Resist "AI"

voidUpdate

I've never understood the water argument... yes, it takes a lot of water in the initial setup to fill the water cooling loops, but isn't not constantly burning water, right? it gets cooled off again and goes around the loop

serbuvlad

I'm not saying this situation is different from all of the other technological paradigm shifts in history. But what concerns me is that authors of articles such as this feel no need to differentiate themselves from other anti-technology arguments in history.

glimshe

Emotional rejection of AI will lead to the same outcome as emotional rejection of cars, the printing press and computers. Additionally, when it comes to the software field, it will be a sure way of selecting yourself out of the work pool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--bH6O2_Vvk

vertnerd

"After trying Kagi/Duck Duck Go, I have gone back to Google for search and I freely grant that I find the “AI Overview” to be useful." I feel compelled to point out that Kagi does offer AI-backed answers if you want it to. Just pose your query with a question mark to trigger the AI response in addition to the usual search results. It is not ever the default or only answer, and I pray Kagi keeps it that way! I use the AI option more often than I thought I would, usually for things that I don't consider controversial or complicated.

meander_water

I see a lot of people throw their hands up in the air and say "I have no control over this, might as well go all in on AI". But we as individual consumers have more power than we think. We don't need to use these AI features and products. We've survived perfectly fine without AI. Made plenty of scientific discoveries and lead enriched lives without it. The biggest "fuck you" to the pricks who pushed this on us would be if we collectively went "meh".

unified101

The important question is: Will my work competitor also resist AI? We have no way to organize this, and hence, as they say, "resistance is futile".

borzi

Why? AI is enriching my life and letting me focus on solving hard problems. I don't believe in the sentience crap and am just using it at face value for what it is, a useful productivity tool. Every software developer's main purpose is to automate and reduce the amount of boring manual labour required. By this logic, should people in the past have "resisted the software development department"?

czpl

Why are we glossing over the fact that it's all trained on stolen code, stolen art, stolen books? It's unethical to use it, it's unethical to take money for it. It should be either free or killed. I really don't understand why we just collectively accepted that.

DannyBee

I guess i'll give a super-unpopular take. Listening to developers complain about AI doing things to their life and the world at large when they have spent the past 30 years automating just about everyone else they could out of a job (Since this has been one of the primary uses of software) is ... something else. It sounds like a a a mix of hubris, arrogance, cognitive dissonance, ignorance, etc. Only when it started to affect their world did any developers start to care, and even then nobody seems to ever stop and say "hey what were we doing the past 30 years, maybe we should think about this", it's instead "hey look at what these other people are doing with AI , someone should think about this". It feels like, to paraphrase a movie quote - "Nobody gets to destroy jobs and the the world but us"

cautiouscat

I admittedly flip-flop on this quite a bit. I use LLMs in my work and for a bunch of pet projects I don’t really care much about. For the pet projects, it’s not really a big deal. I’m the only user, and I as the user don’t care how it works under the hood. Work is a different story. I have never felt more disconnected from my work than in the last 6-8 months. It takes a huge mental toll to read into our code and figure stuff out, almost like I just got hired and I’m working on new code for the first time. I’m asked to read “specs” written by LLMs that are unintelligible and I find my brain disconnecting immediately. Tickets, also written by LLMs pose the same problem. I’m asking teammates questions because I want their answer and I’m told to just ask Claude. None of this feels good, it may be where the industry is heading but as a professional it feels wrong.

ftomassetti

I see good ethical reasons to be against AI, but I see no reasons why “resisting” would lead to anything but irrelevance. So I think this is terrible advice

vouwfietsman

Bad blog. > I do not come to you with clean hands. > I am not here to dictate morality These two things contradict eachother. > My primary focus here will be software development > Environmental Harm > Stanley Tucci These three things also contradict eachother. > If we lived in a post-scarcity Maybe this is your real problem, and you're just confusing cause and effect. > We need to resist “AI” so that thousands, perhaps millions of people do not die Hyperbole. > Look up the “Eliza effect”. Even the weakest conceivable program like this was seductive. These new ones are masters of seduction. Sounds like software development alright. This person has a familiar name, I'm sure he is amazing at something. This blog is not the peak of his work. EDIT: > I quote “AI” to emphasize that these things are not intelligent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

cfiggers

I'm sympathetic to the author's core position. I think LLMs as they're currently deployed are doing net societal harm so far. For example, for every React app whistled up in five hours, there's a high schooler or college student out there sleepwalking through their foundational courses and being set up to catastrophically fail upon trying to enter the job market. But I think it's important for the quality of public discourse that we forward only the best, strongest arguments for any given position (whether I personally agree with that position or not). A weak argument gives unnecessary purchase to unscrupulous haters who might use that weaker argument as a low-grade "straw man" to dismiss the whole position. So with that preamble, some constructive criticism (very well-intentioned): > I am not exaggerating: We need to resist “AI” so that thousands, perhaps millions of people do not die. On this one you are, in fact, exaggerating (certainly with "millions," likely with "thousands" as well). The overwhelming majority of people who lose their job for whatever reason (and there are many reasons, not just this one issue) fall back on a support network of their family and friends while they "get back on their feet" by pivoting to another job or form of employment (sometimes branching into entrepreneurship, for example). The alternative to employment at whatever FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company someone was laid off from is not "death." It is typically "some, sometimes quite significant, discomfort." Granted "AI Layoffs" are starting to ripple out beyond FAANG, but the story is similar in other industries. If "layoffs kill people" is the moral hill we choose to plant our flag on, then mustn't we also campaign with equal vociferousness against all the other causes of layoffs in general? Since to do otherwise is to sit by while those laid off allegedly die in droves of thousands or perhaps millions? It also occurs to me that this framing ("AI causes layoffs") also gives incompetent and unaccountable executives a pass by pinning the actual harm done by irresponsible layoffs (which to be clear, is not none!) on "the AI" rather than on the leaders who are in the positions to actually decide what happens in their organizations. I think the argument is much stronger if we talk about the aggregate cost to humanity being paid in terms of displacement, life disruption, and curtailed opportunity (especially for juniors). We should not make the "toxic escalationism" move of equivocating things we don't like with negligent homicide, even if it makes for a punchy one-liner.

llm_nerd

I'm not sure how valuable this advice is. From what I can see, Jeffries hasn't been involved in actual software development for decades (he is ~87 and has a lot of great accomplishments under his belt, but in the year 2026, 0% of his income relies upon him generating solutions for paying clients in a competitive space, and probably hasn't for a long, long time). For some reason HN readers love this sort of content, largely by periphery players who mostly think it gives them an angle for clicks. And, I mean, as someone who uses lots of AI to delight clients and stay competitive, you be you. It leaves more for me.

rDr4g0n

we can all debate the finer points but in any case "resist" is exactly the right message. AI companies are racing to build empires on products built on the whole of human writing, charging rent to access it, then leveraging their scale to improve the model. the big data era was a gold rush for greed. the AI era is has upgraded to a warp engine for greed. the harms and manipulation of social media took ages to enter the social discourse, and are just now turning into legal action. AIs warp-engine speed guarantees greed will fuel warp-engine scale harm before society catches up, and before America's greedy ass politicians are cornered into trying to do something. resist fucking greed. if you gotta use LLMs, at least don't pay an AI company.

api

I criticize stuff like this a lot. I criticize the doomer “bomb data centers” rationalist cult even more. At the same time, maybe I shouldn’t, and I sometimes find all the AI skeptic and even doomer discourse heartening. We really messed up with the Internet. I’m an Xennial and I had a minor role in it but I was there and it feels like the Internet was “our project.” I was literally born with the PC, discovered BBSes as a tween and the pre web Internet as a teen. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the net is bad. I think it’s more positive than not (still). But my god the addiction and disinformation and brain rot and propaganda and child predators and you get the idea. The addiction is the big one, the root of all evil. “Maximizing engagement” is destroying civilization. But I digress. Back in the 90s, nobody talked about this. Well not nobody but maybe this one person pissing into the hurricane. Discourse on the net and computing in general was 99.99% breathlessly positive bordering on delusional utopian. We didn’t see it coming. Nobody was talking about how this could go off the rails and do horrible things. Well almost nobody. I guess dystopian cyberpunk nailed some of it but it was too much in the realm of fiction. It wasn’t part of the real world discourse which was all Mondo 2000 and early Wired and open source movement and PC industry optimism. So ironically all the anti AI discourse makes me cautiously more optimistic about AI. We are talking about the risks, the downsides, the ways it could go majorly bad. Maybe we will notice if it does and correct. If we’d done that with the net, noticed that maybe addictionmaxxing apps and sites was going to work “too well” or that flattening the discourse to 140 characters would harm the collective mind, things might be a little better today. Even if we go in with one eye a little open and correct a little bit, that could make a big difference. Could have with the net too.

keiferski

I can buy the idea that AIs are making people a lot lazier intellectually, on average. But I do think that for the atypical user that is "information-hungry," AIs are a massive productivity booster. I've probably asked ChatGPT 1,000 questions over the last 2 years that I otherwise would have needed to spend 15+ minutes researching. Prior to AI, I would have just... not spent the time looking them up. The danger is just when you start using AI but otherwise continue doing exactly what you were doing before.

wartywhoa23

Count me in. I rejected my promotion (losing 2x gain in salary) from sysadmin to developer at my work exactly because of AI that ate it alive during the last year. Our devs have been outright complaining about getting dumb, losing touch with the codebase and getting lost in weekly switching between models/agents that have been gushing as if from a firehose, but the management (read investors) knows better and there's a culture of self-censoring the opposition to AI among employees.

renegat0x0

There are various approaches toward AI. Some are radical. I often found extremism to be wrong in most cases. I have a suspicion that people who reject AI related stuff is just scared under the hood. They fight against AI because of the fear against loosing job, money, or control. There were many manual jobs. Lets say carpenters. They had manually created things, often pieces of art. Now many things are soulless, created by factory output, and by robots. It is true that we lost some artistry. It is true that every line of code will not be a work of art. There is no going back though. Adapt.

adamtaylor_13

I must again point out that we're not even certain yet that we're "losing" any programming capability, and we're not certain the tradeoff isn't worth it. All of these arguments presuppose we're losing something that's not worth losing. I want someone to start one square earlier and argue to me why that matters. I've read enough of these "your skills are atrophying!" arguments; I'm also making like 10x as much revenue as I did through a business that delights my clients. Why should I care about my "skills" if I'm still able to make money, pursue hobbies, and enjoy life? I just don't think it's that serious.