Ask HN: How to get taken seriously while using AI?
Lately, it seems people have been getting more intense about being anti-AI, and it seems reflected in US politics as well, like the recent news about Mamdani banning it in NYC schools. But this thread is not about politics, or trying to shift anti-AI rhetoric. My question is how do I get taken seriously when there is, what feels like, an unfair label of slop if someone uses AI?
For reference, I am disabled and I get a lot of help from using AI as a coding assistant. For reference I made this thread here previously, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41543666 I have a lot of code I self-host or keep private because when I was starting out I got a lot of flack for not being a real software engineer (it’s a long story, I am not interested in telling it), so I never got the confidence or desire to share things I build with people. A coding assistant helps provide structure that I don’t trust myself to impose. The problem is now it seems like I’ll have to contend with the label of AI slopware engineer instead even after going through training and education.
So it seems like there’s never going to be anyway I’ll ever be good enough or real enough for these same types of people. I am not trying to impress them anyway, but I worry their POV is going to poison the well for people like me. So what do I do?
I’ll also give some unsolicited advice to anyone reading this who might consider themselves a real engineer: be a better teacher and mentor. If you want standards, and value skills, then either tell people how to learn, or teach them. No one helped me when I was starting out, and no one mentored me. AI is good for someone like me who no one helps and only judges. Promise I am not being melodramatic, just saying what life has been like. I hope others get luckier.
4 comments
[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 17.5 ms ] threadAlso maybe try to find a community that aligns with your values (not lobsters).
I’m plowing through huge projects at work I never dreamed possible before agentic development. And now I can write side projects with the limited time I have.
My current take is that AI is still broadly terrible at writing code on its own (I use codex and Claude code). What has made me effective is writing dev tooling that deterministically write and enforce code design.
My team uses the tools I wrote, and with (much but not complete) confidence we can ship good code reliably with ease.
BUT, to get there, it took a lot of SWE experience, mostly from drowning in shit code for many years. to know what is actually good takes knowing what is bad. And to scale that out across many engineers, to give them “taste” for free, is not trivial. Without this tooling, I probably would have lost my mind tbh.
I get the gripe with AI. If you don’t know what the code is doing, someone else who reads it will, and you’re wasting their time unless you’re asking for something different than looking at the code. Maybe you have a product you want reviewed. In that case, does the code matter as much as a SDK? Doubtfully.
> A coding assistant helps provide structure that I don’t trust myself to impose.
I believe you think you have some good rails, but it’s relative. Maybe it’s helpful to you but to a seasoned person or even objectively it just isn’t. Or maybe it is good, idk.
At any rate, asking for grace when shitslopping code in doesn’t tee you up for mentorship. Investing in learning code itself and being honest about your limitations, for me at least, wins more points than dishonesty, which I see is a recommendation in another comment.
You SHOULD be using AI in 2026 when you know how to steer it. And if you don’t know how to, you SHOULD constantly check yourself and level up. Every loop of your agent is an opportunity to learn.
You got this!