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• Forgeties79 7mo ago
  > It's so intriguing, I wonder if the people who are against it haven't even used it properly. I feel like this is a common refrain that sets an impossible bar for detractors to clear. You can simply hand wave away any critique with “you’re just not using it right.” If countless people are “using it wrong” then maybe there’s something wrong with the tool.
  • airstrike 7mo ago
    Illogical. I had Claude read a 2k LOC module on my codebase for a bug that was annoying me for a while. It found it in seconds, a one line fix. I had forgotten to account for translation in one single line. That's objectively valuable. People who argue it has no value or that it only helps normies who can't code or that sooner or later it will backfire are burying their heads in the sand.
    • wtetzner 7mo ago
      This feels like a strawman. Most criticisms of AI for coding are about how overblown the claimed benefits are, not that there are no benefits.
      • airstrike 7mo ago
        While that may very well be true, it's a valid reply to the GP who made this claim, not to my comment explaining to the parent why their argument was logically flawed.
        • deleted 7mo ago
          [deleted]
        • wtetzner 7mo ago
          Except that the GP didn't claim that AI had no value?
        • Forgeties79 7mo ago
          Just because you disagree with me doesn’t mean my argument is “logically flawed.” And as the other commenter said, I never said AI had no value. I have used various AI tools for probably 4 years now. If you’re going to talk to and about people in such a condescending way then you at least ask clarifying questions before jumping to the starkest, least charitable interpretation of their point.
    • Forgeties79 7mo ago
      >Illogical. Dismissive. Also kind of rude. > People who argue it has no value or that it only helps normies who can't code or that sooner or later it will backfire are burying their heads in the sand. I don’t think this describes most people and it’s certainly not what I think.
  • seanmcdirmid 7mo ago
    There are people who know how to code and people who don’t. AI is the same way, it isn’t a mystery.
    • Forgeties79 7mo ago
      And yet every LLM company pushes it as a simple chat bot that everyone should use for everything right now with no explanation or training. It can’t be a precision tool that requires expertise as well as a universally accessible, simple answer to all our problems. That doesn’t strike me as user error.
  • hippo22 7mo ago
    > If countless people are “using it wrong” then maybe there’s something wrong with the tool. Not really. Every tool in existence has people that use it incorrectly. The fact that countless people find value in the tool means it probably is valuable.
    • Forgeties79 7mo ago
      Not saying the tool doesn’t have value. I’m saying the tool has a problem.
  • potsandpans 7mo ago
    A bunch of people with no construction experience could collectively get together and start complaining that their ball pein hammers aren't working. Doesn't mean the hammers are bad, no matter how many people join the community. You need to learn how to use the tools.
    • rileymichael 7mo ago
      A bunch of people with poor programming experience could get together and start claiming their new tool is the future. Doesn’t mean the tool is actually useful, no matter how many people join the community.
      • potsandpans 7mo ago
        Except my analogy is correct and yours is clearly biased. Continue to not use the tools and become irrelevant.
        • Forgeties79 7mo ago
          I don’t think yours is correct or that theirs is biased.
  • dwallin 7mo ago
    When it comes to new emerging technologies everyone is searching the space of possibilities, exploring new ways to use said technologies, and seeing where it applies and creates value. In situations such as this, a positive sign is worth way more than a negative. The chances of many people not using it the right way are much much higher when no one really knows what the “right” way is. It then shows hubris and a lack of imagination for someone in such a situation to think they can apply their negative results to extrapolate to the situation at large. Especially when so many are claiming to be seeing positive utility.
• zythyx 7mo ago
  > I wonder if the people who are against it haven't even used it properly. I swear this is the reason people are against AI output (there are genuine reasons to be against AI without using it: environmental impact, hardware prices, social/copyright issues, CSAM (like X/Grok)) It feels like a lot of people hear the negatives, and try it and are cynical of the result. Things like 2 r's in Strawberry and the 6-10 fingers on one hand led to multiple misinterpretations of the actual AI benefit: "Oh, if AI can't even count the number of letters in a word, then all its answers are incorrect" is simply not true.
• seanmcdirmid 7mo ago
  HN has a huge anti AI crowd that is just as vocal and active as its pro AI crowd. My guess that this is true of the industry today and won’t be true of the industry 5 years from now: one of the crowds will have won the argument and the other will be out of the tech industry. Vibe coding and slop strawmen are still strawmen. The quality of the debate is obviously a problem
  • DrewADesign 7mo ago
    I don’t understand why people are so resistant to the idea that use cases actually matter here. If someone says “you’re an idiot because you aren’t writing good, structured prompts,” or “you’re too big of an idiot to realize that your AI-generated code sucks” before knowing anything about what the other person was trying to do, they’re either speaking entirely from an ideological bias, or don’t realize that other people’s coding jobs might look a whole lot more different than theirs do.
    • seanmcdirmid 7mo ago
      We don’t know anything about the commenters other than that they aren’t getting the same results with AI as we are. It’s like if someone complains that since they can’t write fast code and so you shouldn’t be able to either?
      • DrewADesign 7mo ago
        > We don’t know anything about the commenters other than that they aren’t getting the same results with AI as we are. Right. You don’t know what model they’re using, on what service, in what IDE, on what OS, if they’re making a SAP program, a Perl 5 CGI application, a Delphi application, something written in R, a c-based image processing plugin, a node website, HTML for a static site, Excel VBA, etc. etc. etc. > It’s like if someone complains that since they can’t write fast code and so you shouldn’t be able to either? If someone is saying that nobody can get good results from using AI then they’re obviously wrong. If someone says that they get good results with AI and someone else, knowing nothing about their task, says they’re too incompetent to determine that, then they’re wrong. If someone says AI is good for all use cases they’re wrong. If someone says they’re getting bad results using AI and someone else, knowing nothing about their task, says they’re too incompetent to determine that, then they’re wrong. If you make sweeping, declarative, black-and-white statements about AI coding either being good or bad, you’re wrong. If you make assumptions about the reason someone has deemed their experience with AI coding good or bad, not even knowing their use case, you’re wrong.
• isodev 7mo ago
  What we call AI at the heart of coding agents, is the averaged “echo” of what people have published on the web that has (often illegitimately) ended up in training data. Yes it probably can spit out some trivial snippets but nothing near what’s needed for genuine software engineering. Also, now that StackOverflow is no longer a thing, good luck meaningfully improving those code agents.
  • blackcatsec 7mo ago
    Exactly this. Everything I've seen online is generally "I had a problem that could be solved in a few dozen lines of code and I asked the AI do it for me and it worked great!" But what they asked the AI to do is something people have done a hundred times over, on existing platform tech, and will likely have little to no capability to solve problems that come up 5-10 years from now. The reason AI is so good at coding right now is due to the 2nd Dot Com tech bubble that occurred between the simultaneous release of mobile platforms and the massive expansion of cloud technology. But now that the platforms that existed during that time will no longer exist, because it's no longer profitable to put something out there--the AI platforms will be less and less relevant. Sure, sites like reddit will probably still exist where people will begin to ask more and more information that the AI can't help with, and subsequently the AI will train off of that information; but the rate of that information is going to go down dramatically. In short, at some point the AI models will be worthless and I suspect that'll be whenever the next big "tech revolution" happens.
  • logicprog 7mo ago
    Coding agents are getting most meaningful improvements in coding ability from RLVR now, with priors formed by ingesting open source code and manuals directly, not SO, as the basis. The former doesn't rely on resources external to the AI companies at all, and can be scaled up as much as they like, while the latter will likely continue to expand, and they don't really need more of it if it doesn't. Not to mention that curated synthetic data has been shown to be very effective at training models, so they could generate their own textbooks based on open codebases or new languages or whatever and use that. Model collapse only happens when it's exclusively, and fully un-curated, model output that's being trained on.
• piskov 7mo ago
  > helping you understand what is happening If only there were things called comments, clean-code, and what have you
• franciscop 7mo ago
  I've seen some discussions and I'd say there's lots of people who are really against the hyped expectations from the AI marketing materials, not necessarily against the AI itself. Things that people are against that would seem to be against AI, but are not directly against AI itself: - Being forced to use AI at work - Being told you need to be 2x, 5x or 10x more efficient now - Seeing your coworkers fired - Seeing hiring freeze because business think no more devs are needed - Seeing business people make a mock UI with AI and boasting how programming is easy - Seeing those people ask you to deliver in impossible timelines - Frontend people hearing from backend how their job is useless now - Backend people hearing from ML Engineers how their job is useless now - etc When I dig a bit about this "anti-AI" trend I find it's one of those and not actually against the AI itself.
  • zozbot234 7mo ago
    The most credible argument against AI is really the expense involved in querying frontier models. If you want to strengthen the case for AI-assisted coding, try to come up with ways of doing that effectively with a cheap "mini"-class model, or even something that runs locally. "You can spend $20k in tokens and have AI write a full C compiler in a week!" is not a very sensible argument for anything.
    • seanmcdirmid 7mo ago
      Because hardware costs never goes down and energy efficiency never go up overtime? Whatever the value/$ is now, do you really think it is going to be constant?
      • ThrowawayR2 7mo ago
        If hardware industry news is any indication, hardware costs aren't going to be going down for GPUs, RAM, or much of anything over the next 3-5 years.
        • seanmcdirmid 7mo ago
• existencebox 7mo ago
  I'm similarly bemused by those who don't understand where the anti-AI sentiment could come from, and "they must be doing it wrong" should usually be a bit of a "code smell". (Not to mention that I don't believe this post addresses any of the concrete concerns the article calls out, and makes it sound like much more of a strawman than it was to my reading.) To preempt that on my end, and emphasize I'm not saying "it's useless" so much as "I think there's some truth to what the OP says", as I'm typing this I'm finishing up a 90% LLM coded tool to automate a regular process I have to do for work, and it's been a very successful experience. From my perspective, a tool (LLMs) has more impact than how you yourself directly use it. We talk a lot about pits of success and pits of failure from a code and product architecture standpoint, and right now, as you acknowledge yourself in the last sentence, there's a big footgun waiting for any dev who turns their head off too hard. In my mind, _this is the hard part_ of engineering; keeping a codebase structured, guardrailed, well constrained, even with many contributors over a long period of time. I do think LLMs make this harder, since they make writing code "cheaper" but not necessarily "safer", which flies in the face of mantras such as "the best line of code is the one you don't need to write." (I do feel the article brushes against this where it nods to trust, growth, and ownership) This is not a hypothetical as well, but something I've already seen in practice in a professional context, and I don't think we've figured out silver bullets for yet. While I could also gesture at some patterns I've seen where there's a level of semantic complexity these models simply can't handle at the moment, and no matter how well architected you make a codebase after N million lines you WILL be above that threshold, even that is less of a concern in my mind than the former pattern. (And again the article touches on this re: vibe coding having a ceiling, but I think if anything they weaken their argument by limiting it to vibe coding.) To take a bit of a tangent with this comment though: I have come to agree with a post I saw a few months back, that at this point LLMs have become this cycle's tech-religious-war, and it's very hard to have evenhanded debate in that context, and as a sister post calls out, I also suspect this is where some of the distaste comes from as well.
• tomhow 7mo ago
  Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • dredmorbius 7mo ago
    And you can escape asterisks using backslashes: Italic *Escaped asterisks* \*Double-Escaped asterisks\* *Italic* \*Escaped asterisks\* \\*Double-Escaped asterisks\\* (tomhow seems to have goofed his escapes above. As I've done many times myself...)
    • dredmorbius 7mo ago
      GP comment since corrected, for the curious. And/or future me.