I derive joy out of people using a thing i helped design and they never get frustrated with it. It works, it’s fast, it solves the problem and it’s rarely a pain to maintain or extend for me or my team. Thats good, solid stuff right there.

Personally I just don’t care to use AI tools. I like programming. I don’t like agentic coding or prompting. I’m just not interested.

Sometimes the front page is so full of pro-AI/AI-projects I just skip reading anything that day. I don’t want to yuck in anyone’s yum. I just don’t care. Not interesting.

I’m not sure there is a single consensus or majority opinion on HN wrt AI. Seems there are lots of little camps with different takes.

Maybe I was reading too much into this part of your comment.

Plenty of folks don’t separate the ethical, political, or moral from the technology. For them using it is condoning it. Like for me, owning a car is contributing to car culture. It might be inconvenient for me or seem backwards to others but it’s worth resisting. They want to know that something was written with AI so they can avoid supporting AI or condoning its use.

I know my personal choice doesn’t make much of a difference but I refuse to own a car. I advocate at my local city council to remove car storage from streets, remove parking minimums, add better transit, make the core of our city car-free. It sometimes feels easier to join in and just accept that this is the way of the world but I refuse to believe in inevitability: building cities for the benefit of cars is a choice.

Maybe some folks want to avoid AI code because they don’t want to make that choice?

I can’t say for them. But I do know there’s no sense pretending like they don’t have a point or feigning shock that someone might not have the same view as you do.

I think many people in this camp have political or ethical concerns and want to avoid contributing to or supporting the companies behind frontier-AI tools. Or they have moral or technical concerns and want to boycott usage to maintain their principles.

It should be fairly widely known at this point.

I’m starting to come around to the belief that vibe coding isn’t engineering. Not saying Ashby is vibe coding. The post certainly says they’re super serious about making sure everyone understands every line of change. I wonder how they manage that in practice.

There are few empirical studies on the effects of informal code review, what most of us do on GitHub and Codeberg, on error rates. It’s not much. But a little side line mentioned that the effect we do have on error rates disappears the more code you read per hour.

So you used to have the 80/20 rule. 20% of your dev team is doing 80% of the work. Now we have a tool that enables the 80% of the team that manages to squeak by without doing a whole lot to… write a whole ton of code that the 20% now have to review… only if they read too much it’s not going to do a whole lot.

So I dunno. Seems like that combined with the come wave of price hikes we might see orgs talking about rolling back their AI usage later this year.

Ok so you’re not denying the impact on climate change. Any of the other negative impacts it has on society?

Don’t sweep them under the rug and say, “works for me though so that’s worth it, not a big deal.”

I think the maths is interesting and the research is fascinating. I like computers, programming, and theoretical computer science more perhaps than the average person. That doesn’t mean I’m happy with data centres relying on illegal methane power plants to generate their base load power requirements. I think it’s unethical… and illegal. It seems like regulators are either unable to keep up or are getting paid to not look. That’s unethical. The financial systems used to deploy these data centres are imploding in debt and should also be regulated. They’re going to poison a bunch of retirement funds and could be a major factor in the crash of US bonds. Unethical. If they can’t run a profitable business even when they are bending and cheating and causing all of this harm I don’t think there’s any reason they shouldn’t be left to crash and burn like anyone else.

I don’t have much sympathy for the position of, “yeah that stuff is bad but I like it anyway and don’t want to talk about it.”

You might find more common ground with people if you can recognize the harms it does do, acknowledge that they are bad and advocate for change.

And you might have to give up the idea that any of this technology is going to lead to the creation of science-fiction super intelligent beings. We know what the combination of attention, transformers, and RNN can do. Pretty nifty stuff… but is it worth bleeding an economy of all its resources so that you can simulate f within psi worth it? I don’t think so. Sometimes the answer is, yeah neat but who cares? I’d rather have energy for keeping my cooling on in the middle of this heat wave.

There was no labour law at the time. Destroying the machines was a way to gain leverage, nothing more.

Ultimately the capitalists won that conflict. Many Luddites were murdered or jailed. And the history that was written tried to tell us that the Luddites were backwards peasants who didn’t understand technology and progress.

Now we have more ditches than we need, the environmental damage from building the machines, extracting fuel, burning that fuel... never been cheaper to dig a ditch but who the hell needs one? Business shuts down, people lose jobs, the market re-adjusts... but the damage remains.

Capitalism isn't the end of economics. It's certainly not the most efficient means to ensure the needs of everyone are met and that the environment in which we depend is kept safe from destruction. Great at maximizing the production of ditches and paperclips though.

Although technology doesn't necessarily need to displace labor. We didn't invent compilers and stop hiring and training programmers. We hired more programmers. We invented better compilers and new programming languages.

The language that AI folks are using and the choices and policies they support show that they're not philanthropists or even interested in capitalism. They're trying to monopolize their businesses and remove competition. They don't see the value in labor and innovation and competition.

There is always some selfishness in people but it is a choice to structure society and economic activity around it.

We can't even decide if type systems have made us more productive. It's barely been studied. Same with test-driven development.

What it sounds like we'll see, from your description of AI-enabled developers, is a commensurate (perhaps linear) increase in the rate of errors reaching production systems. Every line of code is a liability. Now everyone has a fire-hose they can aim at a production environment.

At least time and effort prevented some bad ideas and potentially bad code from reaching production.

I'm sure the platforms providing these tools are going to be happy with the results when every business writing code this way becomes dependent on them and have no exit strategy. The prices increase, the service gets worse, and you're locked in. Sounds real productive.

Probably because they mandate its adoption. And while there are plenty of developers who will happily comply and see it as a good thing. There are others who will do it because they have to or risk losing their jobs.

It's a bit of a silly thing to claim. "We made everyone use it, so they did, and now adoption is going up!"

An experienced Rust developer is going to be in a better position to drive an agent to generate useful Rust code than a Python programmer with little or no Rust experience. Not sure I agree with the author that everyone should just generate reams of Rust now.

At least if your get paged at 3am to fix the 300k AI-generated Django blog you’ll have a chance at figuring things out. Good luck to you if Claude is down at the same time. But still better than if it was in Rust if you have no experience with that language.

Destroying the machines was a way to gain leverage for a class of people who had none. People had been using looms for centuries. It wasn't the technology that was the problem... that's what the victors, the capitalists, have written was the reason.