alt Hacker NewsIt's the latest tech holy war. Tabs vs Spaces but more existential. I'm usually anti hype and I've been convinced of AI's use over and over when it comes to coding. And whenever I talk about it, I see that I come across as an evangelist. Some people appreciate that, online I get a lot of push back despite having tangible examples of how it has been useful.
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I see LLM's as kinda the new hotness in IDEs. And some people will use vi forever.
I'm probably one of the people that would say AI (at least LLMs) isn't all its cracked up to be and even I have examples where it has been useful to me.
I think the feeling stems from the exaggeration of the value it provides combined with a large number of internal corporate LLMs being absolute trash.
The overvaluation is seen in effect everywhere from the stock market, the price of RAM, the cost of energy as well as IP theft issues etc etc. AI has taken over and yet it still feels like just a really good fuzzy search. Like yeah I can search something 10x faster than before but might get a bad answer every now and then.
Yeah its been useful (so have many other things). No it's not worth building trillion dollar data centers for. I would be happier if the spend went towards manufacturing or semiconductor fabs.
Right this is what I can’t quite understand. A lot of HN folks appear to have been burned by e.g. horrible corporate or business ideas by non technical people that don’t understand AI, that is completely understandable. What I never understand is the population of coders that don’t see any value in coding agents or are aggressively against them, or people that deride LLMs as failing to be able to do X (or hallucinate etc) and are therefore useless and every thing is AI Slop, without recognizing that what we can do today is almost unrecognizeable from the world of 3 years ago. The progress has moved astoundingly fast and the sheer amount of capital and competition and pressure means the train is not slowing down. Predictions of “2025 is the year of coding agents” from a chorus of otherwise unpalatable CEOs was in fact absolutely true…
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Most of the people against “AI” are not against it because they think it doesn’t work.
It’s because they know it works better every day and the people controlling it are gleefully fucking over the rest of the world because they can.
The plainly stated goal is TO ELIMINATE ALL HUMAN EMPLOYEES, with no plan for how those people will feed, clothe, or house themselves.
The reactions the author was getting was the reaction of a horse talking to someone happily working for the glue factory.
I don't see it that way. Tabs, spaces, curly brace placement, Vim, Emacs, VSCode, etc are largely aesthetic choices with some marginal unproven cognitive implications.
I find people mostly prefer what they are used to, and if your preference was so superior then how could so many people build fantastic software using the method you don't like?
AI isn't like that. AI is a bunch of people telling me this product can do wonderful things that will change society and replace workers, yet almost every time I use it, it falls far short of that promise. AI is certainly not reliable enough for me to jeopardize the quality of my work by using it heavily.