do but it won't end very well I feel.

But users also include users of the code. There's no value in self-flagellation via terrible code or pointlessly complicated frameworks.

There are others who just want a problem solved, and it doesn't matter to them how the program which solves it gets written, as long as the program (appears to) work and it's done as quickly as possible, so they outsource the development to AI. That is not hacking.

It's hard to face this, specially for the one oasis in the job market that pays well.

I notice that a lot of people say they'll be able to write 2.0 faster than I can write 1.0. This means that their 1.0 must have been so bad that they had to rewrite it. Why, then, would their 2.0 be any better? Because they got some feedback? At some point, your users are just going to leave for a competitor.

[0] Meaning I use it, think it's neat, and will continue to use it, but would prefer to use it a lot less than my boss wants

It's like we are 19th century farmers and suddenly there are the latest John Deere equipment available for huge amounts of money raising yields 100x. Most of us can't afford the equipment and will be pushed out.

And look who Anthropic is partnering with: the absolute worst of Wall St. like Apollo.

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.

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

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?"

This explains to me 90% of the reactions I get when I talk to people.

Users don't. Question is, do developers, who are tasked to read, modify, and maintain the code?

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

Smarter people tend to be more sceptical and resistive when something gets shoved up their bottoms too much or much more than it seemingly deserves.

Nothing special about AI here, it’s a general tendency.

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.

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.)

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?"

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.

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

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.

That is the simple explanation.

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.

Take your pick: Anxiety over the possibility of redundancy and consequent financial precarity. Concern about our children's futures - their education and careers. Sorrow over the loss of the craft of software construction, with the potential for reduced autonomy and creativity. The atrophying of human cognition. Disgust at the excessive hype. Dismay at the environmental impact. Worries about the social and political impact, including further enabling authoritarians. Horror at the inevitable use of AI in warefare. Just plain exhaustion at the rate that the world is changing.

Like you, I'm a software engineer. 30+ years. I find the technology of AI genuinely facinating. I also enjoy making software.

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

This has been extensively discussed here and elsewhere. Its obviously a simplification, but some people prioritise the end-result: the product. Other people prioritise the practice of building the thing: the art/craft/engineering of coding and software construction. There seems to be a certain amount of mutual incomprehension between these two perspectives.

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

Ultimately, I think that financial pressures will mean that software inevitably becomes much less the product of a craft and much more an industrial mass-produced product, extruded by AI. So, if you're frustrated by current contrary attitudes on HN and elsewhere, then perhaps you just need to wait a few more years.

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.

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

And I think there is a debate about llm biases [1].

And the obvious question of who owns and controls llm/ai technology. The wealth of humanity should be invested in humans and not a handful of llm’s and corporations who “own” them [2].

I think these are examples of thoughts which run through people’s mind——biases—-which direct replies even if they’re not directly expressed.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48401243

[2]: Senator Bernie Sanders’ legislation “American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/bernie-san...

And that's the problem.

Many see AI as the biggest representative of the world and the internet getting worse. It accelerates the decline that was already there, and when people see their favorite websites become littered with garbage, themselves not being able to find a job or the supposedly enlightened tech elite becoming 10x more insane than they already were, the obvious thing to look to is AI. And what about all the companies that are trying to hop onto the hype bandwagon and are enforcing AI usage or laying off half their staff and demanding that the remaining half 'just use AI' to work twice as hard? Also not very good for the image.

The kind of people who only care about code quality and ignore the above issues, in my experience, are people with no horse in the job market race. Old people, rich people, non-techy people who don't have to do this for a living. They're having the time of their lives churning our small personal projects and not caring about anything else. Everyone else is suffering too much from the other causes to take them seriously.

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.

This is even bigger with AI because of a couple of other recent trends that have been marketed the exact same way and have failed to live up to the hype: cryptocurrencies ("have fun being poor"), NFTs, the metaverse, etc. None of these have turned out to be the absolute use-this-or-you'll-be-unable-to-participate-in-society level changes that their proponents have claimed. Now AI proponents are making the same claims, but people have seen that the last few times this has been claimed (often by the same people) and therefore don't believe the new claims.

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?

We're still waiting for a model that can draw a pelican on a bike, you're not zero-shotting every problem with AI yet. If we want improvement, we gotta start by being honest.

AI 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

But then you have a second group of people who don't have the time or inclination to learn a new way of working, or are worried they won't be able to keep up. If thats you this is a very scary time because the value of your current skills and position in life is decreasing day by day. Some peoples approach to this problem is to just stick their head in a sand with the subconcious belief that if they can convince themselves and enough people that this is not happening, it's not going to happen and their position in life will be safe.

A very common blindspot people have to rationalize this position is focusing on unskilled use of the current models (and often not even using the current best models). Then use that to make judgements about why AI won't be able to do something even in the future. The models are obviously going to keep getting better and I think even the best users are still just scratching the surface of how we can get the most out of the current models.

This comes from their years of experience. When you also get those years of experience, you may come to similar understanding.

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.

However, people do need to make peace that AI as a tool is the future of programming at bare minimum and especially at coorperations as it becomes part of performance reviews and you have to compete with AI assited collegues. As I've said before at least for me AI replaced the boring part of writing code, but reignited the joy of designing systems and problem solving.

The losing jobs problem. The controlled by a few big companies problem. The sycophancy problem. The devaluation of human purpose in our culture problem. The loss of human communication problem. Writing code a bit faster is not worth all these problems.

Separate from that, I also don't think it's good enough. By the time you stand up all the processes and guardrails that make it viable, and account for the lessened understanding slowing velocity in the long term, I don't think it really speeds things up. Obviously it speeds up small things that you don't need to understand much, but that's not what I typically work on.

Exactly. Which is the reason why code that increases maintenance friction and costs, or decreases the product's operability or fitness for purpose, does not properly serve the end of advancing the business. Not in competitive industries anyway.

There's this whole manufactured narrative going on geared toward reframing the quality of code design and structure as an aesthetics problem. If you think code design and structure is an aesthetics problem, you will not understand the pushback.

A much more interesting question, I think, is why bad AI code is perceived as a worse problem than bad human code.

My observation is that bad human code ultimately slows down its own maintenance: the speed at which the human can add bad code decreases as the human adds more bad code. So it's a self-limiting problem. Whereas AI will quickly and efficiently add extra layers of bad code to work around the issues introduced by its own earlier bad code. If you let that go on, you can end up in runaway complexity scenarios where only AI can maintain the code at all, until even it can't. There have been a lot of arguments on HN that such scenarios are not a problem because AI will keep getting better, but to me this amounts to a Ponzi scheme for tech debt, which I find undesirable.

And that's not to even mention the externalities.

So, basically, depending on whether you care about all of the above, or not, the machine that supercharges your LoC-per-day metric will be seen as a good thing or a bad thing, and it's not a divide that can be reconciled because it boils down to what individuals care about. We can all agree about the end of writing code, but that doesn't mean you can't be wrong about the ways to get to that end, I guess.

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.

(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.

Bad submissions have always existed, if you don't like it, move on, don't engage.

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.

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.

Users hate when a bunch of unrelated things break for no reason, and then get fed a pile of slop for months about why the thing that is clearly broken isn't actually broken.

I know two well-know games going through this cycle; one of them had a community manager accidentally leak their usage in the changelogs due to a slug left in a link, the other's owning company has been on the hn frontpage for their mandated llm usage.

Oh, users care about this.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?)

>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 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.

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.

Either

- in principal, the "AI racists",

- for legal fears (no GPL code in my business project),

- or the AI slop haters, the other "AI racists", because AI is no slop anymore as in the first years.

AI cannot think, and just processes requests through input and generates output based from training data.

There is no passion, there is no human brain improvement or anything that we as a human race evolve from over time.

The best creations have been creations built by us and will continue to be that way.

Yes, we created AI, but what is next after AI, we still like to create things ourselves which is what fuels the creation of the next best thing.

People who pride themselves on using a prompt to get something output miss out on the intellectual stimulation and brain development that comes with doing the work yourself and collaborating with other humans to get the work done.

These build memories, group bonding, and other things that exist in the real world that will never happen if AI does all the work.

You will also notice those that offload everything to AI are horrible at thinking for themselves over time. It has to be a balance, AI has some great use cases, but should not be used for everything as that takes away the natural challenge we as humans need to have.

I have seen the devaluation of what should be done by seeing a coworker say we built this thing. When I say oh you and your girlfriend built it, amazing, then they say no me and AI did it.... I say so you mean you told it to build that thing. It give a very real false since of capability and accomplishment while not highlighting the hard fact that the prompter is not an engineer, architect, scientist and has not built any real technical skill and wastes away sending prompts to a machine while not actually growing their own capabilities.

Then said person gets frustrated because they are stuck in their job, tired due to vibe coding with no visible results on their investment of time except for loss of money they have spent on tokens. Tokens in little to no financial return is what the bulk of people are seeing because the bulk of us that spend money do not want to see the same vibe coding mess that has been spammed everywhere.

There is also the massive security issues that vibe coded apps have at scale which is very hard for a human to maintain, follow, and keep secure. As we don't know why x code is there and the logic of it being there would need to be reviewed by a human that is the only thing in the equation that can actually think.

So use it as a tool, but still continue to do the bulk of the work yourself so you continue to grow is the best route to success over a very long period of time.

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?

Is bad because

> Users [...] care that the product works.

Is true.

If you want your project to work for more than a few weeks/months at a time, you need to put actual engineering effort into designing a product that works. "The AI can fix it when it inevitably breaks" doesn't change the fact that it broke, and now you have to pay for more tokens to fix it.

Well engineered software still breaks, obviously, but the class and severity of bugs is generally a whole hell of a lot less. When you have an engineer who understands the product, fixing problems is faster than naive "pls fix" prompts.

The fundamental misunderstanding is that "code" represents the entirety of a project. Your premise is that code is a means to an end, which isn't wrong, but your conclusion is "therefore code quality is irrelevant". These two ideas put together are extremely naive and outright incorrect.

In many ways, the code is the product. The functionality your users want is literally encoded in the program. It's true that the aesthetic qualities of the code are largely irrelevant to that goal, but the code needs to be correct. Otherwise the functionally is incorrect and your users are unhappy. Moreover, the product needs to stay working indefinitely under practically infinite use cases. The only way that happens is if you put actual engineering effort into designing a system that works and is correct. The way that happens is if you write good, correct, and readable code.

AI generated code is not a bad thing in and of itself.

The bad and objectively incorrect idea is that you don't need to put thought, consideration, or engineering into a project because you have an infinite code machine.

These two notions are not mutually exclusive. You can have hand written slop that blows up on launch. You can have well engineered and architected AI written code. The problem is when people think that code is all that matters and thought is no longer required because any problem can be fixed with more code.

This is something fundamental that comes up in literally every domain. If you want your solution to work for the next ten minutes, you can slap together anything that works. If you want your solution to last a generation, you have to engineer it to do so. Bridges, houses, sewer systems, cars, medicine, code, interpersonal relationships. To do a job well, you have to put effort in and you have to think critically.

The bulk of the "anti-AI" sentiment you're complaining about is not about AI. It is the objectively correct rejection of your attitude that infinite code can replace thought, design, and engineering. Code isn't the problem, it's that you're ignoring everything else that makes a project work. This is plain and simple reality. Having infinite nails does not mean you can build a three story apartment block. Having infinite rivets doesn't mean you can build the golden gate bridge.

Infinite code does not make you an engineer.

It's also clear that it's valuable enough at minimum around the edges in prototyping, testing and analysis that it's not going away.

So any reasonable person would understand the situation is still evolving and maybe push back on strong claims of software development being already completely obsolete. is that anti-AI?

edit: you know, I might just be old, and maybe about to be irrelevant. what I don't understand is why that seems to make people so angry. I'm sure the future will sort itself out.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

If I wanted to care about what users want, I would have been a founder or salesman, not an engineer.

For many if us, being anti-clanker in our day to day jobs has an actual negative impact on our careers and livelihoods so we need to shut up and hide the obvious reality anyone with more than 3 braincells can clearly grasp. HN is anonymous so you can see what people actually think instead of what they're forced to pretend they think at work in order to not be punished by our billionaire-owned companies.

We particularly hate the malinche retards like you lining up to glaze AI. Do you think it makes you special or something? That you'll be the ones to survive layoffs and be AI tech leads once the Epstein class pushing clankers cleans house?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

This sentiment has been with us for a long time, and AI has only made it worse. Many people have experienced the damaging effects that focusing on execution speed have had on our lives, and you would think if AI makes us 10x faster, we could spend half that time actually making programs more performant and secure. But all of the gains always funnel into speed, when we have the golden opportunity to make things better.

Then there are the players that make it. Casey Muratori recently did a video called "It just Happened" where Eric Schmidt gives a commencement speech and washes his hands of the negative things that have happened in it, even though his decisions at Google and the technology he helped create made a lot of that happen. A quote from Casey's Video

> This is a case where someone who had direct decision-making authority during the time period when the very worst most dystopian parts of the technology business model were developed, perfected and entrenched. And he is giving this commencement speech to a group of students who have known nothing but that their whole lives. They're not like me. They didn't know a time before all of this. They didn't experience technology in the 80s or something like this.

One of the most important things in that quote is that there are people who have known nothing but a predatory, privacy invasive technology world. When that is your baseline, new technology that could advance that at 10x speed does not feel great. And now it requires only a couple bad actors and a subscription to make that happen.

At work we are mandated to use AI. That feels bad for a lot of reasons. But one of the worse is having to review AI generated code. I have never liked reviewing other peoples PRs, and now with the speed AI code is created, I could spend the whole day just doing that. So now my job is worse because I have to do more of the part I like the least.

Next, I've been thinking a lot about "the human scale of things". To me that means slowing down, and not consuming things faster than my lizard brain can understand. While I might be able to go 10x faster, unless I'm doing something I've done a million times before, I will not be able to keep that much code in my head. So I quickly lose understandings of projects, and I have to fight hard to rebuild my knowledge.

Lastly, as someone who has "vibecoded" an app, It feels completely impersonal. Yea I had the idea, and yea I had to type the prompts, but producing a whole mountain of code over the course of weeks or months (I've done both) just leaves me feeling empty on the inside. There is still a selfish human component to the programming that I and I suspect others do, and AI takes away from that

I'm not sure what the solution is though. Do we say, if you don't want to take ownership over the bad things that happen then we will down play your part in the good? Do we try to set up organizations that persecute those accountable? Should Eric Schmidt be in jail? Should he be fined? Do we as developers try to use the tools "for good?" I don't know, and I'd love to know what other people have to say on this

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?

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!

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.

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)

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.

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).

- 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.

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.

I feel you could be confusing negativity towards the application of AI with negativity towards the technology itself.

I use AI frequently and am neutral to positive regarding the technology. However, we have seen a rise in "I built a tool" submissions on here which advertise AI envisioned, AI named, AI marketed, AI designed and AI programmed projects. The submissions contain AI generated descriptions. The authors reply with AI generated responses. Often, other authors reply with AI generated comments.

I am entirely comfortable expressing negative sentiment towards the people promoting projects made using AI in the most lazy, passive fashion possible. It's not a moral stance, it's just a matter of quality control.

Further, CEO's and thought leaders with strong pro-AI stances have repeatedly expressed sociopathic or misanthropic views. Again, I'm comfortable holding negative sentiments towards them.

Lastly, your framing is entirely from the point of view of a product person who is desperate to ship something. This is not necessarily the priority of all people present on here. I'm very happy to express negative sentiment towards the SaaS bros who create little value for their users, the tools they use or the wide community in which they participate.

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).

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.

Or that we're all talking to an LLM when we think we're talking to other humans (eg in here).

Or that kids are demonstrably taking the easy way out instead of actually learning. Cheating isn't new, but the level of disengagement is biblically awesome. Between that and the stagnant junior jobs market, what hope do they have?

Honestly, what is there to celebrate? Toil is a necessary component of human satisfaction, and we're shifting everything we do to a LLM.