The HN crowd is generally skeptical, but "shallow dismissals", which are specifically called out in the guidelines, are still extremely common. These dismissals are not as clever as they tend to seem to those skimming the comments, but folks have developed a bunch of thought-terminating cliches to empower this: calling anything involving AI "slop" is the most common, but more catchy (but fundamentally incoherent) phrases have also emerged:

> If you didn't take the time to write it, why should I read it?

I mean, fundamentally you read things if they bring value. It doesn't actually matter if a human wrote it. It matters if it is correct and useful. One implementation is to have a human review, but you can imagine others. Fundamentally anyone who reads and leverages the output of AI knows this. The phrase seems reasonable because it is a good refutation of folks literally copying and pasting AI output from their ChatGPT session in the comments, which I think everyone agrees isn't good hygiene for online discussion. Because the guideline is "right" in that case, it seems easy to apply everywhere, but I think that's overly broad.

> I have tokens, too. Just give me the prompt.

As if everything generated with AI is created as a one-shot with ChatGPT. I feel like half the people writing this stuff have no clue how professionals are using AI. The model, reasoning level, skills, tools, harness all matter, and that's even if the whole thing is a one-shot and we ignore all the server-side variables (inference engine, temperature, top_k, quantization level, etc.). If not, it's the product of a (probably extensive) back-and-forth with an AI, possibly changing models for various subagent calls (Kimi K2.7 Code for the plan, MiniMax M2.7 for implementation, Deepseek v4 Flash as advisor, etc.), etc. Orchestration is as important as prompt and context, but the space has a lot of dimensions. This is why you get radically opposed takes on models, harnesses, and the even the utility of AI: everybody is doing different stuff, solving different problems, and reporting results all over the spectrum. There was a guy just today on HN claiming Opus 4.8 was terrible at agentic development, for example, with half a dozen responses asking how s/he could possibly say that.

Anyway, my post was controversial, but overall negative on points. I just don't understand how anyone can actually use these tools and then post in such a black-and-white way about AI use. I spend a ton of time refining my use of AI and I'm getting better over time, but it's a lot of trial-and-error trying various combinations of tools and trying to match them to tasks. Appreciate your response and the discussion.

In posterity, your grayed comment will benchmark the integrity of the environment here. Grayed, dead, undisputed. Out of sight, out of mind, except for persisting anyway ;)

Keep the courage. That's what it was once all about.