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- Hacker News
- 90s highschool hobby programmer here. I see LLMs as what it is. Not a bit more, not a bit less.by lolakutty
- I'm 55, about to turn 56, and I did hobby programming back in the 80s, mainly in a C64 and C128, so I fit the bill, although I'm no developer and right now all my programming is reduced to some shell scripts aimed to automate repetitive or tedious tasks.
And no, I'm not "overwhelmingly" pro-AI. Especially since many of us know that the AI concept is storied and goes a long time even before our generation, and this LLM-based AI isn't really AI in a proper sense.
This "AI" has some good uses, granted, but the cost-benefit ratio is stupidly bad. For all the benefits that I can see with AI, if this means that I have to put up with scrapers aggressively ruining the Web, data centers gobsmacking available resources, and getting GPU and memory prices gouged to death on me, I'd rather pass. It's not an attractive proposition, simply stated.
Worse yet, I teach; and AI-enabled cheating is making my work much harder.
So, pardon me if I'm a little unenthusiastic about this newfangled artificial intelligence that isn't.
by sombragris - No, you see some high profile Gen X-ers like Torvalds, Carmack etc. bend to corporate and investor pressure.
But the majority isn't. In the same manner, the math people who were enthusiastic about AI (before Navier Stokes was proven by a human guided AI!) are the ones that are terminally online and were enthusiastic about Lean before. You simply don't hear about the rest.
Opposing AI under one's real name is dangerous, so one does not get an accurate picture.
by 1299348 - Anecdotal, but my dad fits this grouping and he's pretty indifferent. He asks Claude questions, but hasn't incorporated agents for work. He likes it as a better search, but doesn't have a lot of care or opinion in either direction with it. It's a very healthy take IMO.by jjice
- I was a hobby programmer in the 80s, but that was after college. I was a hobby programmer in the 70s via my high school's library having a terminal to access a mainframe for self-study programming courses, and I built mail-order computer kits which I programmed in machine language.
I think AI is a great tool, but requires safeguards. I use it every day, but I use a lot of tools to reign it in, keep it on task, check its results, and force it to follow an engineering process.
I don't know about the "as quickly as possible" part, since there needs to be guardrails, but improving AI should be done sooner rather than later. e.g, instead of training to give the answer it thinks you want to hear, it should be trained to give provably correct answers. instead of being trained and fine tuned and then let loose, it should be able to continuously learn and improve.
While people keep chasing tokens/second and vibe-coding, I'm more interested in correct results per kWh, sustainable and ethical AI. Also, I'm worried that there will be an increasing digital divide between the wealthy and the rest of us, so I do want AI to be available and not locked up just for corporations and governments.
To me, the fun is solving problems, and AI let's me solve more problems, harder problems and more quickly. I was happy to move from assembler programming to high level programming languages, to 4GL, to frameworks, tech stacks, etc. Moving to AI coding is just another shift in solving problems at a higher level with more productivity.
hacking microprocessors was fun. building complex systems using AI is fun, too.
- Yes, cautiously, it's a great freaking tech. Same excitement I had with computers back in the days, the possibilities is endless.by segmondy
- I have no idea in general, but I was an 80s high school hobby programmer and don't think this way, nor do the devs I know who are roughly of the same vintage.by JohnFen
- Ditto.
Moment we create software liability and enforce them, is that moment AI will ship-up or shape-out )I know it's backward(.
by egberts1 - I am very pro-AI and I was coding in the late 80s, although not in high school, I was in elementary at the time.
Given I started on an Apple IIe with a green screen and basic, and have since had to shift languages and techniques repeatedly over the decades, I have to be someone that embraces new technology if I want to stay relevant and productive.
This means that I will adopt things that make sense and AI does make sense.
by bhouston - In short, no.
Most of the folks I talk to in my age group are somewhere between anti-AI and "AI works for specific use cases". I find it is the younger folk who think it is miraculous and want to use it everywhere.
by codingdave - The executive class is overwhelmingly Gen-X and that class is very pro-AI.by smcg
- My dad was programming professionally at that time. He’s retired now and he loves AI. It’s a constant topic of conversation and he even teaches classes to other seniors at the community center. They had to move him to a bigger room, because the classes are so popular.
Interestingly, he hasn’t tried to do any coding with it. Though I didn’t send him a couple ideas for using AI to create basic throw away tools that I thought might be useful for his classes, if he wanted to explore that avenue.
by al_borland - Of course not, it goes against everything they love and cherish about personal computing. It's pouring concrete over their playground and wilderness, to be replaced by factories. "Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated." Sadly many natives join their colonizers willingly, so they can stay relevant and productive in the industry that is actively devaluing their work.by lioeters
- I'm not that old, but literally no engineer I work with is "overwhelming pro-AI". Befitting engineers, they understand that AI is a tool and while it has its uses, it also has its limits. The enthusiasm that exists stems from AI solving actual hard engineering problems in front of our faces, but everyone using it has also encountered AI doing something very stupid as well.
Even our management is pretty honest about this. Our in-house AI platform running near-frontier models from the larger vendors requires manual confirmation of every command executed on a company machine. It's tedious, but aside from establishing a clear line of blame if the AI does something screwy, it also forces you to step through the AI's analysis which can be quite educational.
by scottLobster