alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
Genuine question.
Over the past six months, there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.
I’ll probably make a lot of enemies by saying this, but do people realize that code is just a means to an end?
Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.
I say this as someone who has spent more than 20 years honing their craft as a software engineer.
Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Comments
Because it's the crowd that sees reality of the results, not just the marketing.
You can ship a 1.0 10x faster and leave bug hunting to your users and tank your reputation before you have one or you could do like what we've been doing for 30 years and ship quality. There was no problem to fix there that AI fixed.
Many reasons. Each person is an individual and you will learn most by seeking to engage with all the individual stories to empathise and understand. Ultimately it’s a very human thing to care, this is a big change and everyone deals with change differently. It’s a great start to see you caring and wanting to know more.
The reports of AI powered 10x development speed are greatly exaggerated
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Also: at some point the elegance of the code starts to matter more than execution speed. :)
I am anti-gun despite guns being extremely effective at propelling metal at high velocity. I am not anti high-velocity metal, nor do I believe guns should never be used under any circumstance.
This post is absurd, childish binary thinking.
I work with junior ops "engineers". Even though some of them won't admit it, they want to do everything with AI, and they do not care much about testing. Even their peer review is done by AI, you can tell by the way the comments are written. They want to deploy stateful clusters, manage VM lifecycles, and even deploy our own Kube cluster, probably entirely vibe coded.
One of them tried to use tabs in yaml instead of spaces, didn't know what a virtualenv was, and didn't know why Kube jobs asked for xp in writing operators ; yet he is pushing multi-files features in less than a day that are meant to manage our backups, and is pushing for managing our own kube clusters in front of management (which finds that it is a lovely idea). At this point I am not sure what to do but it won't end very well I feel.
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used.
But users also include users of the code. There's no value in self-flagellation via terrible code or pointlessly complicated frameworks.
I am guarded on today's LLM after much unit testings myself.
For as long as LLM use the probabilistic predictive next-token for an algorithm, there shall be glaring errors when encountering a complex-logic (or even compound-logic).
In short, use AND, OR, NOR, XOR sparingly when doing AI prompt. Elevate your err-dar when doing so.
The root cause if of course AI's role in loss of power on compensation (coding as a skill is no longer as valuable), and loss of power in labor vs capital.
It's hard to face this, specially for the one oasis in the job market that pays well.
It's in the name "Hacker News". Hackers are people who enjoy doing the programming themselves, because they get satisfaction from it. Often they program in their spare time, and sometimes what they develop has little to no practical value, and is done as a learning exercise. Using AI would defeat the purpose for them. If they're forced to use AI in their job, it decreases their job satisfaction.
There are others who just want a problem solved, and it doesn't matter to them how the program which solves it gets written, as long as the program (appears to) work and it's done as quickly as possible, so they outsource the development to AI. That is not hacking.
I "hate" AI[0] because I believe that elegant code is a different bulding material to ugly code. Ugly code is harder to change. At some point, it becomes impossible to change.
I notice that a lot of people say they'll be able to write 2.0 faster than I can write 1.0. This means that their 1.0 must have been so bad that they had to rewrite it. Why, then, would their 2.0 be any better? Because they got some feedback? At some point, your users are just going to leave for a competitor.
[0] Meaning I use it, think it's neat, and will continue to use it, but would prefer to use it a lot less than my boss wants
I think it's because too many people have released tools that's clearly not ready for production because they don't know what to actually check. So it's now just easier to pattern match away any good tools that might surface.
I think the technology is fantastic but the current trend of larger and larger proprietary models will bring a concentration of power/money like never seen before.
It's like we are 19th century farmers and suddenly there are the latest John Deere equipment available for huge amounts of money raising yields 100x. Most of us can't afford the equipment and will be pushed out.
And look who Anthropic is partnering with: the absolute worst of Wall St. like Apollo.
Everyone knows eventually AI will impact their career prospects. How can you be in love with that
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Having seen bad (human) code behind award winning products, and good (human) code take so long the investors get cold feet, yes.
Some people claim (or seem) to know which corners can be safely cut. But what I've seen suggests those who cut corners got lucky, rather than using skill to know what could be safely ignored.
The other side of this is that I have come to view things like "Clean Code", "SOLID", "VIPER", and use of mocking in unit tests, the same way as self-help books: survivorship bias.
GenAI in code is likely to give us enough feedback fast enough that we can turn the survivorship bias of SWEng self-help guides into actual science; but unless progress stops suddenly (could happen any time if investments stop), humans coders aren't likely to be the beneficiaries of this research.
It’s just a big forum so it has lots of people. Personally, I block most reflexively anti-AI people because they’re boringly repetitive. But this has always been the case. Over a decade ago, my friend made a user script to block Snowden news[0].
There are just some topics that a lot of people like to act as radio repeaters on. I just block everyone who seems repetitive to me or who talks in a boring way. In the old world you’d go to a forum and you’d find that many of the threads are occupied by abrasive old timers of one or other type who have driven away all the people who’ve written the information on the forum. This is the standard thing that happens over time. Those for whom the group is the thing prioritize spending their time expressing group membership over being useful to the group.
As forums grow bigger, they attract these participants and then these guys drive out the rest. But you don’t really have to give in to the whole thing. I just remove them and their threads from my comment feed. It’s a pretty good experience.
Other groups that I find undesirable are those with whom I cannot relate. Programmers in crappy companies spend a lot of time talking about how they’re defending their work from useless managers who take credit for everything and so on and so forth. Or they might invent psychoanalysis to express why bosses want people in office rather than remote. There’s just not very much to learn from this kind of person. It’s just a generalized complaint machine which, unlike on sites which have topic-forums like Reddit, leak into general space here.
But you can clean up your own feed. And it’ll get better. It actually doesn’t take very many.
Many of the people reading HN will be making a lot less money in two years. Some will be unemployed. Some will be homeless.
Human intelligence becomes less valuable in quantity as AI gets better. Being big and strong was once valuable. Not so much any more.
"When this machine learns your job, what are you going to do?"
Everyone knows AI will impact their jobs eventually. How can one be in love with that idea
There are coders and creators. The first identify as their tools, the second don't care about the tools (too much).
This explains to me 90% of the reactions I get when I talk to people.
If I was an end user of a working product (AI or not), I wouldn't care.
At work generating and fixing loads of slop is less rewarding work than doing old coding, troubleshooting, article writing, whatever. The internet is full of fake blogs full of fake information. Youtube is full of fake videos and people reading LLM scripts. It feels impossible to share or appreciate small projects because it's so much harder to tell if any effort or thought went into something at all now. My parents can't tell what's real on social media. I'm less sure in my career path because I might spend my time learning skills that become useless in 5 years. I have conversations on the internet or Jira where people respond with LLM output (half the time saying "Claude says..." half the time not.) Kids are cheating their way through school. I'm probably getting dumber by using it.
There's plenty of reasons to be "anti-AI". It's not just a tool that's making programming more convenient.
AFAICT hacker news is only slightly less positive on AI than the average tech industry gathering, which is still like two standard deviations more positive than any average gathering of random people in a city. I think the culture of silicon valley reads anything less than gushing hype as negativity right now, which is a weirdly polarized place to be, but the discourse around this technology is bizarre in general, being an absolute gamechanger that nonetheless still somehow feels quite oversold by its most ardent boosters, who are themselves a minority, but one with rather disproportionate voice and reach
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand
Users don't. Question is, do developers, who are tasked to read, modify, and maintain the code?
I actually felt the opposite. HN is full of AI crowd.
> Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace.
This precisely why I still have mixed reaction towards AI, even AI can produce functional code but might be filled with foot guns. I personally don't use AI (the full automated ones, e.g., Claude code, Codex, Cursor) but also I don't complain about people using AI.
This also reminds me of Jonathan Blow's Software is in Decline[1] talk. Even when the humans coded everything, we gave up on quality a long ago for speed. So people complaining about low quality AI code is ignored.
Simply put software engineering is not as rigorous as other engineering and most of the time when software ultimately fail there isn't major consequences.
Because we include people who dislike the hype machine and the initial "it's alive" push triggered a reaction, coupled with a different reaction to what we might call legitimate fears of dis-intermediation: much code is derived from prior code and so LLM are a good fit for reducing the need for coders in some contexts.
I think few of us are blind to how good some systems now are, but we're concerned by reports of worrying trends like swamping free software with machine derived CVE and a decline in critical thinking, not to say outright exam cheating.
It seems weird to be "pro-AI" or "anti-AI" in general. It's a tool. It's like saying construction workers are pro-hammer
I think it's a negative feedback loop: If you are convinced that AI is worthless you are not going to be willing to spend $100-$200 to try the best tools, and if you're not using the best tools or you have to work under severe token limitations you are going to have a bad experience which is going to further convince you that AI is worthless.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
Yeah, when your code runs on more than one machine, more than once. Then it's worth it to spend some time to make it actually good. RAM usage also matters.
Why do workers dislike being charged to rent scab labor from their oppressors?
I have similar thoughts a lot. Actually, bugs and technical debt existed even when humans wrote the code. However, while low‑level layer coders might oppose AI interfering with their 'artwork,' someone like me, who mainly assembles libraries like Lego bricks on top of frameworks, would probably find LLMs useful.
When I first started working with LLMs in 2019 AI was in no was synonymous with LLMs. I personally realized pretty quickly that they’d eventually be able to write software that compiles. Not necessarily good software, but software that passes a minimum threshold.
Then again there were all sorts of hallucination-adjacent issues which are still present but rarer as models get bigger. Wondering about the consequences for software engineering as an industry was a little bit of an “overpopulation on Mars” problem since GPT2 could barely string a paragraph together.
Another factor is the industry’s continued insistence on evaluating the ability to write software using leetcode. Well, Claude is probably the best leetcoder in the world now, but since our industry never figured out better evaluation criteria for candidates of course we are backed into a corner.
There is a huge difference that is missing in this question.
Anti-AI does not mean anti-AI-coding-agents. It's the new vibe-mindset being created by vibe coders/vibe thinkers (AI companies are also promoting this), which is that I can make my ideas from scratch on my own and then blame AI for the mess created by the maker.
As a software engineer, I cared about architecture, code and technical responsibilities/duties. To achieve maximum and optimal results I'll take assistance from anything — AI, non-AI and whatnot — to speed up the process either 10x or 100x.
Different people have different opinions (including opinions in favor of AI, and opinions in between, and more nuanced opinions).
I have several objections as well, including the Dijkstra objection (i.e. it is not as precise as using a computer code), as well as concerns about the commercial intentions (and terms of use and other related issues) of whatever companies makes them, and wastes of power and other things like that. There is also expectation of use even if it does not help, and that what I have seen often does not help and is better to do by yourself, or to use different software rather than LLM/generative-AI software. (Many people have different objections, although in some cases I do not consider them significantly important.)
If you think HN crowd is Anti AI, try to talk to a random person on the street. HN crowd is generally more measured on the topic. Current AI is not the perfect solution, and comes with many many soci economic problems and general HN statement reflects that alongside the mindblowing strides made
I think HN “crowd” on average is smarter than a random or some hype eating crowd on the internet.
Smarter people tend to be more sceptical and resistive when something gets shoved up their bottoms too much or much more than it seemingly deserves.
Nothing special about AI here, it’s a general tendency.
HN has been very pro-AI over the last several years. It's only swung back slightly the other way recently. I suspect this is due to tensions in the gulf causing some institutions to reallocate their investments, which results in reduced bot activity.
The current AI tech (LLM and other Gen image stuff) is impressive as heck, but it has flawed origins (facebook torrenting the books, everyone scraping the web and anything they can without attribution) and downright evil boosters advocating for the elimination of humans livelihood (they are talking to CEO). The “hyperscalers” moving fast and breaking things (their local environment mostly) don’t help.
Claude calls it enterprise and production ready. I now have to spend the next two days dealing with the fallout, page, outage.
Because the HN crowd is composed largely of developers — the profession that is first to fall to the Axe of AI.
This question goes a lot deeper than AI.
You can infer a developer's position on AI with 100% accuracy if you ask them a related question about the customer and how much overtime they'd be willing to pull to meet a deadline for one of their internal projects. It's the same question, just worded a lot differently.
The general form is probably something like "are you willing to sublimate your ego in order to care for the parties who ultimately justify your compensation/career?"
> Users don’t care
Suppose one proved that a sizable mass of people don't care whether they eat dog food.
There are people who won't feed them dog food even so.
There are people who will see ways to extract more profits.
> just a means to an end?
Indeed.
Which means?
Which end?
There are as many unthinking raving fans as there are unthinking raging haters. The reality is that the decision-making power-wielding bunch will make dumb, uncaring, probably some form of "evil", people-harming decisions via AI. Because that is what they do. Almost invariably, until forced to do something else.
So, again, which means? Which end?
This weird "my perspective is universal" thing is among the worst features of humanity in general.
> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works
A lot of people here are not users but creators, they do care about these things
Are they? Seems plenty of AI pilled to me. What they don't care for are the bs narratives and can see through the CEO excuses for axing jobs because of it.
Mainly because noisy people are most visible. Both pro-AI and anti-AI (so to speak) crowds have them.
I use AI daily. But not with agents. Those feel like cars before there were safety measures, like seatbelts. I'm no anti AI. I'm just waiting for the seatbelts.
This is an extremely short-sighted and surface-level take.
What AI is (a part of) HN against?
The actual uses?
The "it will get sentient next year and take over the world" bullshit?
These two things are simply unrelated, and my experience with coding assistants (that I do use daily, because they are useful) says whatever OpenAI and Anthropic say in their marketing is 95% lies and hyperbole.
Any technology that is marketed as a religion will get the same reaction from me.
Is it? As mentioned by another comment, it's probably more divided than 'anti-AI'.
Also, 'Over the past six months, there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve checked the HN Best RSS feed without seeing a post about how AI ...' probably means the opposite is simply not news worthy anymore - no one wants to read another article that says AI could write fairly reasonable code.