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- Hacker News
- Remember, in a consumer economy, anything that reduces the number of consumers is risky. Tech people such as developers are well-paid. Reducing their numbers will be a noticeable loss of market.
Yeah, companies might save headcount, but the cost of automation and lost customers? Given the market momentum, we’ll learn this over the next few years.
And how will debugging occur if there’s no strong grasp on the current code or purpose?
by jleyank - Reads like religion, not fact based analysis.
I'm by now past the point where I thought "this is a great tool that will help me programming" to the fear phase where I know it will destroy my job and career. But still I can't agree fully with the article. Hallucinations are not the issue. We can extract value from it even when it does hallucinate.
The only reason we're having this discussion is because AI is intelligent and therefore poses a threat to us.
by HeavyStorm - AI has no intelligence whatsoever though… Well not entirely true, but the only intelligence there is in AI is the human one behind it all.by frizlab
- They're right about everything, but at the same time it actually has become useful.
Sensible not to depend on it and create a vibe-coded mess, but keep everything modular & review the generated code closely and you can go back to humans-only in future with no problems.
If someone offered a whole team of devs in India for an unknown number of months basically for free, one would be a fool to turn that down even knowing it wouldn't last forever. Claude etc feels like the same kinda deal.
by sanitycheck - > If someone offered a whole team of devs in India for an unknown number of months basically for free, one would be a fool to turn that down even knowing it wouldn't last forever. Claude etc feels like the same kinda deal.
I've made a lot of money fixing software where people paid for those offshore teams and they would have been better off having not done that and writing maintainable software from the start. They were fools paying for it and they still would have been fools if it had been free.
- This statement reminds me of how older Queen albums like A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races proudly stated that No synthesizers! were used in the production of songs like Bohemian Rhapsody. Of course Queen did eventually relent and used these instruments on later albums. Did they do right in not using synths back then? Sure they did. Did they do right in using synths in their later albums? Sure they did. Does a statement like No synthesizers! or 'We never use AI. For anything' have added value other than informing the reader about the tools used to create a work? No, not really.by hagbard_c
- As much as I want to agree with this, for some of the reasons given, even I must admit that AI does have its uses. I think a reasonable take is the ObjFW one:
https://git.nil.im/ObjFW/ObjFW/src/branch/main/documentation...
> AI/LLMs cannot be used to generate any code, documentation, assets or similar – all of it needs to be 100% written by a human.
> Utilizing AI/LLMs to help find bugs in the code or to help with debugging is acceptable. However, if the AI/LLM proposes a patch, this cannot be used – the AI/LLM should be instructed to only explain bugs or fixes, but never produce any code.
> Using an AI/LLM agent to create tickets is not acceptable. However, using an AI/LLM for translation between languages in tickets is acceptable.
by apple4ever - I tend to agree this is the only reasonable use of AI indeed.by frizlab
- More developers need to grow a spine and take this stance.
Good on them, and shame on those dumping on them.
- If I was maintaining such a boutique implementation I could probably do without AI as well, sans the moral high ground posting.
- Yeah. What do they want, a golden star next to their name?
This is the kind of posturing that leads nowhere. If you're concerned about resource usage then use an open model locally
by raverbashing - To put it bluntly: this particular product category is now an afternoon's vibe-coding project for one person. The result would be worse code, probably. Also probably still good enough.by olmo23
- > AI will lead to a tyrannical police state > What will happen once the rug invariably gets pulled? Those data centers will start serving another purpose. > All around the world, governments are assembling massive networks of cameras, “license plate readers” that are suspiciously equipped with microphones sensitive enough to listen in on your conversations, and other unimaginable surveillance devices. > All that computing power built up under the guise of bringing about the “AI future” will start being used to spy on you, follow your every movement, listen to all your calls, and more.
Isn't there a case to be made that this is/already has been the case and is not uniquely an AI thing? The governements of the world weren't waiting for ChatGPT to go viral before deciding to spy on their citizens so why we blame AI for this?
by altmanaltman - This is the truth! We are living in a surveillance state that would make Stalin green with envy.
We are also seeing daily examples of this surveillance state being used against political opponents, powerful bloggers and journalists among the alternative media, and regular citizens who said the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Since human beings are easily corrupted by power, this system will be weaponized more and more, and democracy will be hacked away at as well, until we are living in an authoritarian society with a democratic fig leaf, as we can see among the dirka-dirka-stans of the world.
by abc123abc123 - > The governements of the world weren't waiting for ChatGPT to go viral before deciding to spy on their citizens so why we blame AI for this?
Because AI can do this at a scale previously impossible.
by baubino - > All that computing power built up under the guise of bringing about the “AI future” will start being used to spy on you, follow your every movement, listen to all your calls, and more.
This post sounds like someone who lives in deep in an echo chamber and has a warped reality because of it. That said I read this point and was like yup they’re right about one thing anyway.
by ianm218 - So does this one.by badgersnake
- There's a reason the biggest market for datacenters is in northern Virginia, and it ain't for the cheap power.by AyyEye
- “I’m not an elitist,” Green said. “It’s just that I’d much rather sculpt or write in my journal or read Proust than sit there passively staring at some phosphorescent screen.”
https://theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesn...
by themgt - Off-topic, but this Onion piece is a bit weak. The hook is that the man is obnoxious about his habit of not watching TV, and that's all there is to it.
Some stuff from the Onion is genius, but this is not it.
- Handcrafted software will find it's own market the same way that handcrafted clothing, furniture and other previously industrialized goods that became commodities did. They'll be more expensive generally and it'll be a smaller market overall, you'll always have some people who will love them all the same. Not my choice, but I can understand why they would want it.by knuckleheads
- I agree with you but I believe the definition of handcrafted will shift to include software produced partly by AI, just as most handcrafted things involve industrial machinary at some point.
But then, I can also imagine a world where nobody cares enough about writing code and instead we have "human designed software" just as we currently have human designed cars and fridges but few made by hand (and no market for them). Then, handwritten software becomes an impressive curiosity like Chris Sawyer's original Rollercoaster Tycoon written entirely in ASM.
by jamiejquinn - I doubt it. Software is, well, software. Most people have their aesthetic preferences in regard to clothing or furniture, and aesthetics of these are obvious to anyone. Code that runs on a device and implements some functionality is not like it. It is more like infrastructure - nobody cares about handcrafted sewage pipes. Plumbers possibly can have strong preferences regarding plumbing, but other people don't.by wolvesechoes
- The difference is that one is physical and the other digital. Digital art, even if exceptionally high quality, has been commoditized by artists from developing countries asking dumping wages, and not recovered since. People who have enough money to buy for the "soul" of an object, and the labor behind it, usually buy physical.by schleck8
- The app is Cork: https://github.com/buresdv/Cork/network/dependencies
It depends on Factory: https://github.com/hmlongco/Factory/blob/main/CLAUDE.md
Sticking to a strident "No AI" policy developing software is going to become increasingly difficult.
by simonw - It's a dependency that clearly AI is used for during development. Fair point since the blog post is phrased like a total ban on AI in the supply chain
Edit: Landing page says "Completely free of AI. Read our stance." in the hero section. That borders on false advertising
by schleck8 - I think there's merit to it. It's not as if doing it exclusively with AI is all sunshine and rainbows. As someone doing agentic engineering at work I'm actually starting to sour on it after seeing what it's doing to people's ability to think for themselves and even do basic software engineering tasks.by latentsea
- Oh I shall propose my dependency injection lib, it has not and will never use AI…by frizlab
- I'd be interested to see the project author's reaction to this. Will he downgrade to an older version of the library out of principle?by GaryBluto