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

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.

> 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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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

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).

AI threatens the programmer identity.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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

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".

Why were weavers so anti-mechanical loom? Is it more complicated than that?

I don't think it is a large number of people creating this perception, I think it is more their depth of feeling about the issue.

I am often struck by the similarity with bigotry about migrants, where they are portrayed as unreliable and undtustworthy entities that are threatening jobs. Simultaneously arguing their inability and ability are problematic.

You have a second vein of behaviour that object on more religious grounds. There are people that believe that any real understanding of models would deny biblical truth, much like evolution, it is a spurious claim, but at the same time the Discovery Institute is putting money into AI disinformation.

I am unsure how much the Future of Life Institute has influenced thinking, they reputedly have a war chest of half a billion. I have certainly seen videos on YouTube that have been sponsored by them.

Old guard doesn’t like new guard.

What bothers me most on link aggregation sites - where (in theory i suppose) humans are involved in submitting and upvoting - so much of comment threads "yuk it's AI slop" like it can't me judge and discussed based on the actual ideas. What bothers more is when this shows up in non-/new posts because the implication is that whoever upvoted the post just has bad judgements on what could be seen as worth sharing. To me this is no different than brigading and cancelation

Bad submissions have always existed, if you don't like it, move on, don't engage.

People started treating HN as a tech subreddit. It’s Reddit crowd

Well it’s a fear of being replaced in the ones hating on AI so bad.

There is a real divergence of experiences. That is one factor. There are people who are domain experts in some narrow complex domain who do such complex work that LLMs are still not there. I see some of that in my work place with large complex, domain specific languages, etc.

This is also challenging people's view of themselves as craftsman and the "crafting" of software. Something like carpenters who disavow power tools.

There is the worry about slop which is also real. I.e. that AI can and does generate garbage that ends up making things worse.

Worries about job security, the future of the industry, people's economic future and place in a new world where parts of their job get automated away.

I agree with you. Users don't care how the code is generated. This is purely economics there is no big market for "craft code" (like craft beer). There is only market for working software. And yes, LLMs are non-deterministic token generators, but so are humans, and LLMs are mind blowing. We live in the future. They don't replace software engineers quite yet- they are power tools.

> 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.

Users hate when a bunch of unrelated things break for no reason, and then get fed a pile of slop for months about why the thing that is clearly broken isn't actually broken.

I know two well-know games going through this cycle; one of them had a community manager accidentally leak their usage in the changelogs due to a slug left in a link, the other's owning company has been on the hn frontpage for their mandated llm usage.

Oh, users care about this.

The way I see it, there are three possible outcomes:

1. AI works worse than expected.

Our economies are depending on this not to be the case, so it triggers the Greater Depression. Widespread poverty and misery ensue.

2. AI works as exactly as expected.

This means whoever controls it gains enormous power over everybody else. There's no possibility of resistance: the Second Amendment doesn't matter when your oppressor has fully automated murder drone factories. We enter a dystopia beyond anything Orwell imagined. Note that this is an arms race, which means there's no limit to resources it can consume. Billionaires are fighting over who gets to be king of the world and they don't care how much you're paying for RAM.

3. AI works better than expected.

This means the "recursive self improvement" plans succeeds, and the "intelligence explosion" scenario happens. This, with probability very close to one, results in the sudden extinction of all life. Human values are a highly complex result of our shared evolutionary history. Something that did not share any part of that history will have profoundly alien values, e.g. "minimize training loss". If it's vastly more intelligent than us, it will be able to fulfill those alien values which extreme efficacy. There are very few goals of the "make number go up" kind that don't result in everybody dead when taken to the logical conclusion.

I'm not against the usage of AI as a first principle, but there are a lot of problems with it currently that make me against its use.

The losing jobs problem. The controlled by a few big companies problem. The sycophancy problem. The devaluation of human purpose in our culture problem. The loss of human communication problem. Writing code a bit faster is not worth all these problems.

Separate from that, I also don't think it's good enough. By the time you stand up all the processes and guardrails that make it viable, and account for the lessened understanding slowing velocity in the long term, I don't think it really speeds things up. Obviously it speeds up small things that you don't need to understand much, but that's not what I typically work on.

More like anti mindless hype and braindead evangelism.

But the AI hypebeasts are incapable of differentiating that from an anti-AI stance.

I mean others are saying its divided and that's true.

I guess the other side of your argument is... Is it better though? One could easily argue much of software development is promising projects strangled by their own technical debt and short sighted designs. It still has yet to be seen if AI can make well architected systems unsupervised. And this really was one of the few places where technical people shared their labors of love and appreciated the technical skills of a community.

Also, all the externalities whether that be environmental, social, or even technical and hn is really bad at actually talking about these things directly so we have to couch it all as the tool being bad. That's the part you're missing for many its more like its not good enough to justify the costs

people have already become accustomed to low quality software, luckily just in time for ai llms to finally start generating somewhat usable code (in small context) for h1b prompt pilots. silicon valley rejoicing

There's a reason why this tech is called disruptive.

The same phenomenon can be observed on Reddit. You'll see a lot of knee-jerk reactions to anything that looks AI, as in 'Thanks ChatGPT' or 'AI slop' top comment, and at the same time you'll see entire subs raving about any new AI advance, or massive upvotes for somebody's vibe-coded project - because it's just... good.

Like others have said, we're becoming more polarized, partly because of the nature of social media (anybody can share anything, anybody can comment), and partly because of the effects of said media on the human brain. It'll only get worse/more amplified as we go forward.

wth are you talking about

Isn't the mere fact that every HN frontpage is filled with AI-related articles not indicative enough of how much it holds interest here?

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

Many people here are engineers and are interested in solving problems. First step to solving problems is to identify them.

lazy so copying from a different thread:

you might be drinking some of that AI koolaid, conflating our suddenly hypertrophied abilities to produce code regardless of our familiarity with the syntax or the APIs with ability to produce and deliver good quality products, but this delusion is getting reality check as we speak.

a realization is propagating through the industry that being able to produce more code than you're able to review, comprehend and internalize is actually not a great thing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48381598

that said im not anti ai, i just think it is being applied in the most moronic ways during this hype cycle (gary tan anybody?)

Why are you so pro AI? I find HN well balanced on the topic. LLMs are consistently referred to in proto-mind or cognitive frames. This is whats truly eye rolling. Push back should be a given. We are not even accurately describing them as semiotic infrastructure yet. We’re just getting started. Expect haters.

They called it AI instead of calling it neural networks and therefore provoked unrealistic expectations for this technology. Criticism will never end because of the fraudulent naming of this technology.

>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 will tell 8 year old me that his interest in coding was simply a misguided abstraction towards providing customers with business value.

Certainly these AI agents will get the time machines ready for that any minute, or, well, any major software/app/website breakthrough that has happened every 2-5 years. They work 10x as fast, so it should be easy, right? It's not like everything's been bottlenecked by product and engineering is the slow burn skill that PUT FOOD ON OUR TABLES this whole time... right?

The following does not answer your question. I am me; I'm not "the HN crowd", if there is even one. And if there is such a crowd I wouldn't be the one knowing what it thinks.

The following is only a perspective on the argument of "the product works" and what "code elegance" means. I don't really care much about LLMs but the following is not necessarily tied to them.

Also, I'm retired from professional programming so feel free to ignore all of it as antiquated and irrelevant.

---

Code is not really "a means to an end". Code is better described as a liability.

People you write code may have different perspectives on code but those with more experience generally end up with this idea engrained in their minds. Code is a cost.

Thus, you'd want to have less of it, and you'd want to have code which:

- you at least have some grade of confidence that you can understand as deeply as possible, because that means you can maintain it better and more efficiently. It means that you can, when if fails, quickly/easily find where it failed, sometimes even why it did.

- you can manage in its entirety, which becomes exponentially more difficult when there's more of it and you didn't write it yourself. Not only that, it becomes more difficult to manage it when it has been incorporated in very large chunks that reach all over the codebase, and it becomes a lot more difficult when it lacks consistency, coherence and a certain uniform style.

What you call "the elegance of code" is not an aesthetical quality but a practical one. A developer obviously wants to have something that works, but that it does so well, reliably well. And they want code that is manageable enough that when shit happens -and it always does-, the fix will be hopefully easier and will hopefully make the resulting code more reliable, not less.

And, sure, in some circumstances development speed does matter. The problem is that the circumstances in which it does are frequently "unwanted" ones, usually external pressures, which we already disliked. Usually, you need to develop faster because someone else is pressuring you into putting that speed above reliability, not because it is intrinsically better to do it faster.

The one acknowledged situation in which development speed is tolerated above these other qualities is when doing a prototype. But then again, experienced developers know that prototypes can very easily turn into traps. When doing a prototype, quality is relegated because it is understood that this will not be the final product. It is understood that a prototype's code is disposable. But too often prototypes then become either the product directly or the basis for it. And again this happens because of external pressures. Most of the time because someone says "hey, it's working" without realising that it is barely so, that it's fragile, that it relies on constant tweaking and manual adjustment. But as it appears to be working, it gives the impression of being good enough to make financial sense to build on it.

And when you "ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace" what you're usually doing is shipping prototype 2.0, an unreliable system that requires more constant tweaking and manual adjustment. A system that entraps the developers into more maintenance on each iteration, when they'd want the opposite.

---

All in all, using LLMs to produce code may have its place. But if you focus on the idea of producing vast quantities of it faster, then that may not be the best use.

Because no one has shown profitability, only made claims that are unproven so far. This combined with being one of the largest investments of capital since the rail system, and being backed by known conmen like Musk, make a subset of the population(myself included) sceptical.

If you are blind to or don't care about those caveats then AI looks amazing because it can legitimately produce novel results. Its just that for the subset that I am part of, it looks like they are doing so by burning a dollar to make 50 cents in revenue and that is not sustainable.

I just simply don't think it's that good.

I think ever since @dang posted the updated rules against LLM comments/posts, the tide has turned.

You have no obligation to agree with them, but after all this time I don't know how someone on either side could be ignorant of what the other side's main arguments are.