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- Hacker News
- The more close you are to the fire the more you understand how dangerous it is.
HN always have had a sizable anti-tech crowd (I don't want to say luddite because it's borderline pejorative). If you see the technology from close and you understand the human impacts of it then there is a reason some would rather stay clear from it. I know some FAANG engineers who doesn’t allow their kids to have smartphones or use social media even though they are themselves working at those companies. Why do you think that is? And you don’t even have to be a FAANG employee to see the social and human impacts of modern technology. AI is the same, in fact not even the same because it’s even worse and it will be only worse.
by haunter - > Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster.
Show the receipts. Where are the mobile apps, the photoshop replacements, the video and audio editors, the games and game engines that took a decade to make in the past that have shipped since Claude code came along?
> By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
Again where are the receipts?
My experience with coding agents is that they’re perfectly good at generating a v0.1 that just about passes the sniff test. It does the first 90%, but the second 90% always takes longer than the first 90%. That second 90% is what coding agents are terriblle at, and are what make actually good products.
by maccard - The very premise of your question is very questionable.
> Over the past six months, there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
At the same time, there hasn't been a single day without several AI hype posts. The notion that HN has turned into an outlet for anti-AI sentiments does not match my experience at all. In fact, many users are already tired of the constant influx of vibe coded "Show HN" posts, AI model discussions and prompting recipes.
Also, AI is not only about the ability to generate lots of code very quickly. The potential (and actual) negative effects in certain fields and in society as a whole are very real and it's reasonable that people want to discuss them.
by spacechild1 - There are two different crowds using "AI":
- One crowd is using to research algorithms, libraries, write boilerplate code, write test harnesses, introspect and integrate with APIs, do hands-off refactoring, and automating what would otherwise be boring tasks. They still think about architecture, best practices, understanding things in detail and the general shape of the solution is in their hands.
- Another crowd is curating prompts, setting up autonomous agents, creating tooling and guardrails around it, anything else but getting actually involved in how the sausage is made. They are working on meta tasks around the problem, in the hope the solution will write itself.
These two crowds are currently living in very different worlds, and getting very different results. We'll see what survives soon.
by manoDev - > Over the past six months, there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
because it's true
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.
How can you guarantee that it works though? You can verify, but it would be at the same speed as before the AI, or even slower.
> By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
By then you have a blackbox of a codebase which is unmaintainable, or in a worst case scenario you end up losing your data or get hacked or both.
by knivets - Because I enjoy writing code. I enjoy being paid for writing code. And I don't enjoy writing prompts for AI.
Code is not just a means to an end. Code is a means to my happiness. Users might not care, but I do care. I love good code. I feel great when I can write good code.
I won't say that I don't care about users. I do. But I care about me, first and foremost. And AI threatens to remove my lifestyle and workstyle. That's why I'm bullish against it. And at the same time I use it, because I feel forced to use it. This is rat race.
At the same time I can say that I don't care about delivering product 10x faster. Actually I'd prefer to deliver product 0.1x faster.
Yes, I understand that contradicts to the business side of view. Well, I don't care. I'm not getting paid percentage of product sales. I'm getting paid flat salary and I care about keeping it and live good life in the process.
I'm being completely honest about it. Maybe it'll help someone to understand that point of view.
by vbezhenar - I call these AI tools "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet". They belong to american companies which can cut off your access if american government doesn't like your country's government. They fed from the free internet that many of us grew up in, store it in humans unreadable form and sell you access to it. If some day claude starts to spit out compiled binaries instead of code nobody will notice, and we'll essentially get proprietary cloud-hosted compiler that most in the world depends on to build software. With built-in telemetry and backdoors and clause in license that allow full overtake of your business if provider wants it ofc. It's a great shift from the internet we all know and love towards the new subscription-based access to world's propriatary knowledge base. It's a perfect "mind control" tool as well - you don't need USAID, "free media" and stuff like that in other countries when all people there including politicians ask chatgpt everything from meaning of life to recipies of pancakes. Once you see these political and philosophical dimensions it's hard to unsee how claudecode running on my PC won't turn into a weapon some day. But in blissful ignorance it's fun to use, and companies love it for the promise of replacing people. Amen
- It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant.
You can see from the following 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...
by dang