Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

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.

> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand

That's true, but they care deeply about the consequences of that:

> about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.

So whomever your strawman is, they got a point.

Note that I'm "anti-ai", I use it a fair bit and even received the trendy email asking me to watch out how much I spend in it cause it's expensive. I'm also not delusioned into believing the "it's 10x faster" and "code doesn't matter anymore" marketing. If the thing fails it's my name on the git blame and my number they call at night so I'll review that code thank you very much.

I feel like past the wow effect it's pretty easy to see the seams and the limits, even on "frontier" (god do I hate that term) models, and nothing replaces human skill for now if you're working on something with any significance.

Dang sums it all, I dont perceive hn as being pro or against AI, it's a mix, but if you're polarized, whatever "side you're on" you'll feel the other side is over represented.

Most people in general have a negative view on AI, the HN crowd isn’t special

> Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI

Take your pick: Anxiety over the possibility of redundancy and consequent financial precarity. Concern about our children's futures - their education and careers. Sorrow over the loss of the craft of software construction, with the potential for reduced autonomy and creativity. The atrophying of human cognition. Disgust at the excessive hype. Dismay at the environmental impact. Worries about the social and political impact, including further enabling authoritarians. Horror at the inevitable use of AI in warefare. Just plain exhaustion at the rate that the world is changing.

Like you, I'm a software engineer. 30+ years. I find the technology of AI genuinely facinating. I also enjoy making software.

> do people realize that code is just a means to an end?

This has been extensively discussed here and elsewhere. Its obviously a simplification, but some people prioritise the end-result: the product. Other people prioritise the practice of building the thing: the art/craft/engineering of coding and software construction. There seems to be a certain amount of mutual incomprehension between these two perspectives.

> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.

Ultimately, I think that financial pressures will mean that software inevitably becomes much less the product of a craft and much more an industrial mass-produced product, extruded by AI. So, if you're frustrated by current contrary attitudes on HN and elsewhere, then perhaps you just need to wait a few more years.

AI is a threat to the livelihood of many people on HN. So, there is a portion of the community here (small but very vocal one), that is against AI.

That is the simple explanation.

Given a large majority of the HN audience is likely directly employed by large orgs responsible for creating this garbage, it definitely doesn’t skew negative.

There is now more, and likely only an increasing amount, of AI content.

As someone interested in what other people, not machines, are doing - I don’t want to spend time reading superfluous prose/code that LLM’s generate.

More like, HN crowd is anti-HYPE

This is an extremely short-sighted and surface-level take.

AI is no doubt powerful and i think that's reflected on HN. However, a lot of AI news these days is alloyed with hype and falsehood. Some amount of sceptical counter pressure is warranted.

> Code is just a means to an end

No, it it's not just that. Don't you realize your opinions are just, well, your opinions?

I spend quite a bit of time every day on HN, I see the vast majority of posts are about AI and how AI is accomplishing more and more.

AI is not supposed to write excellent code, it is supposed to write the “most likely” code which equates to your average engineer. People who are below the curve are going to see a much higher benefit than people who are higher than the curve.

And in my experience with AI doing personal projects, 10x as fast probably understates it by at least an order of magnitude.

I don’t know why people have to pick one side or the other. AI speeds up development at the cost of oversight. Whether this tradeoff makes sense depends on the real world consequences of getting it wrong and the quality of the foregone oversight, which is very much case by case

> They care that the product works.

And that's the problem.

Both of them can be true at the same time? Many people on HN are at the forefront of this technology, we're testing it in prod and telling each other what does or doesn't work. It's not anti-AI to use the AI and then document a failure.

We're still waiting for a model that can draw a pelican on a bike, you're not zero-shotting every problem with AI yet. If we want improvement, we gotta start by being honest.

I like AI but I'd like it to be a different ratio of non-ai/AI posts here bc its a lot and kinda irritating by now

Cause people here see the loopholes and want to solve them to increase efficiency which does'nt means they are pessimistic about AI.

You say anti-ai; I say pro-human (warts and all).

And I think there is a debate about llm biases [1].

And the obvious question of who owns and controls llm/ai technology. The wealth of humanity should be invested in humans and not a handful of llm’s and corporations who “own” them [2].

I think these are examples of thoughts which run through people’s mind——biases—-which direct replies even if they’re not directly expressed.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48401243

[2]: Senator Bernie Sanders’ legislation “American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/bernie-san...

No need to overthink. Most people, pretty much everywhere, simply don't like new things.

If your bar for good software is "released asap", more power to you. Fortunately though, that's not everyone's stance. Not everyone is aiming to shit out the next big crud app.

AI is great for prototyping, but that is far different to AI in production-grade software, including with the hidden cost of maintenance. You have to know what you are doing.

Why even risk using AI directly in mission critical high risk software powering cars, planes and financial transactions or control systems with no human oversight?

If a disaster happened and an investigation was launched and the inquiry found that the software was "vibe coded" and no-one understood the code, would that look great towards the software vendor's reputation?

> AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.

It is strange to me that your question is so narrowly scoped, as though code is the only current use of AI and as though bugs are the reason to be against it and not a clear existential crisis that the world has not demonstrated any capability to meet.

The end goal of AI, literally the goal, is to make it so that workers aren't needed anymore. Ignore for the moment that AI isn't good enough right now to have eliminated all the worker roles yet. That is still fundamentally its goal. You will tell the AI what you want, the AI will give you what you want, ..., profit. No nasty employees to deal with.

I would rejoice at this if I lived in a society that decided it would use the fruits of each new labor efficiency to provide for the populace instead of telling me that people who don't work should die in a gutter. But I do not live in such a society.

Your post is talking about only the code itself, the quality, the speed. Other people are already debating you on that, but I suggest that you also look into what's surrounding AI that's making people very averse to it.

Many see AI as the biggest representative of the world and the internet getting worse. It accelerates the decline that was already there, and when people see their favorite websites become littered with garbage, themselves not being able to find a job or the supposedly enlightened tech elite becoming 10x more insane than they already were, the obvious thing to look to is AI. And what about all the companies that are trying to hop onto the hype bandwagon and are enforcing AI usage or laying off half their staff and demanding that the remaining half 'just use AI' to work twice as hard? Also not very good for the image.

The kind of people who only care about code quality and ignore the above issues, in my experience, are people with no horse in the job market race. Old people, rich people, non-techy people who don't have to do this for a living. They're having the time of their lives churning our small personal projects and not caring about anything else. Everyone else is suffering too much from the other causes to take them seriously.

This site is the gathering place of the biggest AI zealots there are. If someone posted that they have stopped talking and started communicating with the world solely through a camera pointed at their face and having claude interpret their facial expression, I would not know if they were joking. That is the caliber of AI fandom here.

AI anecdotes posted here are also clearly exaggerated. When someone tells, it's a story of extraordinary feats, something truly spectacular. But then when someone shows, it's always some below mediocre slop. It looks like shit and the program does not work etc.

This is not a recent development either. Ever since chatgpt came out there have been people here posting that they use it for things it can't do.

And I'm not even of the opinion that LLMs are useless technology. They clearly are good for many things. Recent security vulnerability findings have been impressive for example. Automatic spam and astroturfing is an obvious use case. And it's actually easy to come up with potential use cases. This technology is not bitcoin.

Is HN crowd any more anti-AI than other places e.g. reddit?

> why anti-AI

I suspect because most people that participate on HN have something to do with writing or shipping software. Most discussions around AI feel like children pretending to be adults in the room, except everyone else still just sees children pretending to be something they are not.

That isn’t new and it certainly isn’t limited to AI. For example, it’s come up in the past many times when people pretend to write JavaScript but can’t or when people believe they can replace JavaScript with WASM and yet can’t. What is new that Autism (absentee introspection) or Dunning-Kruger feel of it is both wider and deeper. It’s the feeling of someone professing their expertise without ever actually producing anything before.

The only product of AI is labor displacement and, by extension, wage suppression (as the duties of the displaced become free labor from those who remain and those who remain aren't asking for raises).

So ahy are so many on HN anti-AI? Because automation has finally come for them. Now it's personal. While it wasn't personal, you could pretend that people who had their livelihood taken away was a result of personal moral failure. You would see that 10 or 20 years ago when people would quite callously say "you should've done computer science" and that was that.

There are a lot of reasons to hate AI, not least of which is the externalities. It's essentially profiting off intellectual property as well as user-generated content for no compensation. Software people can actually identify with that in a way they just didn't when it was music, art or literature.

The data centers themselves nobody wants. They get massive tax and electricity breaks. Everyone pays for the upgrades and gets to live with the water pollution ,noise and higher utility bills. And because the data center is powering labor displacement, unlike, say, an auto plant, it produces negative jobs.

This all comes at a time when society is at the breaking point. Unaffordability is a massive problem (only getting worse) while we rapidly approaching minting our first trillionaire. Wealth inequality is reaching levels that historically have resulted in violent revolution.

AI in particular and automation in general could be a good thing for society. In another version of society it would allow people overall to work less and more menial jobs could be automated away. We don't live in that society. We live in the society that will make 99% of people poor so a handful of people can have $500 billion instead of $400 billion. All while the world seems to be getting ever more violent and cruel and major issues like climate change are going to start biting real hard.

I feel like the negativity is mainly due to lack of understanding on how LLMs work under the hood. The more you learn about it, the more you realize that it’s just a glorified autocomplete machine and the reason why it looks so capable is the engineering behind prompt and harness.

Unless there is another breakthrough in model training, I don’t see AI taking over anytime soon. However I do agree that’s it has become another tool, the engineers can use to increase their productivity which is a positive thing

1. because they know better. You don't have to understand it, for them to be right.

This comes from their years of experience. When you also get those years of experience, you may come to similar understanding.

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.

There's a lot of people talking about the technical aspects of AI, but I think the (for a lack of a better term) marketing of AI is just as important. Insisting that anyone who is anti-AI is on the wrong side of history does not tend to make people who leaned in that direction reconsider their opinions, it tends to make them think that pro-AI people are arrogant and thus push them even further towards being anti-AI.

This is even bigger with AI because of a couple of other recent trends that have been marketed the exact same way and have failed to live up to the hype: cryptocurrencies ("have fun being poor"), NFTs, the metaverse, etc. None of these have turned out to be the absolute use-this-or-you'll-be-unable-to-participate-in-society level changes that their proponents have claimed. Now AI proponents are making the same claims, but people have seen that the last few times this has been claimed (often by the same people) and therefore don't believe the new claims.

From my perspective it comes down to two factors.

First is the corporate push for AI. We are constantly getting told to "use AI for X" and not "explore if it makes sense to use AI for X". It's pretty obvious that quality doesn't matter, only cutting staff costs does, and I dread to think how software and service will look in 5 years.

The second part is how people use it to do their work without shame. You can't get a bug report without someone saying "here's what Claude thinks". Great, is it right? I can ask Claude myself, at least verify. Outage reports will be summarised and pushed by AI without anyone verifying. I have to argue with a bot to get my PRs through, and nobody reads anything anymore.

It's not that AI can't be useful it's that it seems like nobody cares how good the quality is, only that it does the work.

> 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.

I just don't understand what you mean by "let's face it". I repeatedly face it at my job, all our code has been AI assisted since March, and not once have I observed such a 10x speedup. The only 10x examples I've seen in the wild have been on tasks like cross-language code rewrites that completely fail your "code is just a means to an end" criterion.

AI threatens the programmer identity.

Just like with politics, you see large numbers of people dividing up into two different camps. Pretty soon every statement that raises a legitimate concern about AI will be seen as 'hating AI' and every observation about how AI helped in a particular situation will be seen as coming from an 'AI fanboy'.

The genuine answer is that many people who hold a lot of power over me (the executive suite of my industry) intend to do me harm with it (put me out of a job).

I don't spend much time on HN but from a glance it seems more middleground (reddit f.ex is extremely anti-ai). I think what you see generally just comes down to human nature. This new technology comes out which is going to change a lot and introduce much turbulence and uncertainty. Some people are happy to put in the work of learning these tools and are confident in their ability to land on their feet. If thats you this is an incredibly exciting time. Without a question a single individual has never had as much leverage as they have right now. And at least currently software engineering skills is a force multiplier in what you are able to accomplish.

But then you have a second group of people who don't have the time or inclination to learn a new way of working, or are worried they won't be able to keep up. If thats you this is a very scary time because the value of your current skills and position in life is decreasing day by day. Some peoples approach to this problem is to just stick their head in a sand with the subconcious belief that if they can convince themselves and enough people that this is not happening, it's not going to happen and their position in life will be safe.

A very common blindspot people have to rationalize this position is focusing on unskilled use of the current models (and often not even using the current best models). Then use that to make judgements about why AI won't be able to do something even in the future. The models are obviously going to keep getting better and I think even the best users are still just scratching the surface of how we can get the most out of the current models.

I read a lot of comments talking about pro-AI or anti-AI. The world (and each of us) is much more complex than a binary split.

What surprises me most is some of the virulent reactions that code generation appears to elicit, sometimes citing reasons such as craft, artistry, and originality. As if the entire disciplines of computer science and systems engineering never depended on assemblers, code generation, compilers, JIT. Or really, just writing bytes that can represent machine code, P-code, or bytecode.

A reaction that doesn't appear to make the very direct connection with the systems of exploitation, but chooses to target the tools, or the users of tools is difficult to justify as extremely sophisticated.

Generally I've seen no signs that HN is anti-AI. I haven't ran the statistics, but there is as much excitement around AI especially when new opensource models release as there's cautionary tales around it. Even being pro-AI I have to admit that I scream at the black box and throw slurs at it quite often because it's genuinely a fustrating tool to use when it does not understand basic instructions, but also makes you understand that this is not magic.

However, people do need to make peace that AI as a tool is the future of programming at bare minimum and especially at coorperations as it becomes part of performance reviews and you have to compete with AI assited collegues. As I've said before at least for me AI replaced the boring part of writing code, but reignited the joy of designing systems and problem solving.

> code is just a means to an end?

Exactly. Which is the reason why code that increases maintenance friction and costs, or decreases the product's operability or fitness for purpose, does not properly serve the end of advancing the business. Not in competitive industries anyway.

There's this whole manufactured narrative going on geared toward reframing the quality of code design and structure as an aesthetics problem. If you think code design and structure is an aesthetics problem, you will not understand the pushback.

A much more interesting question, I think, is why bad AI code is perceived as a worse problem than bad human code.

My observation is that bad human code ultimately slows down its own maintenance: the speed at which the human can add bad code decreases as the human adds more bad code. So it's a self-limiting problem. Whereas AI will quickly and efficiently add extra layers of bad code to work around the issues introduced by its own earlier bad code. If you let that go on, you can end up in runaway complexity scenarios where only AI can maintain the code at all, until even it can't. There have been a lot of arguments on HN that such scenarios are not a problem because AI will keep getting better, but to me this amounts to a Ponzi scheme for tech debt, which I find undesirable.

And that's not to even mention the externalities.

So, basically, depending on whether you care about all of the above, or not, the machine that supercharges your LoC-per-day metric will be seen as a good thing or a bad thing, and it's not a divide that can be reconciled because it boils down to what individuals care about. We can all agree about the end of writing code, but that doesn't mean you can't be wrong about the ways to get to that end, I guess.

Could it be the new car effect. You get say a Mini then see it everywhere. Personally I see diverse views on AI here.

If you're impressed by something which was done by AI, then you're not qualified enough to judge it.

Generally speaking the local crowd is anti-hype, and so it's easy to get the manifestation of that conflated with with what you're describing.

(I fit your literal description, but primarily from a nomenclature perspective - I'll call them generative models and LLMs - and I appreciate this puts me in the minority. BUT I do believe part of the hype feedback loop was the intentional mislabelling of these technologies from the outset. AND I understand why the marketers did that.)

I suspect the older crowd has lived through the hype playbook enough to recognise it early, and that the pattern this time around is becoming a bit a bit more obvious now, so I expect increasing levelling out of expectations & understanding.

Its complicated, this is how its going to be. People are going to have opinions and take sides or take no side at all.

Because being critical of AI is the second most boring activity on HN.

Old guard doesn’t like new guard.

Fun question, we can speculate a bit of course.

We're talking about vocal minorities expressing their arguments for and against AI. And some people here are just very vocal and dominant. Passive aggressive/obnoxious even. But that doesn't mean they represent the dominant opinion. If you've had the pleasure of attending a lot of meetings with developers, many of them barely open their mouths and some of them can't shut up. You find a lot of those types on HN. And looking in the mirror, that's me.

Most people that come here are hackers. Many of those probably use paid subscriptions for agentic coding tools at this point. At least, I don't know many professional developers that don't. But I know plenty that grumble a lot about AI and how they are still relevant and not that easily replaced by a tool. This stuff is a bit threatening to many people and it's triggering anxiety, uncertainty, anger, etc. And a lot of that leaks through in the discussions here.

And there's an uncomfortable reality that HN has been around for a while and the demographics are maybe a bit skewed towards people in their forties and fifties. People that are a bit set in their ways and maybe a bit conservative and change resistant. I'm in my fifties myself and I have to actively fight that tendency in myself.

So, all of that adds up to a lot of negativity.

because anti-ai crowd is loud and stupid. They don't know how to use ai tools and keep complaining ai does a bad job when prompted "build me a Twitter clone".