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>>“… wonders why people aren't more annoyed with AI companies “ Outside a small bubble within Silicon Valley and the finance ecosystem funding it, I’d say most

by cmiles8 5mo ago

>>“… wonders why people aren't more annoyed with AI companies “ Outside a small bubble within Silicon Valley and the finance ecosystem funding it, I’d say most folks are increasingly fed up with AI. It’s a very noticeable shift these last 6 months. The mood went from excited, to just annoyed at all the slop and folks using AI as a half-baked easy button vs doing real deep value-add thought. Business is also noticing that the ROI simply isn’t there and a lot written about this. That doesn’t bode well for AI providers that need to massively increase prices to make the math work on their business models. The world inside of the AI bubble seems largely ignorant of the mood shift underway, which suggests interesting times are ahead.

eooekwe 5mo ago
Agreed. This place is legit delululand. I speak to people who work at the upper echelons across various industries regularly and whether you want to believe it or not idc - the management are desperately trying to push AI but it just doesn’t add much value to what they do. At best it’s just a really good search engine across internal data. Many of these places already had things called macros in place so there’s barely any value add.
- jmalicki 5mo ago
  It took the desktop computer revolution about two decades to show up in productivity statistics. Itt takes time to adapt. Even within SV there are still luddites who sometimes type out code, in mid 2026!!!
- oulipo2 5mo ago
  Indeed, and HN also has a huge "pro-AI" bias... everytime you make a comment to point out that AI is first and foremost a political artefact, rather than a technology, and that it will be weaponized against people, they downvote... Although they know perfectly well what happened to their search / personal data, but they still don't want to see the obvious
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- Aurornis 5mo ago
  > Agreed. This place is legit delululand. Funny, I see HN as having a high concentration of anti-AI comments and general AI doubt. Yours included. The vibe among less technical people I talk to has a negative sentiment about AI and AI companies, but largely because they see AI as more effective and capable. They think it’s coming for their job and way of life and they don’t like that.
  - eooekwe 5mo ago
    Your post captures exactly what I’m saying. If AI is coming for people’s jobs and it’s more effective, the management of firms across multiple industries should reflect that by firing lots of people right now. Why wait? Collect the extra cash flows today given future expectations of technological progress. Who says no to more money? Lmfao. Or… perhaps they don’t quite stand all that much behind that claim. Moreover ‘less technical’ means what exactly? I referenced people who are senior managers who are trying to wedge AI where they can. Who are you referencing?
    - Nicook 5mo ago
      I believe he is referencing the proletariat masses, the rabble, etc.
- jerf 5mo ago
  We have a skewed-to-the-positive view about AI around here because we are the industry where it has turned out to work to a significant degree. We can argue about whether it lived up to the promises and the practical implications of using it and how much you can trust it, etc., but it's actually a debate in our space because there is enough value that it is worth debating. I think in a lot of other spaces it isn't working nearly as well. From my blog https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/programming_is_engineering/ https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/programming_is_engineering/ : "It’s worth taking a moment to really watch how [AIs] work, as they are working on some relatively lengthy task for you. It reminds me of bumper bowling [1]; link to a short video showing what it is. The AIs bang along all our bumpers; failing compiles, failing tests, failing integrations, error messages, all the bumpers we’ve built into our engineering process, and in the end they get a good result. But that good result is as much a result of all the solid engineering processes we have installed as anything else, because the AI without those protections rolls into the gutter relatively quickly. In those fields where the bumpers can’t be built as easily or in as great a quantity as we can have them, that’s what happens with the AIs. "... it’s not that “programmers are awesome”, it’s that our domain is amenable to having all these bumpers in the first place." I can think of bumpers for other domains, but not in the quantity we have in our space. Plus there's things like accounting, where "accounting" already is the bumper, having an AI banging into the accounting bumpers is much more concerning than a syntax error on compile is for us. Coding AIs would be nearly useless if the bumpers weren't there, and I think that's where a lot of other domains end up with when it comes to AI. If you want to see what I mean, watch a longer coding process in your AI, notice the first place it bangs into one of the bumpers I'm talking about, and then imagine how valuable the AI would be if instead it didn't realize that it banged into a bumper, continued on obliviously, and then went off into ever-more-fantastic flights of fancy with no connection to reality. Such an AI would be too hazardous to use. I think that's the experience of almost every other field right now. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yKOBBwUw8yg https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yKOBBwUw8yg
  - bigstrat2003 5mo ago
    > We have a skewed-to-the-positive view about AI around here because we are the industry where it has turned out to work to a significant degree. Well... except that it actually hasn't. A handful of people are saying "yeah we're getting huge gains, it's unreal". But most devs here talk about how it's at best a modest speedup, and at worst slows them down. So even for programming, the thing they are supposedly good at, LLMs aren't actually that good.
coffeefirst 5mo ago
I agree, and with a little nuance: There's a lot of overlap between people who cannot stand the AI boosters, don't want a data center built anywhere near them, are sick of the slop, and still use a chatbot for some stuff. I don't think this is hypocrisy. I don't think it's a contradiction at all. It suggests that people actually like natural language interfaces where they make sense and the price is reasonable. What they don't like is the rhetoric, behavior, impact on electricity prices, insistence on cramming it into places where it doesn't belong, layoffs, threats, and general obnoxiousness of the people pushing it and their general milieu. Which makes perfect sense.
- ungovernableCat 5mo ago
  I think people have stopped giving tech companies the benefit of the doubt, unlike the start of the social media era and the smartphone era. Both of those things did transform life & culture but mostly to the benefit of their makers. People now expect the same from AI and for better or worse most of the CEOs are not even pretending this time. The most they do is some vague hope that it'll all workout magically somehow.
tern 5mo ago
I think it's just hard to know this for the people working on it. AI radically changed my life. I'm doing at least 10 times more, more ambitious, higher quality work. I've been listening to people around me talking about alignment and the singularity for almost a decade. It's strange to imagine that people live in a world where this isn't and hasn't been happening for a while now. "Over-hyped" is not the word I would use if I take my daily experience as an example, nor when I consider even lower-bound projections.
- JCTheDenthog 5mo ago
  >I'm doing at least 10 times more, more ambitious, higher quality work. Got any examples you can share?
  - tern 5mo ago
    Not publicly yet, but I work on a programming language, compiler, and runtime that achieves magical (to me) things in a niche field. I would never have attempted something at this scale otherwise, so it's a very 0-to-1 experience subjectively.
    - alain94040 5mo ago
      That matches my experience. At least on the solo front, there were so many topics I wasn't an expert on, that limited what I could build. Now with AI assistance, the sky is the limit. I don't need to be an expert in frontend, backend, I can just build on my personal expertise in a functional domain, and leverage AI to fill in the gaps. I believe many people will benefit from being to build exactly what they want, without gatekeepers or investment.
- q3k 5mo ago
  Cocaine radically changed my life. I'm doing at least 10 times more, more ambitious, higher quality work.
  - leptons 5mo ago
jollyllama 5mo ago
To say it briefly: >Why aren't people more resentful that these companies have pushed this technology upon them They are.

by cmiles8 5mo ago

eooekwe 5mo ago

Agreed. This place is legit delululand. I speak to people who work at the upper echelons across various industries regularly and whether you want to believe it or not idc - the management are desperately trying to push AI but it just doesn’t add much value to what they do. At best it’s just a really good search engine across internal data. Many of these places already had things called macros in place so there’s barely any value add.

jmalicki 5mo ago
It took the desktop computer revolution about two decades to show up in productivity statistics. Itt takes time to adapt. Even within SV there are still luddites who sometimes type out code, in mid 2026!!!
oulipo2 5mo ago
Indeed, and HN also has a huge "pro-AI" bias... everytime you make a comment to point out that AI is first and foremost a political artefact, rather than a technology, and that it will be weaponized against people, they downvote... Although they know perfectly well what happened to their search / personal data, but they still don't want to see the obvious
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
Aurornis 5mo ago
> Agreed. This place is legit delululand. Funny, I see HN as having a high concentration of anti-AI comments and general AI doubt. Yours included. The vibe among less technical people I talk to has a negative sentiment about AI and AI companies, but largely because they see AI as more effective and capable. They think it’s coming for their job and way of life and they don’t like that.
- eooekwe 5mo ago
  Your post captures exactly what I’m saying. If AI is coming for people’s jobs and it’s more effective, the management of firms across multiple industries should reflect that by firing lots of people right now. Why wait? Collect the extra cash flows today given future expectations of technological progress. Who says no to more money? Lmfao. Or… perhaps they don’t quite stand all that much behind that claim. Moreover ‘less technical’ means what exactly? I referenced people who are senior managers who are trying to wedge AI where they can. Who are you referencing?
  - Nicook 5mo ago
    I believe he is referencing the proletariat masses, the rabble, etc.
jerf 5mo ago
We have a skewed-to-the-positive view about AI around here because we are the industry where it has turned out to work to a significant degree. We can argue about whether it lived up to the promises and the practical implications of using it and how much you can trust it, etc., but it's actually a debate in our space because there is enough value that it is worth debating. I think in a lot of other spaces it isn't working nearly as well. From my blog https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/programming_is_engineering/ https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/programming_is_engineering/ : "It’s worth taking a moment to really watch how [AIs] work, as they are working on some relatively lengthy task for you. It reminds me of bumper bowling [1]; link to a short video showing what it is. The AIs bang along all our bumpers; failing compiles, failing tests, failing integrations, error messages, all the bumpers we’ve built into our engineering process, and in the end they get a good result. But that good result is as much a result of all the solid engineering processes we have installed as anything else, because the AI without those protections rolls into the gutter relatively quickly. In those fields where the bumpers can’t be built as easily or in as great a quantity as we can have them, that’s what happens with the AIs. "... it’s not that “programmers are awesome”, it’s that our domain is amenable to having all these bumpers in the first place." I can think of bumpers for other domains, but not in the quantity we have in our space. Plus there's things like accounting, where "accounting" already is the bumper, having an AI banging into the accounting bumpers is much more concerning than a syntax error on compile is for us. Coding AIs would be nearly useless if the bumpers weren't there, and I think that's where a lot of other domains end up with when it comes to AI. If you want to see what I mean, watch a longer coding process in your AI, notice the first place it bangs into one of the bumpers I'm talking about, and then imagine how valuable the AI would be if instead it didn't realize that it banged into a bumper, continued on obliviously, and then went off into ever-more-fantastic flights of fancy with no connection to reality. Such an AI would be too hazardous to use. I think that's the experience of almost every other field right now. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yKOBBwUw8yg https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yKOBBwUw8yg
- bigstrat2003 5mo ago
  > We have a skewed-to-the-positive view about AI around here because we are the industry where it has turned out to work to a significant degree. Well... except that it actually hasn't. A handful of people are saying "yeah we're getting huge gains, it's unreal". But most devs here talk about how it's at best a modest speedup, and at worst slows them down. So even for programming, the thing they are supposedly good at, LLMs aren't actually that good.

coffeefirst 5mo ago

I agree, and with a little nuance: There's a lot of overlap between people who cannot stand the AI boosters, don't want a data center built anywhere near them, are sick of the slop, and still use a chatbot for some stuff. I don't think this is hypocrisy. I don't think it's a contradiction at all. It suggests that people actually like natural language interfaces where they make sense and the price is reasonable. What they don't like is the rhetoric, behavior, impact on electricity prices, insistence on cramming it into places where it doesn't belong, layoffs, threats, and general obnoxiousness of the people pushing it and their general milieu. Which makes perfect sense.

ungovernableCat 5mo ago
I think people have stopped giving tech companies the benefit of the doubt, unlike the start of the social media era and the smartphone era. Both of those things did transform life & culture but mostly to the benefit of their makers. People now expect the same from AI and for better or worse most of the CEOs are not even pretending this time. The most they do is some vague hope that it'll all workout magically somehow.

tern 5mo ago

I think it's just hard to know this for the people working on it. AI radically changed my life. I'm doing at least 10 times more, more ambitious, higher quality work. I've been listening to people around me talking about alignment and the singularity for almost a decade. It's strange to imagine that people live in a world where this isn't and hasn't been happening for a while now. "Over-hyped" is not the word I would use if I take my daily experience as an example, nor when I consider even lower-bound projections.

JCTheDenthog 5mo ago
>I'm doing at least 10 times more, more ambitious, higher quality work. Got any examples you can share?
- tern 5mo ago
  Not publicly yet, but I work on a programming language, compiler, and runtime that achieves magical (to me) things in a niche field. I would never have attempted something at this scale otherwise, so it's a very 0-to-1 experience subjectively.
  - alain94040 5mo ago
    That matches my experience. At least on the solo front, there were so many topics I wasn't an expert on, that limited what I could build. Now with AI assistance, the sky is the limit. I don't need to be an expert in frontend, backend, I can just build on my personal expertise in a functional domain, and leverage AI to fill in the gaps. I believe many people will benefit from being to build exactly what they want, without gatekeepers or investment.
q3k 5mo ago
Cocaine radically changed my life. I'm doing at least 10 times more, more ambitious, higher quality work.
- leptons 5mo ago

jollyllama 5mo ago

To say it briefly: >Why aren't people more resentful that these companies have pushed this technology upon them They are.