It's a tough predicament when the industry you're in is moving towards violating your personal preferences and ethics.
I'm neither agreeing with or disagreeing with the author's stance. But this tension crosses the line of "I have an opinion" to "I have an opinion that impacts my livelihood".
For someone who doesn't like doing cryptocurrency, advertising, gig economy bullshit or a host of other things, this is not a new problem. But yeah, it sucks.
Programmers then: "We don't need unions, it's a bunch of communism that keeps me from making as much money as possible"
Programmers now: "Oh no, holy shit, what am I going to do as the market forces us to be a bunch of fucking gremlins. Too bad I threw away the power of collective bargaining"
It seems people keep forgetting why unions formed in the first place. Given a chance a company of any size will fully optimize for its own profit regardless of how awful the side effects are to individuals, the environment, and society at large.
See West Virginia coal mining in the early 20th century. Resulted in a lot of violent conflict as desperate workers were getting squeezed for every penny and owned little of their own, often working in company towns.
I love the pro-union sentiment, but I don't think we need to treat "programmers" so monolothically, and we definitely should act like its too late. Now is the perfect moment to unionize!
I don't think there are successful examples of unions being able to fight major technological shifts in the long haul. At best, they can force the management to accept a suicide pact - we're all slowly going down together. That may be preferable to sudden layoffs, but it's still not great, as evidenced by the troubles of the US auto industry.
Instead, I think that doctors and lawyers have it right: they effectively have the authority to decide who's allowed to practice the profession, so ChatGPT can't write you prescriptions or defend you in court.
I was probably close to where the author was a couple months ago, and now am even more on the "doomer" side of things. But I think many skeptics of the technology have the idea in the back of their mind that "if this thing actually pans it out will be worse than if it doesn't".
If it doesn't pan out, the thing evaporates in a bubble, your job goes back to normal. If it does, your job is toast no matter what (and seemingly many jobs). If software is primarily supply constrained, that will eventually change.
Lately I'm more inclined to believe the latter is true, but I think skeptics are often hedging like this.
Absolutely. Actually truly taking aboard the belief that your 401K is now 100% up in the air, much less your career, much less your childrens' whole lives... it's tough.
I was lucky enough to be thrust through this in 2023 by DALLE-2, but the body of the normal distribution is just starting to pass the rubicon, month by month, day by day... Lowkey agonizing watch so many people go through something so relatable, only to turn to primal, nationalistic urges and downright epistemic denialism.
The culture is robust already, too -- I have no illusion that the obvious arrival in ASI will change much of anything, just like evolution didn't end up killing the church like some feared. They'll simply fold that into the interwoven chitin of cherry-picked facts and party lines, accumulated over their years in the echo chamber. Any headline that seems like it should obviously pierce the veil instead gets used to reinforce it (e.g. "Oh they claim AI solved a math problem, now?? They must really be getting desparate to hide the hoax if they're willing to go that far!")
This forum bans politics and I really don't want to start a whole thing, but I guess I'll just float the anecdote that I learned about this theory of Echo Chambers in am baby epistemology course, where the example given was the MAGA movement. Take that as you will.
> But I think many skeptics of the technology have the idea in the back of their mind that "if this thing actually pans it out will be worse than if it doesn't".
I don't think you need to be skeptical of the tech to think that. The question there is: given the moral character of the people in charge of big companies, what do you think will happen if they can replace all labor with cheap machines? If AI can do the thinking they had to pay humans for, and robots can do the menial tasks they had to pay humans for, they don't need the common man for anything. People like you and I are at very real risk of being in a permanent underclass if these AI dreams come to fruition.
Oh agreed, I'm mostly explaining why someone who was a skeptic would make the calculation that they can afford to opt-out of using AI (and why you might weigh on the side of opting out even if you didn't think using LLMs had a morally unsavory valence).
It already is for quite a few. We have something that's very useful and gaining improvements as time goes on. Probably not fast/good enough for some companies with wild expectations, but there's no doubt that this thing is here to stay.
not really. I don't work for FAANG because they're evil (plus im unqualified). I choose to mostly work for ethical companies. Locally declined to interview at the casino gambling company, the local buy now pay later usurers as an app, for elsevier. I left jobs when they offshored teams. I left jobs when they mandated unproven vaccines.
I don't make as much money as others though. I should totally write python and join some fintech
Such stances are very easy to make when there is no financial incentive or no competition with any meaningful money on the line. But as soon as there is competition, they don't care about "AI policies" if it is the means to make a lot of money.
The best example of this is security in open source software which maintainers have no choice but to use AI to protect themselves before an attacker can use AI to find and build exploits for security vulnerabilities faster than they can patch it.
In some sectors such as banking, crypto, defense and government, this is extremely critical. It will soon be the same with AI companies who have the AI model and someone could use AI to breach them with the goal of leaking the proprietary model.
So to them, policies like this, are actually a downgrade that they cannot afford to do.
Not using world-changing technology because some people are using it harmfully is wild. Expanding it to people just making art (/entertainment...) that you don't like is just confusing.
Obviously I relate to the anxiety that made this man put up at least 3 mentions of how much he hates AI per page site-wide and to finish this draft before the actual site, but I can't help but see it as an unhealthy coping mechanism.
It's a shame cause this is an origami-themed freelance web developer who believes strongly in labeling natural vs. artificial prose, which couldn't be more up my alley if he tried! Shame the world is like this.
Just for clarity, in case anyone else doesn't see it -- I'll just take one paragraph:
Criticism of AI has led to harassment.
Perceived support of AI has led to molotovs and bullet-riddled doors.
AI has been used to publish hit pieces.
Computers have been used to publish hit pieces.
Generative AI is used openly to generate sexual abuse material.
Ditto, just with a much more serious crime. This one is actually a lot easier now and we need new laws for sure, but plugging your ears to the future will not speed those laws up in any way, no matter how indirect.
AI chatbots have encouraged vulnerable people to commit suicide.
Again, a serious, new twist on existing problems with suicide prevention. But A) it's far from a foregone conclusion that it's a net negative on suicide rates given that there's tons of positive anecdotes too, B) refusing to use claude code is not going to help devise legal, social, and technological solutions to that problem, and C) this is so clearly post-hoc reasoning.
For example: where's the "Social Policy", given that social media is a proven threat in this sense?
Electricity was world-changing, do we consider ourselves to be using it? Why is there this presupposition with LLMs? Are we just taking the "ai" leaders for their word? From what I can see, the tech we have today is not up to to the task of replacement and capability improvements (not benchmark) seem to be decelerating.
> Electricity was world-changing, do we consider ourselves to be using it?
We do, but craft workers in the industrial revolution did lose their jobs, and at the pace AI is developing I don't see any reason to believe that professional workers will not eventually have their jobs threatened.
> Why is there this presupposition with LLMs? Are we just taking the "ai" leaders for their word?
No, I don't think we are. And let me be clear: I was very skeptical about this until recently. I think the models are objectively capable of doing a lot of the job of software engineers now, and increasingly engineers are being pressured to not only use them, but to take themselves out of the loop. There is a reason the conversation of "should we read the code" has been raised in public discourse and engineering talks now. That should concern everyone.
> From what I can see, the tech we have today is not up to to the task of replacement and capability improvements (not benchmark) seem to be decelerating.
Jobs were not just lost during the industrial revolution, how many new tasks and jobs were created? (hint, it was more than were lost)
If someone is telling you to not be in the loop, they are not aware of the capability ceiling of agents and llms. Progress appears to be slowing the last few months, people are not finding Opus 5 to be that much better than 4.8, less wow effect these days
Please tell the coal miners in Appalachia that they shouldn't worry about their jobs being lost, because look at all the new tech jobs we have!
I do think what you are highlighting is probably a pretty significant difference with AI and highlights the problem with the comparison, if the optimists turn out to be right!
It is backwards in every scenario, and it is basically tilting at windmills. There is a lot of that around, thinking it is making a difference.
Guy thinks this is his niche. Everyone will go "that's neat" and move on with life.
There was another post on here recently by a translator, whose profession is translating documents, declaring that they won't use AI in their work and anyone who does is a noob and it is no threat to what they do...and it just was amazing stuff. Of course HN pandered to it with lots of "oh yeah that's right you show 'em", but surely we all realize how fantastically silly that was. A web developer / designer who refuses to use AI is rapidly going to be very unemployed, though they might try the purist "no AI here!" angle niche for a tiny delay of that inevitable.
There are many ways to use Ai in programming without having it write code. Code reviews are a place where they are extremely helpful and are becoming company policy. It actually improves code quality and that's before we get to the security side of things. Adversaries will absolutely be running Ai, so you ought to know what those Ai are finding yourself before others do.
There are very serious mathematicians who refuse to use AI because they rightfully are concerned about the skill loss and harm overall. If anything it makes more sense for a mathematician to avoid AI than a software engineer though personally I think software engineers should use it sparingly as well.
I feel like you could replace “AI” with “computers” across much of TFA and it would read like something from a few decades ago (ignoring the web development specifics…)
That lends some credence to the “AI is a tool” position I hear in some forums, though I do think there are real harms from the vast scale of AI deployment.
Not if he can also deliver equally good or better results, which I suspect he will. Not everyone needs it to do a good job, and for others, it could be a net negative.
Using computers created an unambiguous productivity boost. Same cannot be said for all types of software engineering with AI; that's why we keep having this debate. The results are mixed.
> I feel like you could replace “AI” with “computers” across much of TFA and it would read like something from a few decades ago
No you can't. Here is a quick sample
Computer crawlers routinely scrape websites using underhanded tactics like residential proxies and falsified user agents. The damage to open source infrastructure is overwhelming both servers and maintainers alike. Denial of service (DDoS) has forced deployment of defensive software and intrusive CAPTCHAs. The number of known computer bots grows monthly. These bots blatantly ignore the long established robots.txt industry standard.
Computer slop is spammed on social networks resulting in a new threat of misinformation and scams. Computer search prioritises misinformed overviews over real sources.
Yeah. I buy that there are some use cases where AI is a trap, or not as good as people.
I'm also chatting with my logs and triaging things like 10x faster in multiple open terminal sessions while I post on HN right now. So I'm also certain there are some use cases where not using AI will soon be professional negligence!
Exactly. the general point is: "I choose to use tools X, and not tools Y, for these moral/ethical reasons." In 20 years we'll see something similar: "I choose to use AI and not X, for these moral/ethical reasons."
To be clear, I don't mind the rationale (although I don't agree with them myself).
People think reducing some argument to “use tech” or “use computers” is a slam dunk nowadays. But see what a beautiful mess of adtech, antisocial and predatory social media, massive privacy breaches over trivialities (both in professional conduct and what the service was about) with no accountability, surveillance tech, revenge porn, scams, robber tech barons... and with that in mind do we really have anything to gloat to the naysayers from “a few decades ago”? ;)
> I do not currently use AI for professional work.
I came here to say "Yes, and my grandfather thinks the internet is the 'mark of the beast.'" I'm not really sure what makes this persons opinion more noteworthy (in the wikipedia sense) than my grandfathers.
I suppose it's popular here because a lot of people who will be forced to learn new skills if AI takes their job hang out here, but hearing that buggy-whip manufacturers hate those new-fangled automobiles isn't' really newsworthy.
It's a coincidence that it occurred the rise of the Internet (computers existed before) and AI. These coincidences happened in the past with other technologies.
So the OP has a valid position to boycott AI, just like in 1870s they should have boycotted trains or in 1910s the oil industry.
I guess I'll say it unhedged (since nobody else has yet): I agree with the author. I don't 100% align with his particular assignment of threats and externalities to AI, but I think overall it sucks and I don't want to use it. I think he's in a space that's getting overwhelmed by AI and AI output and I salute him putting his money where his mouth is. I wish him luck.
Yep. I think that AI tech has turned out to be pretty much the worst thing the tech industry has ever created. It is a huge net negative for the entire world, and even for the very profession which created it.
Nah. AI is anything that can often solve inexactly specified problems, often through the use of a combination of probabilities and deductions.
Your problem is thinking that "artificial intelligence" has to be whatever you think "intelligence" is. This is as true as "artificial grass" needing to be a type of grass. It's a constructed imitation that solves some of the problems that we normally use grass for. It can be green and spiky, soft to play sports on and pleasant in appearance, but it still is in no way grass, and has no relationship to grass. It is something that fits its category as a tool in some circumstances. An artificial leg is not a leg, it is a piece of metal or plastic with a hinge in it. An artificial heart is not a heart, it is a pump. They are both limited replacements for another thing in some useful circumstances.
Artificial grass, legs, or hearts don't become actual grass, legs or hearts even if they perform better in all use cases that we have for the actual item. They only become "grass," "legs," and "hearts" once we find the distinction to be largely useless and begin to omit it.
> AI is anything that can often solve inexactly specified problems
I doubt you'll find many who agree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making.
Finally someone says it. I read it like that every time and briefly imagine a Daily WTF style blog about the pitfalls and shortcomings of everyone's favorite IPC system, only to be sorely disappointed.
51 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 5.5 ms ] threadI'm neither agreeing with or disagreeing with the author's stance. But this tension crosses the line of "I have an opinion" to "I have an opinion that impacts my livelihood".
And I'm witnessing a lot of it.
Programmers now: "Oh no, holy shit, what am I going to do as the market forces us to be a bunch of fucking gremlins. Too bad I threw away the power of collective bargaining"
It seems people keep forgetting why unions formed in the first place. Given a chance a company of any size will fully optimize for its own profit regardless of how awful the side effects are to individuals, the environment, and society at large.
Instead, I think that doctors and lawyers have it right: they effectively have the authority to decide who's allowed to practice the profession, so ChatGPT can't write you prescriptions or defend you in court.
If it doesn't pan out, the thing evaporates in a bubble, your job goes back to normal. If it does, your job is toast no matter what (and seemingly many jobs). If software is primarily supply constrained, that will eventually change.
Lately I'm more inclined to believe the latter is true, but I think skeptics are often hedging like this.
I was lucky enough to be thrust through this in 2023 by DALLE-2, but the body of the normal distribution is just starting to pass the rubicon, month by month, day by day... Lowkey agonizing watch so many people go through something so relatable, only to turn to primal, nationalistic urges and downright epistemic denialism.
The culture is robust already, too -- I have no illusion that the obvious arrival in ASI will change much of anything, just like evolution didn't end up killing the church like some feared. They'll simply fold that into the interwoven chitin of cherry-picked facts and party lines, accumulated over their years in the echo chamber. Any headline that seems like it should obviously pierce the veil instead gets used to reinforce it (e.g. "Oh they claim AI solved a math problem, now?? They must really be getting desparate to hide the hoax if they're willing to go that far!")
This forum bans politics and I really don't want to start a whole thing, but I guess I'll just float the anecdote that I learned about this theory of Echo Chambers in am baby epistemology course, where the example given was the MAGA movement. Take that as you will.
I don't think you need to be skeptical of the tech to think that. The question there is: given the moral character of the people in charge of big companies, what do you think will happen if they can replace all labor with cheap machines? If AI can do the thinking they had to pay humans for, and robots can do the menial tasks they had to pay humans for, they don't need the common man for anything. People like you and I are at very real risk of being in a permanent underclass if these AI dreams come to fruition.
It already is for quite a few. We have something that's very useful and gaining improvements as time goes on. Probably not fast/good enough for some companies with wild expectations, but there's no doubt that this thing is here to stay.
I don't make as much money as others though. I should totally write python and join some fintech
The best example of this is security in open source software which maintainers have no choice but to use AI to protect themselves before an attacker can use AI to find and build exploits for security vulnerabilities faster than they can patch it.
In some sectors such as banking, crypto, defense and government, this is extremely critical. It will soon be the same with AI companies who have the AI model and someone could use AI to breach them with the goal of leaking the proprietary model.
So to them, policies like this, are actually a downgrade that they cannot afford to do.
Obviously I relate to the anxiety that made this man put up at least 3 mentions of how much he hates AI per page site-wide and to finish this draft before the actual site, but I can't help but see it as an unhealthy coping mechanism.
It's a shame cause this is an origami-themed freelance web developer who believes strongly in labeling natural vs. artificial prose, which couldn't be more up my alley if he tried! Shame the world is like this.
Just for clarity, in case anyone else doesn't see it -- I'll just take one paragraph:
Perceived support of AI has led to molotovs and bullet-riddled doors. Computers have been used to publish hit pieces. Ditto, just with a much more serious crime. This one is actually a lot easier now and we need new laws for sure, but plugging your ears to the future will not speed those laws up in any way, no matter how indirect. Again, a serious, new twist on existing problems with suicide prevention. But A) it's far from a foregone conclusion that it's a net negative on suicide rates given that there's tons of positive anecdotes too, B) refusing to use claude code is not going to help devise legal, social, and technological solutions to that problem, and C) this is so clearly post-hoc reasoning.For example: where's the "Social Policy", given that social media is a proven threat in this sense?
We do, but craft workers in the industrial revolution did lose their jobs, and at the pace AI is developing I don't see any reason to believe that professional workers will not eventually have their jobs threatened.
> Why is there this presupposition with LLMs? Are we just taking the "ai" leaders for their word?
No, I don't think we are. And let me be clear: I was very skeptical about this until recently. I think the models are objectively capable of doing a lot of the job of software engineers now, and increasingly engineers are being pressured to not only use them, but to take themselves out of the loop. There is a reason the conversation of "should we read the code" has been raised in public discourse and engineering talks now. That should concern everyone.
> From what I can see, the tech we have today is not up to to the task of replacement and capability improvements (not benchmark) seem to be decelerating.
I am not seeing that: https://metr.org/time-horizons/
And I think if things continue as they have, we are eventually going to see the price of software decline and widespread layoffs soon to follow.
If someone is telling you to not be in the loop, they are not aware of the capability ceiling of agents and llms. Progress appears to be slowing the last few months, people are not finding Opus 5 to be that much better than 4.8, less wow effect these days
I do think what you are highlighting is probably a pretty significant difference with AI and highlights the problem with the comparison, if the optimists turn out to be right!
Guy thinks this is his niche. Everyone will go "that's neat" and move on with life.
There was another post on here recently by a translator, whose profession is translating documents, declaring that they won't use AI in their work and anyone who does is a noob and it is no threat to what they do...and it just was amazing stuff. Of course HN pandered to it with lots of "oh yeah that's right you show 'em", but surely we all realize how fantastically silly that was. A web developer / designer who refuses to use AI is rapidly going to be very unemployed, though they might try the purist "no AI here!" angle niche for a tiny delay of that inevitable.
1. AI models produce consistent output, so it looks the same everywhere, which makes you look like a hustler if you use it for copywriting or design.
2. Customers who are fine with this can use Lovable for $20/month, so it's loser's game to chase those customers.
That lends some credence to the “AI is a tool” position I hear in some forums, though I do think there are real harms from the vast scale of AI deployment.
Using computers created an unambiguous productivity boost. Same cannot be said for all types of software engineering with AI; that's why we keep having this debate. The results are mixed.
No you can't. Here is a quick sample
It's very much nonsense.I'm also chatting with my logs and triaging things like 10x faster in multiple open terminal sessions while I post on HN right now. So I'm also certain there are some use cases where not using AI will soon be professional negligence!
To be clear, I don't mind the rationale (although I don't agree with them myself).
Tsk. Maybe that’s what you were going for.
I came here to say "Yes, and my grandfather thinks the internet is the 'mark of the beast.'" I'm not really sure what makes this persons opinion more noteworthy (in the wikipedia sense) than my grandfathers.
I suppose it's popular here because a lot of people who will be forced to learn new skills if AI takes their job hang out here, but hearing that buggy-whip manufacturers hate those new-fangled automobiles isn't' really newsworthy.
The deregulation since the 70s created oligarchs and encouraged lack of moral scruples. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49416055
It's a coincidence that it occurred the rise of the Internet (computers existed before) and AI. These coincidences happened in the past with other technologies.
So the OP has a valid position to boycott AI, just like in 1870s they should have boycotted trains or in 1910s the oil industry.
Your problem is thinking that "artificial intelligence" has to be whatever you think "intelligence" is. This is as true as "artificial grass" needing to be a type of grass. It's a constructed imitation that solves some of the problems that we normally use grass for. It can be green and spiky, soft to play sports on and pleasant in appearance, but it still is in no way grass, and has no relationship to grass. It is something that fits its category as a tool in some circumstances. An artificial leg is not a leg, it is a piece of metal or plastic with a hinge in it. An artificial heart is not a heart, it is a pump. They are both limited replacements for another thing in some useful circumstances.
Artificial grass, legs, or hearts don't become actual grass, legs or hearts even if they perform better in all use cases that we have for the actual item. They only become "grass," "legs," and "hearts" once we find the distinction to be largely useless and begin to omit it.
I doubt you'll find many who agree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making.
January 2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743095
If you must interact with it, then you must, but you shouldn't.
All of HN should take note.