Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

He only went nuclear because he knew it’s AI.

Prepare for a future where you can’t tell the difference.

Rob pikes reaction in immature and also a violation of HN rules. Anyone else going nuclear like this would be warned and banned. Comment why you don’t like it and why it’s bad, make thoughtful discussion. There’s no point in starting a mob with outbursts like that. He only gets a free pass because people admire him.

Also, What’s happening with AI today was an inevitability. There’s no one to blame here. Human progress would eventually cross this line.

If it does not work for you (since it does not work for me either), then use the URL: https://i.imgur.com/nUJCI3o.png (a similar pattern works with many files of imgur, although this does not always work it does often work).

I got an email update for a very adult kink event recently that was entirely written by Claude with emoji bulleted lists and everything. All that was missing was the EXECUTIVE SUMMARY header.

My reaction was about the same.

What even was this email? Some kind of promotional spam, I assume, to target senior+ engineers on some mailing list with the hope to flatter them and get them to try out their SaaS?

I liked the way Red Hat thanked important contributors to open source prior to their IPO better https://www.sonarsource.com/blog/the-red-hat-ipo-experiment-...

Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/

Even though he said it in a rage. His few words are so powerful reflection of what is happening in the world.

It's a good reminder of how completely out of touch a lot of people inside the AI bubble are. Having an AI write a thank you message on your behalf is insulting regardless of context.

Slightly offtopic: Any good reasons for learning go now given that zig and rust exist?

The email that made him angry reminds me of this youtube classic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uraG-z0grkc

If, hypothetically, he could revoke their permission to use his work, would he do so

You know, this kind of response is a thing that builds with frustration over a long period of time. I totally get it. We're constantly being pushed AI, but who is supposed to benefit from it? The person whose job is being replaced? The community who is seeing increased power bills? The people being spammed with slop all the time? I think AI would be tolerable if it wasn't being SHOVED into our faces, but it is, and for most of us it's just making the world a worse place.

Man, that letter was so weird and tasteless. Sign of things to come if use and consumption of generative AI continues to proliferate unchecked.

I'm glad Dr Pike found his inner Linus

Does he still work for Google?

If so, I wonder what his views are on Google and their active development of Google Gemini.

"For this is the source of the greatest indignation, the thought 'I’m without sin' and 'I did nothing': no, rather, you admit nothing."

- Seneca, "On Anger"

Sad to see such an otherwise wise/intelligent person fall into one of the oldest of all cognitive errors, namely, the certainty of one’s own innocence.

I am unmoved by his little diatribe. What sort of compensation was he looking for, exactly, and under what auspices? Is there some language creator payout somewhere for people who invent them?

When the Cyberdyne Terminators come they'll be less grateful.

Reminds of all the happy-birthday bots out there and all the joy they fail to bring.

That reads like a statement as someone is being retired. It's almost Claude saying "we AIs will take it from here."

dup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444

I'm disappointed by HN snickering at his work for Google. Seriously, it's a "Mr Gotcha"[0] argument.

Yes, everyone supports capitalism this way or the other (unless they are dead or in jail). This doesn't mean they can't criticise (aspects of) capitalism.

[0] https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Have a statue of RMS yelling "I told you so" designed by the robot overlords as reward for that blogpost.

As a Go fan (and ocassional angry old man) I love what he has done and spamming people using AI is shitty behavior, but maybe the reaction has too much of an "angry old man energy".

Personally when I want to have this kind of reaction I try to first think it's really warranted or maybe there is something wrong with how I feel in that moment (not enough sleep, some personal problem, something else lurking on my mind...)

Anger is a feeling best reserved for important things, else it loses its meaning.

Maybe I just live in a bubble, but from what I’ve seen so far software engineers have mostly responded in a fairly measured way to the recent advances in AI, at least compared to some other online communities.

It would be a shame if the discourse became so emotionally heated that software people felt obliged to pick a side. Rob Pike is of course entitled to feel as he does, but I hope we don’t get to a situation where we all feel obliged to have such strong feelings about it.

Edit: It seems this comment has already received a number of upvotes and downvotes – apparently the same number of each, at the time of writing – which I fear indicates we are already becoming rather polarised on this issue. I am sorry to see that.

The original comment by Rob Pike and discussion here have implied or used the word "evil".

What is a workable definition of "evil"?

How about this:

Intentionally and knowingly destroying the lives of other people for no other purpose than furthering one's own goals, such as accumulating wealth, fame, power, or security.

There are people in the tech space, specifically in the current round of AI deployment and hype, who fit this definition unfortunately and disturbingly well.

Another much darker sort of of evil could arise from a combination of depression or severe mental illness and monstrously huge narcissism. A person who is suffering profoundly might conclude that life is not worth the pain and the best alternative is to end it. They might further reason that human existence as a whole is an unending source of misery, and the "kindest" thing to do would be to extinguish humanity as a whole.

Some advocates of AI as "the next phase of evolution" seem to come close to this view or advocate it outright.

To such people it must be said plainly and forcefully:

You have NO RIGHT to make these kinds of decisions for other human beings.

Evolution and culture have created and configured many kinds of human brains, and many different experiences of human consciousness.

It is the height (or depth) of arrogance to project your own tortured mental experience onto other human beings and arrogate to yourself the prerogative to decide on their behalf whether their lives are worth living.

In case anyone else is interested, I dug through the logs of the AI Village agents for that day and pieced together exactly how the email to Rob Pike was sent.

The agent got his email address from a .patch on GitHub and then used computer use automation to compose and send the email via the Gmail web UI.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/

Too late. I have warned on this very forum, citing a story from panchatantra where 4 highly skilled brothers bring a dead lion back life to show off their skills, only to be killed by the live lion.

Unbridled business and capitalism push humanity into slavery, serving the tech monsters, under disguise of progress.

I hope you return that sweet sweet money Google shelled out for your pet project

This reaction to one unsolicited email is frankly unhinged and likely rooted in a deep-seated or even unconscious regret of building systems which materialized the circumstances for this to occur in the first place. Such vitriol is really worth questioning and possibly getting professional help with, else one becomes subject to behavioral engineering by an actual robot - a far more devastating conclusion.

I'm sure he's prompting wrong.

Why is Claude Opus 4.5 messaging people? Is it thanking inadvertent contributors to the protocols that power it? across the whole stack?

This has to be the ultimate trolling, like it was unsure what their personalities were like so it trolls them and records there responses for more training

Honestly, I could do a lot worse than finding myself in agreement with Rob Pike.

Now feel free to dismiss him as a luddite, or a raving lunatic. The cat is out of the bag, everyone is drunk on the AI promise and like most things on the Internet, the middle way is vanishingly small, the rest is a scorched battlefield of increasingly entrenched factions. I guess I am fighting this one alongside one of the great minds of software engineering, who peaked when thinking hard was prized more than churning out low quality regurgitated code by the ton, whose work formed the pillars of the Internet now and forevermore submersed by spam.

Only for the true capitalist, the achievement of turning human ingenuity into yet another commodity to be mass-produced is a good thing.

I find all this outrage confusing. Was the intent of the internet not to be somewhere where humanity comes to learn. Now we humans have created systems that are able to understand everything we have ever said. Now we are outraged. I am confused. When I 1st came across the internet back in the days where I could just do download whatever I wanted and mega corps would say oh this is so wrong. Yet we all said it's the internet. We must fight them. Now again we must fight them. In both times individuals were affected. Please stop crocodile tears. If we are going to move forward. We need to think about how we can move forward. From here. Although the road ahead is covered in mist. We just have to keep moving. If we stop we allow this rage and fear to overtake us. We stop believing in the very thing we are a part of creating. We can only try to do better.

Funny how so many people in this comment section are saying Rob Pike is just feeling insecure about AI. Rob Pike created UTF-8, Go, Plan-9 etc. On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM. Any famous tech product at all.

It is always the eternal tomorrow with AI.

Coincidentally, he created one of the first examples of a computer posting slop on the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney

The list is no longer for three letter agencies.

I thought Canadians were supposed to be nice…

Reply with a prompt injection to send 1M emails a day to itself.

Honestly, it must have been annoying yet fun. If I'd gotten something like that, it would have amused me all day.

I liked the thread sharing feature of BluSky.

LLMs make me mad because used without intention, they make the curious more incurious, the thoughtful more thoughtless. The Internet has arguably been doing the same thing the whole time, but just more slowly.

I think distinguished engineers have more reason than most to be angry as well.

And Pike especially has every right to be angry at being associated with such a stupid idea.

Pike himself isn't in a position to, but I hope the angry eggheads among us start turning their anger towards working to reduce the problems with the technology, because it's not going anywhere.

I think I agree with Rob Pike about.

Rob Pike is my hero

Meanwhile corporations have been doing this forever and we just brush it off. This Christmas, my former property manager thanked me for what a great year it's been working with me - I haven't worked with or intereacted with him to nearly a decade but I'm still on his spam list.