Ask 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.
Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
bigyabai
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.
jflynt76
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.
space_explor
Claude calls it enterprise and production ready. I now have to spend the next two days dealing with the fallout, page, outage.
rzzzwilson
> They care that the product works. And that's the problem.
tonetheman
You are training your replacement.
datadrivenangel
Because AI use correlates with sloppiness, and due to the fundamental attribution fallacy us engineers don't like sloppiness.
manoDev
There are two different crowds using "AI": - One crowd is using to research algorithms, libraries, write boilerplate code, write test harnesses, introspect and integrate with APIs, do hands-off refactoring, and automating what would otherwise be boring tasks. They still think about architecture, best practices, understanding things in detail and the general shape of the solution is in their hands. - Another crowd is curating prompts, setting up autonomous agents, creating tooling and guardrails around it, anything else but getting actually involved in how the sausage is made. They are working on meta tasks around the problem, in the hope the solution will write itself. These two crowds are currently living in very different worlds, and getting very different results. We'll see what survives soon.
rvz
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?
Lerc
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.
dang
It's simply divided. With every such division A vs. B, the A team thinks HN is anti-A and the B team thinks it's anti-B. This is an invariant. You can see from this megathread, currently on the front page, that HN is by no means anti-AI: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406174 . Sometimes it just takes the right initial condition (e.g. title) to bring out one side or other. As for why the community is divided, there's always a temptation to come up with HN-specific explanations, but society as a whole is divided about AI. Surely that is the only explanation one needs. As I've been saying for years, HN can't be immune from macro trends: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
k310
It's way more than code. Sure AI can crank out code at prodigious rates. Gary Tan, Y Combinator's CEO says he ships 37,000 lines of AI code per day [0] And so can I. (oops) "In the Beginning" (I was there) people wrote accounting packages in BASIC. It worked, the language allowed rapid prototyping, and out the door quickly, but BASIC lent itself to spaghetti code, and for anything really serious, the programs were too lightweight, and were very difficult to document and maintain, so that bugs could be fixed and esoteric features added (for $$$) without the fix breaking something else. Every damn line of code had to be commented so that someone else could pick it up when you left and maintain and upgrade it. So, AI's got a mind of its own, and from what I hear, every time you get a solution (code) it's different from the previous. At this point, no solid libraries, such as mathematicians, physicists, medical researchers and yes, rocket scientists can rely on as 100% solid and "bet your life on it" In addition, the hype has extended AI into more general areas, including "bet your life on it" situations where people are using it for therapy, with fatal consequences at times [1] "Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. Adolescents and Young Adults Use AI Chatbots for Mental Health Advice" (RAND) and it's so flawed. And also, it leads to cognitive surrender. [2] "AI and the Psychology of Cognitive Surrender" (Psychology Today) Key points: • AI subtly erodes our cognitive strength by making delegation seem like self-generated thought. • After repeatedly turning to AI for answers, the first thing that erodes is tolerance for not knowing. • True judgment is built by wrestling with uncertainty, not outsourcing discomfort to machines. In a very brief thread about Siri becoming AltSiri [3] my comments regarding the wide use of a tool that is IMO overextended and using the general population as guinea pigs: --- I view and use computers as tools. They (mostly) do what I command. That's because I am by nature a problem solver, and so are others. In fact, if knowledge consists of understanding a particular domain, and wisdom consists of applying knowledge across different domains, creativity of a sort, one of them being that unknown called the future then "button pusher" answers kill my ability to deal with future situations which are not recorded in "The Book of Common Knowledge" (a SNL reference). When "computers" wrestle control of the situation and solve everything, then, as someone said in the early 20th century "Everything that can be invented has already been invented" then there's now no need for computers at all, since "Every problem can be solved by a chatbot" and no need for creative (genius) things like the famous "Wordless Workshop" that ran in Popular Science and Family Handyman magazines. Just answer machines. No need to learn anything, nor to create. Creativity and genius move us forward. That's why we have Hacker News as opposed to those "answer forums" --- And YES, code that you have to reverse engineer in order to maintain must be understandable and well-architected. If that's "Elegant" then So be it. I rapidly prototyped in-house apps, quickly and well, and they had a limited life span. But "enterprise" software isn't going away. And whom [4] do you call when some CTO calls you at 1 a.m. when their business takes a header? Claude? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414607 [1] https://www.rand.org/news/press/2026/06/nearly-1-in-5-us-ado... [2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48413555 [4] I was born in Boston. Cheers!
z0r
The reports of AI powered 10x development speed are greatly exaggerated
happytoexplain
HN is not anti-AI. HN reflects a reasonable ratio of pro-AI and anti-AI sentiments (sometimes held by the same person! because AI covers a lot of ground).
mcmcmc
Most people in general have a negative view on AI, the HN crowd isn’t special
lifthrasiir
Mainly because noisy people are most visible. Both pro-AI and anti-AI (so to speak) crowds have them.
advael
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
gdulli
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.
mkl
A lot of people on HN are anti- overhyping , which comes across as being opposed to the thing being overhyped. It was similar when cryptocurrency overhyping was popular.
orangecoffee
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.
beej71
> They care that the product works This reminds me of Anthropic's post where they say they ship 8x as much code as they used to. And I stopped to consider how many times I've used an app and thought, "You know what this needs? More code!"