9 ms·

It's the latest tech holy war. Tabs vs Spaces but more existential. I'm usually anti hype and I've been convinced of AI's use over and over when it comes to cod

• anthem2025 10mo ago
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• throwout4110 10mo ago
  Right this is what I can’t quite understand. A lot of HN folks appear to have been burned by e.g. horrible corporate or business ideas by non technical people that don’t understand AI, that is completely understandable. What I never understand is the population of coders that don’t see any value in coding agents or are aggressively against them, or people that deride LLMs as failing to be able to do X (or hallucinate etc) and are therefore useless and every thing is AI Slop, without recognizing that what we can do today is almost unrecognizeable from the world of 3 years ago. The progress has moved astoundingly fast and the sheer amount of capital and competition and pressure means the train is not slowing down. Predictions of “2025 is the year of coding agents” from a chorus of otherwise unpalatable CEOs was in fact absolutely true…
  • bigstrat2003 10mo ago
    > What I never understand is the population of coders that don’t see any value in coding agents or are aggressively against them, or people that deride LLMs as failing to be able to do X (or hallucinate etc) and are therefore useless and every thing is AI Slop, without recognizing that what we can do today is almost unrecognizeable from the world of 3 years ago. I don't recognize that because it isn't true. I try the LLMs every now and then, and they still make the same stupid hallucinations that ChatGPT did on day 1. AI hype proponents love to make claims that the tech has improved a ton, but based on my experience trying to use it those claims are completely baseless.
    • hectdev 10mo ago
      This fascinates me. Just observing but because it hasn't worked for you, everyone else must be lying? (I'm assuming that's what you mean by baseless) How does that bridge get built? I can provide tangible real life examples but I've found push back from that in other online conversations.
      • ggerni 10mo ago
        [flagged]
      • queenkjuul 10mo ago
        My boss has been passing off Claude generated code and documentation to me all year. It is consistently garbage. It consistently hallucinates. I consistently have to rewrite most, if not all, of what I'm handed. I do also try and use Claude Code for certain tasks. More often than not, i regret it, but I've started to zero in on tasks it's helpful with (configuration and debugging, not so much coding). But it's very easy then for me to hear people saying that AI gives them so much useful code, and for me to assume that they are like my boss: not examining that code carefully, or not holding their output to particularly high standards, or aren't responsible for the maintenance and thus don't need to care. That doesn't mean they're lying, but it doesn't mean they're right.
        • int_19h 10mo ago
          "Claude Code" by itself is not specific enough; which model are we talking about?
        • hectdev 10mo ago
          Not everyone is your boss. I have 15 years of experience coding. So when the AI hallucinates, I call that out and it improves the code it does create. If someone is passing off Ai's first pass as done, they are not using the tool correctly.
          • queenkjuul 10mo ago
  • mjr00 10mo ago
    > Predictions of “2025 is the year of coding agents” from a chorus of otherwise unpalatable CEOs was in fact absolutely true… ... but maybe not in the way that these CEOs had hoped.[0] Part of the AI fatigue is that busy, competent devs are getting swarmed with massive amounts of slop from not-very-good developers. Or product managers getting 5 paragraphs of GenAI bug reports instead of a clear and concise explanation. I have high hopes for AI and think generative tooling is extremely useful in the right hands. But it is extremely concerning that AI is allowing some of the worst, least competent people to generate an order of magnitude more "content" with little awareness of how bad it is. [0] https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369
    • justatdotin 10mo ago
      > busy, competent devs are getting swarmed with massive amounts of slop from not-very-good developers that is a real issue and yet a normal problem and so has an obvious response. oh wow that PR
  • elictronic 10mo ago
    AI is in a hype bubble that will crash just like every other bubble. The underlying uses are there but just like Dot Com, Tulips, subprime mortgages, and even Sir Isaac Newton's failings with the South Sea Company the financial side will fall. This will cause bankruptcies and huge job losses. The argument for and against AI doesn't really matter in the end, because the finances don't make a lick of sense.
    • throwout4110 10mo ago
      Ok sure the bubble/non-bubble stuff, fine, but in terms of “things I’d like to be a part of” it’s hard to imagine a more transformative technology (not to again turn off the anti-hype crowd). But ok, say it’s 1997, you don’t like the valuations you see. But as a tech person you’re not excited by browsers, the internet, the possibilities? You don’t want to be a part of that even if it means a bubble pops? I also hear a lot of people argue “finances don’t make a lick of sense” but i don’t think things are that cut and dried and I don’t see this as obvious. I don’t think really many people know how things will evolve and what size a market correction or bubble would have.
      • zdragnar 10mo ago
        What precisely about AI is transformative, compared to the internet? E-mail replaced so much of faxing, phoning and physical mail. Online shopping replaced going to stores and hoping they have what you want, and hoping it is in stock, and hoping it is a good price. It replaced travel agents to a significant degree and reoriented many industries. It was the vehicle that killed CDs and physical media in general. With AI I can... generate slop. Sometimes that is helpful, but it isn't yet at the point where it's replacing anything for me aside from making google searches take a bit less time on things that I don't need a definitive answer for. It's popping up in my music streams now and then, and I generally hate it. Mushy-mouthed fake vocals over fake instruments. It pops up online and aside from the occasional meme I hate it there too. It pops up all over blogs and emails and I profoundly hate it there, given that it encourages the actual author to silence themselves and replaces their thoughts with bland drivel. Every single software product I use begs me to use their AI integration, and instead of "no" I'm given the option of "not now", despite me not needing it, and so I'm constantly being pestered about it by something. It has, thus far, made nearly everything worse.
  • aisengard 10mo ago
    There is zero guarantee that these tools will continue to be there. Those of us who are skeptical of the value of the tools may find them somewhat useful, but are quite wary of ripping up the workflows we've built for ourselves over decade(s)(+) in favor of something that might be 10-20% more useful, but could be taken away or charged greater fees or literally collapse in functionality at any moment, leaving us suddenly crippled. I'll keep the thing I know works, I know will always be there (because it's open source, etc), even if it means I'm slightly less productive over the next X amount of time otherwise.
    • throwout4110 10mo ago
      What would you imagine a plausible scenario would possibly be that your tools would be taken away or “collapse in functionality”? I would say Claude right now has probably made worse code and wasted time than if I had coded things myself, but it’s because this is like the first few hundred days of this. Open weight models are also worse but they will never go away and improve steadily as well. I am all for people doing whatever works for them I just don’t get the negativity or the skepticism when you look at the progress over what has been almost zero time. It’s crappy now in many respects but it’s like saying “my car is slow” in the one millisecond after I floor the gas pedal
      • takluyver 10mo ago
        My understanding is that all the big AI companies are currently offering services at a loss, doing the classic Silicon Valley playbook of burning investor cache to get big, and then hope to make a profit later. So any service you depend on could crash out of the race, and if one emerges as a victorious monopoly and you rely on them, they can charge you almost whatever they like. To my mind, the 'only just started' argument is wearing off. It's software, it moves fast anyway, and all the giants of the tech world have been feverishly throwing money at AI for the last couple of years. I don't buy that we're still just at the beginning of some huge exponential improvement.
        • ben_w 10mo ago
  • deleted 10mo ago
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  • skywhopper 10mo ago
    Maybe those people do different work than you do? Coding agents don’t work well in every scenario.
    • throwout4110 10mo ago
      Yet people imply that because it doesn’t work in their scenario that it’s not good?
• suprjami 10mo ago
  I don't see it that way. Tabs, spaces, curly brace placement, Vim, Emacs, VSCode, etc are largely aesthetic choices with some marginal unproven cognitive implications. I find people mostly prefer what they are used to, and if your preference was so superior then how could so many people build fantastic software using the method you don't like? AI isn't like that. AI is a bunch of people telling me this product can do wonderful things that will change society and replace workers, yet almost every time I use it, it falls far short of that promise. AI is certainly not reliable enough for me to jeopardize the quality of my work by using it heavily.
  • Loughla 10mo ago
    >AI is certainly not reliable enough for me to jeopardize the quality of my work by using it heavily. I mean this in sincerity, and not at all snarky, but - have you considered that you haven't used the tools correctly or effectively? I find that I can get what I need from chatbots (and refuse to call them AI until we have general AI just to be contrary) if I spend a couple of minutes considering constraints and being careful with my prompt language. When I've come across people in my real life who say they get no value from chatbots, it's because they're asking poorly formed questions, or haven't thought through the problem entirely. Working with chatbots is like working with a very bright lab puppy. They're willing to do whatever you want, but they'll definitely piss on the floor unless you tell them not to. Or am I entirely off base with your experience?
    • dwoldrich 10mo ago
      It would be helpful if you would relate your own bad experiences and how you overcame them. Leading off with "do it better" isn't very instructive. Unfortunately there's no useful training for much of anything in our industry, much less AI. I prefer to use LLM as a sock puppet to filter out implausible options in my problem space and to help me recall how to do boilerplate things. Like you, I think, I also tend to write multi-paragraph prompts repeating myself and calling back on every aspect to continuously hone in on the true subject I am interested in. I don't trust LLM's enough to operate on my behalf agentically yet. And, LLM is uncreative and hallucinatory as heck whenever it strays into novel territory, which makes it a dangerous tool.
• jimbokun 10mo ago
  Most of the people against “AI” are not against it because they think it doesn’t work. It’s because they know it works better every day and the people controlling it are gleefully fucking over the rest of the world because they can. The plainly stated goal is TO ELIMINATE ALL HUMAN EMPLOYEES, with no plan for how those people will feed, clothe, or house themselves. The reactions the author was getting was the reaction of a horse talking to someone happily working for the glue factory.
  • IAmBroom 10mo ago
    I don't think you're qualified to speak for most of the people against AI.
• sulicat 10mo ago
  I'm probably one of the people that would say AI (at least LLMs) isn't all its cracked up to be and even I have examples where it has been useful to me. I think the feeling stems from the exaggeration of the value it provides combined with a large number of internal corporate LLMs being absolute trash. The overvaluation is seen in effect everywhere from the stock market, the price of RAM, the cost of energy as well as IP theft issues etc etc. AI has taken over and yet it still feels like just a really good fuzzy search. Like yeah I can search something 10x faster than before but might get a bad answer every now and then. Yeah its been useful (so have many other things). No it's not worth building trillion dollar data centers for. I would be happier if the spend went towards manufacturing or semiconductor fabs.
  • rr808 10mo ago
    Lol you made me think my power bill has gone up but I didn't get a pay rise for my increased productivity.
• postalrat 10mo ago
  I see LLM's as kinda the new hotness in IDEs. And some people will use vi forever.
• gaigalas 10mo ago
  I think it's more a continuation of IDE versus pure editor. More precisely: In one side, it's the "tools that build up critical mass" philosophy. AI firmly resides here. On the other, it's the "all you need is brain and plain text" philosophy. We don't see much AI in this camp. One thing I learned is that you should never underestimate the "all you need is brain and plain text" camp. That philosophy survived many, many "fatal blows" and has come up on top several times. It has one unique feature: resilience to bloat, something that the current smart tools camp is obviously overlooking.
• the__alchemist 10mo ago
  Similar experience. I think it's become an identity politics concept. To those who consider themselves to be anti AI, the concept of the tool having any use is haram. It feels awkward living in the "LLMs are a useful tool for some tasks" experience. I suspect this is because the two tribes are the loudest.