alt Hacker NewsI feel like I'm the only person on this site that doesn't use AI for coding. I guess there's probably a lot of other people that haven't commented on this story who don't use it either. But when I read about how much hype and all that sort of stuff there is in the AI industry, and then I see the amount of posts and commentary and deep technical discussion about how this feature has affected people, I'm not so sure. Everyone I know hates AI and how it's been shoved into every corner of our lives, but I look here and it's insanely popular. Anyway, sorry this was a very off topic comment. It's just very interesting to me that the hype isn't all just hype.
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> I feel like I'm the only person on this site that doesn't use AI for coding.
I’m surprised by that. One reason I follow discussions here about AI and coding is that strong opinions are expressed by professionals both for and against. It seems that every thread that starts out with someone saying how AI has increased their productivity invites responses from people casting doubt on that claim, and that every post about the flaws in AI coding gets pushback from people who claim to use it to great effect.
I’m not a programmer myself, but I have been using Claude Code to vibe-code various hobby projects and I find it enormously useful and fun. In that respect, I suppose, I stand on the side of AI hype. But I also appeciate reading the many reports from skeptics here who explain how AI has failed them in more serious coding scenarios than what I do.
I don't use it at all for a variety of reasons, but I rarely bother to get into discussions on HackerNews.
Looking at how new it is, and how quickly things are changing, it seems likely that I could adopt it into my workflow in a month or two if it turns out that that's necessary.
On the other hand, I've spent the last 2 decades building skills as a developer. I'm far more worried that becoming a glorified code reviewer will atrophy those skills than I am about falling behind. Maybe it will turn out that those skills are now obsolete, but that feels unlikely to me.
I feel the same. I don't want to hear about it all the time (although I welcome discussion). I wish this site would go back to talking about other tech things.
AI is indeed just hype in a lot of cases, but also has revolutionary value in a other cases. Trying it is the only way you'll be able to differentiate the latter from the former.
It will be shoved into your life anyway. You might like it or not, but the only safe choice is to learn and understand it IMHO.
About usage: it looks like web development gets benefits here, but other areas are not that successful somehow. While I use it successfully for Neovim Lua plugins development, CLI apps (in JS) and shell development (WezTerm Lua + fish shell). So I don't know if:
a) it simply has clicked for me and it will click for everyone who invests into it;
b) it is not for everybody because of tech;
c) is it not for everybody because of mindset;
I share your experience. Additionally, I am surprised anyone on this site did not see this progression coming. Between costs, the race to be THE provider, and anyone who has an awareness of how the tech industry has been operating the last 15 years, this move by Anthropic was so laughably predictable that the discourse in this thread is pretty disappointing.
All those people are on the drug they got on the cheap during the fun party nights.
They are, or soon will be, surprised that the price is going to increase, and they are the only losers in that great story of theirs...
I hate how AI is being shoved in most things, but I do love AI in a few of those places (ai coding and google search replacement)
I use it sparingly. I do still have to produce boilerplate and don't have the time/will to engineer a better solution. But any actual logic etc I do myself. Why would I take a chance on an LLM doing it wrong when I know exactly how I want it and am perfectly capable of doing it myself. Also, what the hell am I going to do in the minutes it takes to generate, just sit there and watch it? No thanks.
I also don’t use AI for coding. I tried, I explored, I learned how it works.
At the end, “maybe-sometimes works” and “sends a copy of all your code to some server in the US” are just incompatible with the kind of software I create.
Regarding the post, I think it’s telling that Anthropic is trying to force people into using their per-usage billing more than the subscription. My take is that the subscription offers a lot as a way of hooking developers into it and is not sustainable for Anthropic if people end up actually maxing their usage.
Given how much money is wasted into the LLM craze, I can imagine there will be more “tightening of the belt” from the AI corps going forward.
For the five coders out there, maybe it’s time to use your tokens to get back control of your codebases … you may have to “meat code” them soon.