alt Hacker NewsI've seen some discussions and I'd say there's lots of people who are really against the hyped expectations from the AI marketing materials, not necessarily against the AI itself. Things that people are against that would seem to be against AI, but are not directly against AI itself:
- Being forced to use AI at work
- Being told you need to be 2x, 5x or 10x more efficient now
- Seeing your coworkers fired
- Seeing hiring freeze because business think no more devs are needed
- Seeing business people make a mock UI with AI and boasting how programming is easy
- Seeing those people ask you to deliver in impossible timelines
- Frontend people hearing from backend how their job is useless now
- Backend people hearing from ML Engineers how their job is useless now
- etc
When I dig a bit about this "anti-AI" trend I find it's one of those and not actually against the AI itself.
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If you keep digging, you will also find that there's a small but vocal sock puppet army who will doggedly insist that any claims to productivity gains are in fact just hallucinations by people who must not be talented enough developers to know the difference.
It's exhausting.
There are legitimate and nuanced conversations that we should be having! For example, one entirely legitimate critique is that LLMs do not tell LLM users that they are using libraries who are seeking sponsorship. This is something we could be proactive about fixing in a tangible way. Frankly, I'd be thrilled if agents could present a list of projects that we could consider clicking a button to toss a few bucks to. That would be awesome.
But instead, it's just the same tired arguments about how LLMs are only capable of regurgitating what's been scraped and that we're stupid and lazy for trusting them to do anything real.
The most credible argument against AI is really the expense involved in querying frontier models. If you want to strengthen the case for AI-assisted coding, try to come up with ways of doing that effectively with a cheap "mini"-class model, or even something that runs locally. "You can spend $20k in tokens and have AI write a full C compiler in a week!" is not a very sensible argument for anything.