HN is 70% AI propagandists and bots who flood people's attention so they do not develop independent thoughts. This needs to happen daily, because 48 hours might leave people room to think.
These are talkers who have never produced anything, taken everything from open source while looking down on OSS authors. They one-shot a note taking app and feel they have done something culturally significant.
AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people. All web software got worse, nothing new is being written and everyone just talks about their precious conversations with the clankers like commenting on a football game.
The dumbest people always win temporarily.
I fear there is a tendency for some people who are against the proliferation of AI to make sweeping gut-reaction comments like this that do more harm to their position than good.
Perhaps everything that you said is 100% correct, but people are easily swayed by things that “sound right” being overly aggressive opens your position (in people’s monkey brains) to “enlightened centrists” that leave the door open for bolder opposition.
Many people have been genuinely helped or feel like they have been genuinely helped by LLMs in coding, they aren’t going to change their opinions based on fiery rhetoric and accusatory tones. Much like I can’t force myself to believe in Santa Claus regardless of how aggressively my nephews claim he is real.
I think it's definitely not accurate to say that these people have not made anything significant. It sounds like coping. How many programmers have made anything culturally significant? How many are just codemonkeys who fulfill someone else's requests, take their cheques, and go home?
In my opinion, the whole anti-LLM coding thing is purely ego preservation. And I get that, who the hell want's to believe their high paying job is going away? To say using LLMs cannot achieve results bigger than 'one-shotting a note taking app' is really just not true.
Comparing it to NFTs is absolutely wild also. NFTs literally were mass psychosis and had no value whatsoever. You're saying someone can't build software, even just for themselves, or otherwise, that doesn't have any value at all? How could that be true?
Basically, LLMs have reduced the incentives in doing open source.
If you go with agentic route, randos with money to spare on latest models, beat you. If you go LLM-free, AI corpos say "all the better for us! More free untainted dataset!"
I fully agree with you, and especially on the 'temporarily' part. The good thing is, they can one-shot as much as they want, but almost any fully LLM-generated project that pops up still has inferior code quality compared to those projects from people who actually know what they are doing, so people who prefer code quality will ignore most of the AI spam anyway, just like we do. People deploying one-shot projects out there also have a very notable lack of common sense, skill, and knowledge on topics like security and/or code optimization (obviously, because they don't code), which is mostly obvious both in their way of argumentation and their published artifacts.
They are happy to have their ads-maximized agreed-to-all Cloudflare/Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/Apple/Microsoft accounts so they can one-click deploy that "worker" with all the UI gears spinning automatically, because who needs to know how to configure a web server anyway? :^) And wow, have you heard that Cloudflare offers an operating system now??
I was thinking about this recently. HN is of course much older than the current AI hype cycle, but maybe its time to update HN policies to forbid bots, and start thinking about ways to enforce that. There might not be any 100% tamper-proof way nowadays, but reducing the bots by some percentage will still be a win.
> HN is 70% AI propagandists
really? i feel like the overwhelming sentiment in every comment section is staunchly anti-ai. it's far more common to see people lamenting their job prospects or complaining about having to review mountains of slop PRs.
> AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people.
If you had to larp as an anti AI person just to say the stupidest thing possible, this is what you would say.
> AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people.
People don't talk about this overlap but it is real, remember that SBF lead Anthropic's Series B with stolen customer money from the Bahamas. Caroline Ellison participated too, in individual capacity.
https://www.privateequitywire.co.uk/ftx-ceo-leads-580m-serie...