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- Hacker News
- I’m less anti-“anything AI” and more anti-“how AI seems to be used right now”.
It is:
being used as smokescreen for massive layoffs industry wide.
a repeat of the business models of 1999-2000 (growth without profit, race to IPO, promises of infinite TAM).
the business execs are following the crowd, insisting on token maxxxing, not value-to-the-customer maxxxing. There are reports that many companies have already exhausted their annual AI budget by April.
most companies don’t know how to measure if it’s actually increasing value AT ALL.
my former coworkers say it’s empowering non-engineers to write bad code / features which are a net negative. Prior to AI, bad ideas needed an engineer to tacitly approve of it, but now the bad ideas can bypass the engineer at light speed. 10x development speed is VERY BAD if the average change is a net negative.
people are leaning on LLM inference instead of basic tasks such as keeping web bookmarks organized. It will cause cognitive atrophy.
the foundation model companies are heavily subsidizing my $20/mo plan, so I’m pretty sure it becomes unaffordable once they charge cost plus for inference.
I’m personally experimenting with AI for all aspects of business (not just coding). I’m sometimes vibe coding prototypes and sometimes building a rigorous full-SDLC app.
I watched an interview with Ed Zitron yesterday and I found myself agreeing vehemently with his appropriate level of cynicism about the AI industry and how business is using it right now.
by thephyber - I use AI tools daily and find them genuinely useful.
However I am increasingly annoyed at how everything has to be framed as a conversation about AI, how every tech-adjacent company has to brand itself as AI-first, and most of all, how overblown predictions are about an LLM being conscious, etc.
In short – it’s a useful technology reshaping tons of industries, but the hype is grating.
by keiferski - This has been my issue this whole time. Why isn't it just framed as a useful software tool that helps you automate tasks and write code? Use cases beyond this have exceedingly high social cost and negative externalities, and it's arguable that besides highly specialized local models with very specific training data, AI is not reliable enough nor deterministic enough to truly "replace" humans in the vast majority of roles outside of tech.
Obviously the answer is $$$ and the fact that this admin's economic policy has further encouraged the market to go all-in on AI as it's the only thing that's trending in the black for the economy right now. I don't think you'll find many people on HN who won't readily admit that even if they're anti-AI, LLMs are genuinely amazing pieces of software that can be transformative and useful in many different environments, and it's mindblowing how they work. The issue comes from the very harmful way it's currently being commercialized and marketed.
by kunai - Great take.
I have spent the last 3 months away from family, I caught up with my brother & his wife and they also got back from an interesting vacation recently. I tried to get information about their vacation but at best got 2 sentences that it was enjoyable. But they spent more than 24 hours(sleep over to see the nieces) ear bashing me about AI.
I truly don’t care that people find this stuff exciting, just leave me out of it and tell it’s AI content upfront and we’ll get along swimmingly.
by grebc - First of all, I expect to be a loser in the socioeconomical effect the AI brings. This isn't really about the technology itself but about the political systems we have now. From the pure job perspective, I will either lose my job, or will keep it but it will be increasingly more stressful and less interesting. There are literally zero benefits for me as a worker. The only hope is that the economic effect will be so huge, the trickle-down crumbs will be enough to live a decent life, but that is unlikely to happen in my country.
But, even if I had generational wealth behind me to be able to leverage the AI to my advantage, I still see a lot of cons in the way cheap content generation worsens the world around me: facilitating fraud, political shilling, disrupting online conversations (now everyone just sends bot summaries to each other). In a way, I feel a similar change that from the "pre-facebook" Internet to the "pre-chatgpt" Internet that happened in the early 10s.
by frankie_t - You don't need "generational wealth" to leverage AI. If anything the opposite is true; AI empowers people with less to do more. Hiring humans is expensive, tokens are much cheaper.
Also, programmers will be least negatively affected by AI. Humans will need to be in the loop in the forseable future, and programmers are a good candidate for those kinds of positions.
But more generally, I'll never understand this attitude about jobs. As if your job is this thing that you own that someone might take away from you. To me, my job is is something useful that I do in exchange for money. If I cease to be useful then it's fine if I lose my job. I'll find somewhere else to work, somewhere I can be useful. It might be paid worse of lower status but, to me, being useful is the whole point.
by slibhb - > I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
You will need a lot more to make yourself my enemy, but this is the divisor between us... not that you like to use Claude and I don't.
I think it depends a lot on where your interest in (self) development lies.
My main motivator has always been to understand how things work, and myself being able to create as elegant solutions as my technical role models (in the range from colleagues and mentors to the elders of our field), hopefully even pushing it further. Having the LLM just create the product robs me of that, or at least of the most rewarding parts of that. And that's why I don't like to use it.
Different people are driven by different things, I don't think either trumps the other in the objective sense, we're just wired differently.
by rakel_rakel - > people are driven by different things
This is important to understand. I have been coding since I was 11 when I got my first C64, and it is a genuine passion for me, but I also love working with LLM tooling.
One of the biggest things for me is that after decades of sitting in front of a computer I have chronic back and wrist pain that makes it impossible to do the long deep focus sessions that were normal when I was younger. Using AI tooling to handle all of the procedural tasks (running tests, debugging, managing git, etc) dramatically reduces the physical strain of programming, and allows for a much healthier workflow, with regular short breaks.
by metalspot - I am with you. Over the last 40 years I've spent a great many hours enjoying the process of creating software. I did a PhD in mechanical engineering, but the ductility of programming won me over. I started following PG when I read his two Lisp books many years ago, and some of his examples (implement OOP in one chapter!) blew my mind. And they enabled my first company.
These days, however, my time is spent managing agents. I have lost the joy of craftsmanship. I don't spend my day in emacs anymore.
But I am learning to enjoy it. Maybe because I have always had a utilitarian streak, and I actually care for the ends, so husbanding incredibly efficient means is thrilling. I am actually having fun.
by juanre - > My main motivator has always been to understand how things work
Which things, specifically? I got started programming in order to control scientific instruments and analyze the data I collected. I care about the systems I'm studying. I don't really care much about the software I'm programming. As OP said it's a means to an end.
I think you're right that people on HN are generally more curious but it doesn't have to be curiosity about every single element of software. We don't write assembly code anymore either, half of software is about making software easier and faster to write.
- That's well said and where I ended up as well. This whole thing did reveal that a lot of people really never enjoyed programming at all and only saw it as some irritating necessity. I don't really like that crowds presumption that everyone else disliked it too.
For me working through the programming part is the understanding and solving. Programming languages are pretty beautiful and encourage different ways of thinking. Hopefully we can understand it and contribute.
by bontaq - 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 - I'd imagine nearly all here are positive about technology itself, what they're against is: hype, 'progress' at all costs regardless of collateral damage, consolidation, anti-consumer practices - tech as wielded for power. If you pay attention long enough, it's hard not to become wary.
- > HN always have had a sizable anti-tech crowd (I don't want to say luddite because it's borderline pejorative).
It's frequently said that technology is ethically neutral, and whether it's used for good or bad ends depends on how it is applied.
What you call the anti-tech crowd is simply the crowd that takes their ethical responsibilities seriously.
There are other potential points of view that could be adopted instead of tech neutrality. Some tech could be seen as inherently good, in which case there very little concern about how much of it is used. Some tech could be seen as inherently bad, meaning it should be avoided at all costs.
Anyone being honest about AI can see that although it has some positive uses, the potential for misuse is enormous. Therefore, if you're going to use it at all, you should think carefully about how to apply it. To people that have fully bought into the hype this caution appears like negativity instead of rationality.
by ZenoArrow - > 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 - There’s been a massive spike in released code and apps in the last year. If you’re asking for receipts and expecting none then you’re not paying attention.by therealdrag0
- > 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?
For code in general, the various meanings of "I am {insert number here} times as productive" on Figure 9 page 36: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35275/w352...
Same document, Figure 12 page 41 shows a significant spike in iOS apps but also the users per app is way down (which you should expect, given this makes it possible for low-user-count apps to be sensible business propositions).
How many people care to spend a year making a replacement for something that took a decade? Photoshop, despite the complaints about price and subscription model, just isn't expensive enough to justify one engineer-year to replace. Unreal and Unity are free for a lot of people using them, and likewise are not worth the cost of replacing for those who do end up paying (because the teams using them know how to use them and don't want to be retrained).
For this reason, you should be looking at things which would have taken a year of human time but now take a month, or faster, so less Photoshop 27.7 (today) and more back when it was still called ImagePro (1988).
For games, I've seen games like the following take a month or more to get good enough to be interesting, and yet the following took me two prompts, the second of which was the single word "continue" (and only needed that because this was on the free tier and I used too many tokens); I didn't bother to look at the code, I don't care about the code, making the app itself was as easy as simply finding an app like this on the Apple App Store even though such an app was in one of the top-10 lists: https://github.com/BenWheatley/Piano-Trainer
Is this game "as good as" the one on the App Store? Who cares. Any random person who wants their own app can now get their own custom version doing the specific things they care about, which doesn't need to simultaneously support all the use cases of all the other people who would buy the app on the App Store.
From what I read on Hacker News comments, the same is happening with video editing, where it's not "Make an iMovie clone" (why would you, iMovie is free), but rather every time you need one specific thing, you ask your LLM of choice for a solution, and it gives you a shell script which calls ffmpeg with the right arguments.
by ben_w - Photoshop alternatives already exist and are cheap or free, like Affinity.
Why create a Final Cut Pro alternative when it’s so cheap from Apple?
Many existing apps can be mostly cloned by a small team over 6 months or a year, but the challenge is finding customers willing to switch. You still need to add something new and useful, then reach customers somehow.
by davidcann - It's definitely not at the make me a photoshop stage but I don't think that angle explains adequately explains the tone of the anti-AI hn discussions taking place at all.
If it was just a toy with no shot at making something real people would go "oh cool have fun with that" and move on with their life. Instead we see pretty emotionally charged posts.
by Havoc - That’s what I find funny about „end of SaaS”.
If you are a graphic designer you are not going to make your own Photoshop. Even if you could ROI is not there.
Graphics designers of course are bad example because everyone will just generate images directly from LLMs.
But restaurant owner for example could build his own website with menu - heck even with just slapping html without LLM making a decent website was easy but these people didn’t have time for that.
I work in insurtech, wet dream of all big companies dealing with insurance was customer self service so they were building those interactive forms - but no customer wants to do the filling, they don’t care they don’t have time they are busy running their own business and they want to call or meet with someone who knows what needs to be filled in those forms. Chat with AI is not fixing that because business owner will have to spend his time answering all these questions that were in the form but only now it will be chatbot.
by ozim - Being 10x (or whatever multiplier) faster at programming doesn't mean you're going to be 10x faster in designing a product or any other aspect that goes into making a good product.
Even if you hired an actual programmer, it'd take a massive amount of time to build a Photoshop clone.
Of course, at the end Photoshop is lines of code and it could be output as is, end to end. One problem is that users aren't generally giving very precise design documents which would narrow the way to interpret them into code in precisely one way. Or that a design document at any level of precision, other than code, couldn't be interpreted in multiple ways when it comes to a specific implementation.
LLMs also take a relatively long time to output acceptable code, often taking tens of minutes before giving you a small diff. The larger the codebase, the longer it usually takes to start producing code, even over an hour.
by helloplanets - 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 - True... I'm in the first crowd personallyby Ekami
- A lot of people doing the latter camp are people with the knowledge of the former camp, and who are sufficiently happy with the speed and guard rails to no longer worry about "molding the solution in their hands"
I'm not speaking from personal experience, this is what friends are doing at their startups
But I am not surprised at all, because the building blocks of major applications are all out there as boilerplate code - heck half the time AWS has the example you need for you, assuming you know what you want to stitch together and why
If you know the major AWS tool chains and how and why to use them and how to design a product in microservices, then theoretically Claude has no idea what the whole shebang is up to but happily writes all the parts
by aorloff - I wouldn't say those are 'camps' without seeing some data in support of that.by bluegatty
- I don't think thats really it.
For me personally I am vaguely indifferent to programmers using LLMs to make more shitty code. My worry is the second and third order effects
For work currently, as an SRE, I'm being asked to maintain and look after slop as if its properly built and instrumented. Our platform has clear rules and conventions, and AI isn't following those.
For the wider world, I fucking hate that image/video generation is evaporating what is "real". For memes sure its great, but for bad actors it gives a brilliant way to say "its AI wasn't me" and then the debate moves away from "did person do bad thing" to "is it wrong to say that things are AI?"
I also worry about the debasement of value of human work. Looking at history, say of the weavers, it didn't work out to well for them when the powered loom came along.
by KaiserPro - I know LLMs are getting the majority of the attention of late, but there are others of us training and using AI to…
…reads MRIs and video to detect cancer
…analyze genomics for early target discovery
…assisting surgeons
…folding proteins
And the list goes on in other fields as well. Just hoping the recent AI counterculture doesn’t stigmatize other uses of AI.
Am I a fan of Claude code? Not particularly, but I have used it on occasion. And I’ll never understand someone using an LLM to write anything (especially a comment on a site like HN) intended for consumption by other people. Not because I think it’s subpar, but because the point - IMO - is to make human connections, learn, teach, and debate. That’s hard (impossible?) to do if you’re just typing a 30 second prompt and then copy/pasting the output.
by massung - Are we including just technical people in these crowds?
Because there's a third crowd: everyone else/the general public that are standing up vibe coded websites and don't give a hoot how things work in the background or know as long as money is coming in. There are people that are using AI and thinking less and less causing their brains over the long term to become more inelastic.
We're in for a very, very painful future that will have mixed results. On one hand, you can boostrap things a lot quicker with less mental effort and it helps get up to speed without having to know some complex things (e.g. deep knowledge in coding). This can help us innovate on basic things faster, probably.
On the other ... people aren't going to learn. If something breaks in that state where they don't know how something works, what, we're just going to ask another AI to fix it? I don't know how I feel or think about that. On a long enough timeline, there are people that won't know how any of this was designed in the first place.
That's the world we actually live in. And that's what will survive despite crowd 1 and 2 that you mentioned above.
by darksim905 - > 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