alt Hacker News>AI coding versus AI writing may be a useful lens to focus through; while I personally abhor both, HN seems extremely positive about the former and (now) extremely negative about the latter. I hope that policy is extended to all YC startups someday :)
Coding is writing though.
Somehow, HN can say that "code is written once and read many times", and insist that code isn't writing at the same time.
All programming languages were created with the express purpose of allowing humans to express their ideas in a way that other humans can understand while simultaneously being convertible into machine code in a precise enough way.
Code has style, code has readability, and when it comes to algorithms, code is often the best way to communicate them (I haven't seen a CS book without at least some pseudocode in it).
Code is supposed to tell what a program does, and what it's for— to a human that wants to understand or change that behavior.
A human who doesn't have this need has no need for the code.
Programming languages make coding less tedious and more efficient (compared to writing assembly) as a side effect.
The primary purpose is facilitating communication about what the machine should do from humans and to humans.
Sure, the scope of ideas computer languages are tailored to facilitate expression in is not universally broad. But that doesn't mean we're not writing when we write code. Lawyers writing a legal argument are still writing, even when they are doing so in very specific, formal language. Mathematicians are still writing papers.
It takes extreme mental gymnastics to consider coding (which is universally an act of producing text) to not be a form of writing.
To that end, having a negative view towards LLM writing while cheering on LLM coding seems (to me) to be borderline schizophrenic.
The people that advocate AI coding for throwaway projects, or using LLMs as a tool to get more insight into codebases make points that I can understand.
But a day or two ago I've responded to a person that argued that Open Source is no longer necessary because you can just vibe code anything. Many others advocate for using agentic coding in production religiously.
Apparently, this is not incompatible with rejecting AI writing at the same time.
I'd be very curious to hear about how people are overcoming this sort of cognitive dissonance.
> I'd be very curious to hear about how people are overcoming this sort of cognitive dissonance.
It’s not difficult:
Drafting AI-assisted programming of computers is fine.
Drafting AI-assisted communications to other humans is not fine.
If your program is written for the express purpose of communicating a specific written message then the message itself must not be AI-assisted but, here anyways, it’s fine if the executable code is AI-assisted. If your personal views conflate those two points, then you’ll have difficulty coping with the distinction here, and may end up exiting HN if you’re unable to coexist with the cognitive dissonance that separation creates.
> It takes extreme mental gymnastics to consider coding […] to not be a form of writing
It does not: coding is generally a form of writing whose primary audience is non-humans. That other humans may read your code and appreciate it is not related to its primary purpose: to direct the operation of a technological device in a programmatic way. Separately, the primary purpose of human-to-human communications is to convey something from your mind to another’s; the mechanism by which that occurs is secondary and has largely shown to be swappable across all possible substrates that can support communication.
So, then: if your marriage proposal to an imagined lover were in the form of code as poetry, it would be offensive to post that here if you wrote the poem with AI — and since the primary purpose of such a program is human-to-human taking precedence over human-to-machine, that’s an obvious case where AI assistance is unwelcome.
Yes, one can adopt a definition of ‘language’ that incorporates both English and Perl into one bucket; but the poem point still applies. Regardless of what dialect your writing is in, if the foremost audience of the written words is humans, then AI-assisted writing isn’t welcome here.
If you’re unable to judge whether code is foremost intended for a computer or for a human, then that’s an area where you’ll need to invest much more consideration if you wish to adhere to the guidelines.
> which is universally an act of producing text
Brainfuck is not in any way classifiable as ‘text’, nor is Renesas SH-2A assembly code. It may be possible to represent them in an ASCII file, but they are not interpretable through human linguistic processes. TIS-100 programs are representable as ASCII text, but without their shape and structure in a 4x3 visual grid, lose all cohesion and functionality. People who program music synthesizers using knobs and wires aren’t writing text, but are creating communications for a human audience, which is why the outcome (AI-assisted music) is disgusting while the process (AI-assisted synthesizer implementation) would not be. And so on, et cetera.