It's astounding how subtly anti-AI HN has become over the past year, as the models keep getting better and better. It's now pervasive across nearly every AI thread here.

As the potential of AI technical agents has gone from an interesting discussion to extraordinarily obvious as to what the outcome is going to be, HN has comically shifted negative in tone on AI. They doth protest too much.

I think it's a very clear case of personal bias. The machines are rapidly coming for the lucrative software jobs. So those with an interest in protecting lucrative tech jobs are talking their book. The hollowing out of Silicon Valley is imminent, as other industrial areas before it. Maybe 10% of the existing software development jobs will remain. There's no time to form powerful unions to stop what's happening, it's already far too late.

I don't think is the case; I think what's actually going on is that the HN crowd are the people who are stuck actually trying to use AI tools and aware of their limitations.

I have noticed, however, that people who are either not programmers or who are not very good programmers report that they can derive a lot of benefit from AI tools, since now they can make simple programs and get them to work. The most common use case seems to be some kind of CRUD app. It's very understandable this seems revolutionary for people who formerly couldn't make programs at all.

For those of us who are busy trying to deliver what we've promised customers we can do, I find I get far less use out of AI tools than I wish I did. In our business we really do not have the budget to add another senior software engineer, and we don't the spare management/mentor/team lead capacity to take on another intern or junior. So we're really positioned to be taking advantage of all these promises I keep hearing about AI, but in practical terms, it saves me at an architect or staff level maybe 10% of my time and for one of our seniors maybe 5%.

So I end up being a little dismissive when I hear that AI is going to become 80% of GDP and will be completely automating absolutely everything, when what I actually spend my day on is the same-old same-old of trying to get some vendor framework to do what I want to get some sensor data out of their equipment and deliver apps to end customers that use enough of my own infrastructure that they don't require $2,000 a month of cloud hosting services per user. (I picked that example since at one customer, that's what we were brought in to replace: that kind of cost simply doesn't scale.)

I value this comment even though I don't really agree about how useful AI is. I recognise in myself that my aversion to AI is at least partly driven by fear of it taking my job.

> The hollowing out of Silicon Valley is imminent

I think AI tools are great, and I use them daily and know their limits. Your view is commonly held by management or execs who don't have their boots on the ground.

I’m not anti-AI; I use it every day. But I also think all this hand-wringing is overblown and unbalanced. LLMs, because of what they are, will never replace a thoughtful engineer. If you’re writing code for a living at the level of an LLM then your job was probably already expendable before LLMs showed up.

It's not subtle.

But the temptation of easy ideas cuts both ways. "Oldsters hate change" is a blanket dismissal, and there are legitimate concerns in that body of comments.

>It's astounding how subtly anti-AI HN has become over the past year, as the models keep getting better and better. It's now pervasive across nearly every AI thread here.

I don't think you can characterise it as a sentiment of the community as a whole. While every AI thread seems to have it's share of AI detractors, the usernames of the posters are becoming familiar. I think it might be more accurate to say that there is a very active subset of users with that opinion.

This might hold true for the discourse in the wider community. You see a lot of coverage about artists outraged by AI, but when I speak to artists they have a much more moderate opinion. Cautious, but intrigued. A good number of them are looking forward to a world that embraces more ambitious creativity. If AI can replicate things within a standard deviation of the mean, the abundance of that content there will create an appetite for something further out.

I worked for a company that was starting to shove AI incentives down the throat of every engineer as our product got consistently worse and worse due to layoffs and the perceived benefits of AI which were never realized. When you look at the companies that have shifted to 'AI first' and see them shoveling out garbage that barely works, it should be no surprised that people both aware of how the sausage is made and not are starting to hate it.